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

The history Du Mez details is, in many ways, the story of how a religious group came to define themselves by their shared political and social beliefs, arguably even more so than by their theology. However, religion serves as an underpinning for a set of political and cultural beliefs that nonetheless tend to have a contentious basis in Christian theology. One example of this is how evangelical leader Wayne Grudem interpreted the famous injunction urging “loving one’s neighbors” in the service of militarism, specifically “going to war to protect them from ‘evil aggressors’” (239-40). Du Mez cites conservative evangelical hostility toward immigration as one example of a political stance that is at odds with traditional understandings of Christianity: “Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology,” she writes, continuing, “Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it” (297-98).

This movement was the result of both deliberate decisions made by religious leaders like Billy Graham and responses to threatening existential problems like the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Feeling threatened by communism, feminism, and the social changes of the post-World War II era, patriarchal authority, female submissiveness, militarism, and free-market capitalism became associated with Christian values and their defense. Du Mez writes that “common evangelical heritage and shared theological commitments diminished in significance as Christian nationalism, militarism, and gender ‘traditionalism’ came to define conservative evangelical identity and dictate ideological allies” (51).

The intersection of faith, politics, and nationalism in conservative evangelical thought springs from the assumption that the personal and the political are interconnected: “Beyond the home, the power of the patriarch ensured the security of the nation […] Family values politics, then, involved the enforcement of women’s sexual and social subordination in the domestic realm and the promotion of American militarism on the national stage” (88). By this logic, feminists and LGBTQ rights advocates who seem to threaten family values pose the same degree of threat as foreign terrorists. This is what Du Mez refers to when she writes about how conservative evangelicalism “had learned to trade on a sense of embattlement” (135). When Christianity and the nation are inexorably intertwined and both are threatened by internal dissenters and external enemies, then political mobilization is necessary.

Throughout the history of conservative evangelicalism that Du Mez details, marketing and consumerism have been a significant factor in not only how evangelicals promoted their beliefs but also the nature of authority and influence within the movement: “Through religious merchandising and with the help of celebrity pitchmen like Sunday himself, they effectively replaced traditional denominational authorities with the authority of the market and the power of consumer choice” (18). Ironically, this occurred despite the fact that conservative evangelicals and organizations tended to have “more authoritarian tendencies” (290).

The diffusion of power within the Religious Right is a major reason that evangelicals support Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and presidency. Even though some conservative evangelical leaders denounced Trump and opposition from several individual voices persisted, other evangelical leaders changed course to support Trump due to pressure from their own followers and congregations. Because of its long history in marketing and lack of dependence on traditional institutions like individual churches, conservative evangelical culture was especially vulnerable to the “grassroots enthusiasm for the unconventional candidate” (255) that ultimately brought Trump to power.

Consumerism similarly helps this culture reinforce and spread its beliefs. Consumer products like novels, nonfiction books, Bibles, and films reveal what ideas are popular among evangelicals, and these products are crucial to providing Du Mez’s research, which draws heavily on popular evangelical books, films, and the like for evidence and a basis for analysis. Du Mez finds that just the types of products that evangelical businesses offer reveal how ingrained gender roles are in conservative evangelical thought. For example, “Nelson Bibles publishes ‘Biblezines’ for teenagers that contain the text of the Old or New Testament along with ‘Christian lifestyle advice’ for boys and girls” (299). In addition, Christian retail stores provided other kinds of “gender-specific merchandise” (300). Another example was how the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ presented masculinity. Evangelical audiences received it as a film that “offered a good antidote to the image of a wimpy Christ” (181).

Another consequence of conservative evangelical culture’s dependency on marketing was how it fostered and spread radical ideas. The TV show 19 Kids and Counting, starring the Duggar family, revealed the Quiverfull movement, a fringe movement even within conservative evangelical culture, the Quiverfull movement, to the American mainstream. The spread of evangelical messages through books, the Internet, and radio and TV programs, as well as the network that various evangelical leaders and organizations shared, allowed more extreme, fringe voices to easily break into the mainstream: “Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture” (294). Rather than smoothing out the rough edges and forcing evangelical voices to become more moderate to appeal to a mainstream audience, Du Mez argues, marketing and organizational networks allowed fringe and deeply misogynistic and racist voices to reach mainstream evangelical and even broader audiences. Marketing networks further developed and ingrained through such views. The “evangelical consumer marketplace was […] a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity” (12). Thus, marketing and consumerism not only are how the Religious Right spreads its ideas and increases the influence of its leaders but also shape the fundamental structure of conservative evangelical culture.