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

NEW YORK IntervalsBESTSELLER

The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity In the present moment) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism throughout America.

Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism―or inside the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”

As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture inside contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of at this time’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity earlier than they learned about sex―and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes―mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power throughout defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost hour when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.

Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump into 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump inside fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture throughout this country, Jesus and John Wayne exhibits that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.