Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

In Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez combines historical analysis and academic commentary on contemporary religious, cultural, and political movements. In addition, she applies the categories of gender and race to her analysis of historical and contemporary developments in religion and politics. A third commonly used category, class, occasionally appears in Du Mez’s discussion, specifically regarding the relationship between working-class and middle-class status, masculinity, and evangelism (51-52, 162), but she focuses her analysis on gender and race. She discounts the idea that “economic hardship” led to Donald Trump’s 2016 election to the presidency, instead arguing that a feeling among white male voters that their influential status was threatened inspired conservative evangelical support of Trump.

Another key to Du Mez’s analysis is her personal perspective as a Christian and a professor who teaches at an evangelical Christian college (Calvin University in Michigan). This especially informs how Du Mez incorporates Christian theology into her analysis. The forces that shape conservative evangelism in the US are sociocultural and intertwine with ideas of gender roles and whiteness. However, other elements at their core are a set of values and interpretations deriving from Christianity, and the tension between that theology and the culture developed by American conservative evangelicals. For example, Du Mez discusses how the theological understanding of the Trinity that several evangelical leaders espouse “parts ways with roughly two millennia of Christian orthodoxy” (298). The intersection of Christian belief and historical circumstance is important for understanding Du Mez’s argument that the historical development of conservative evangelism—and its role in Donald Trump’s political victories—was “never inevitable.”