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

Like many white Southerners in the 1940s, Billy Graham was originally a member of the Democratic Party. However, he became critical of Democratic President Harry S. Truman for not taking a more aggressive stance in the Korean War against communist North Korea. After the election of Republican Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency, Graham turned to the Republican Party. Both Grahan and Eisenhower believed that conservative sexual morality and gender roles were important in the Cold War fight against atheistic communism and “that Christianity could help America wage the Cold War” (35). In the 1950s, conservative evangelical Christians went from the margins to “the political and cultural mainstream” (36).

Some evangelicals, including Graham, supported the civil rights movement, especially the end of segregation between white and Black Americans. However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed and civil rights protests spread, Graham and many other evangelicals began to turn against the civil rights movement. In particular, they opposed government intervention to protect civil rights and found the idea that racism had dominated the history of the US incompatible with their own concept of the US as a Christian nation. Du Mez argues that evangelical belief in family values led them to oppose legal desegregation, which they saw as a threat to the authority of parents over their children’s education. Also, evangelical Christianity was being influenced by the South through the idea of “the heroic Christian man” as a “white man […] who defended against the threat of nonwhite men and foreigners” (39).

By 1961, evangelicals came to oppose President Jack Kennedy on the basis that he was Catholic and seen as weak on the issue of the Cold War. They instead supported Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. While Goldwater was not religious, evangelicals liked his militant anti-communism, his cowboy image, and his “hard-edged, bombastic style” (40). Nevertheless, Goldwater lost the 1964 election by massive margins. Furthermore, he was not endorsed by Graham and was only supported by evangelicals in the South and the Sunbelt (southwestern states). He was seen as too extremist elsewhere. However, “Goldwater’s defeat […] masked a political realignment already under way” (44).

This realignment led to a national evangelical voting bloc that supported family values, “law and order,” and a militant stance against communism (44). This evangelical bloc was courted by Republican politician Richard Nixon. His religious background was as a Quaker, a Christian sect that held views against violence. However, Graham “coached” Nixon on how to appeal to white evangelical voters. When Nixon became president, Graham and other evangelical leaders like the Southern Baptist Convention explicitly backed Nixon’s controversial foreign policy, including the Vietnam War. While some evangelicals supported Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern, many influential evangelicals were firmly in Nixon’s camp. A pro-Nixon event held by the youth organization Campus Crusade for Christ, Expo ‘72, likewise represented the emergence of “a Christian version of popular music” and would “pave the way for what would become a thriving contemporary Christian music industry” (48).

Many Christians led the anti-Vietnam War movement. Conservative white evangelicals were instead “among the most enthusiastic supporters of the war” (49), seeing it as a righteous crusade against communism. Accounts of American war atrocities in Vietnam were dismissed as being less severe than communist atrocities or such violence was seen as inevitable because of the “sin lurking in every human heart” (49). As Americans became more skeptical about the global role of the US because of the Vietnam War, conservative white evangelicals became more outspoken in support of the US military. The split between the Christian left and right widened as conservative white evangelicals aligned more closely with right-wing Catholics, Mormons, and even the conservative non-religious. At the same time, because conservative white evangelicals were historically poor, even though they were increasingly becoming middle-class they were still “drawn to the values of the white working class” (52).

The US defeat in the Vietnam War and the common appearance of long-haired men through hippie youth culture provoked another crisis in masculinity. Evangelicals responded with works like preacher Jack Hyles’s 1972 book How to Raise Children, which encouraged parents to raise boys to be traditionally masculine, willing to use violence to protect themselves and their loved ones, and promoted the idea that wives and children must be completely subordinate to men. This trend led evangelicals to embrace even nonreligious idols of militant masculinity, such as actor John Wayne, who was not an evangelical but was known to be a right-wing and pro-Vietnam War activist. Wayne’s roles in war films reaffirmed conservative evangelicals’ pro-war stances and their “sense of embattlement” (55), despite the “disillusionment” that Vietnam veterans themselves often felt despite having been inspired to enlist by role models like John Wayne. Still, for certain evangelicals and conservatives, “Wayne modeled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence” (59).

In 1974, Christian conservative Marabel Morgan published the book The Total Woman, which argued that unhappiness among women was not a result of women’s inequality but a result of modern women’s not being submissive to their husbands. Morgan’s arguments had “a religious foundation” (61). Morgan argued for women not only to be subordinate but also to be sexually available and complimentary to their husbands. Another book that strove to provide a conservative evangelical counter to the feminist movement was the 1976 book, Let Me Be a Woman by Jane Elliot. It argued that women and men were “complimentary opposites” but that women were still made to be subordinate to men.

Influential right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly appealed to conservative evangelical women with her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have created legal rights for women as part of the US Constitution. She argued that women’s true rights were achieved through marriage and the family, which feminism undermined. Du Mez argues that Schlafly’s opposition to the ERA was intertwined with other conservative evangelical causes such as anti-communism and Christian nationalism. Schlafly’s campaign succeeded in preventing the ratification of the ERA.

In the 1960s, evangelicals Rousas John Rushdoony and Bill Gothard argued for fathers as the “ultimate authority” in the family, replacing dating with courtship overseen by fathers, discouraging girls from higher education, and institutionalizing rebellious children. Gothard also argued for the absolute power of governments over citizens, churches over members, and employers over employees. Rushdoony and Gothard influenced the perception among conservative white evangelicals that public education was a threat to parents’ authority over their children and the movement toward Christian homeschooling.

Another prominent figure was James Dobson, an evangelical child psychologist who published a book, Dare to Discipline, in 1970. He viewed “children as naturally sinful creatures, inclined toward defiance and rebellion” (79). Blaming the social movements of the 1960s on a breakdown in family values across society, Dobson supported the “reassertion of an authoritarian family structure” (80). In later books, Dobson also argued for a return to traditional gender roles and against feminism. Dobson’s anti-feminism message was reacting against several victories and near-victories for women’s rights in the 1970s, such as the push for the ERA, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to access abortion nationwide, and a law that would have established government-funded daycares, which nearly passed but was vetoed by President Nixon. At the same time, the decline of American manufacturing and more women being hired for full-time jobs was seen as a “‘crisis’ of the family” (82).

Dobson was enormously successful and developed an audience of millions through his books, lectures, and radio programs. He explicitly linked families having authoritative fathers and obedient wives to the success of the nation. While Dobson at first tried to be “apolitical,” he and the nonprofit organization he established, Focus on the Family, became more overtly political by the early 1980s.