A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have utterly remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans. 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 in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Ĭhallenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 20 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in 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. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. Bill Gothard is the third of six children born November 2, 1934, to William and Carmen Gothard.His father was the general manager of an engineering firm and later served with various ministries, including The Gideons International, where he was the executive director. Lea reseñas de productos sinceras e imparciales de nuestros usuarios. John Piper might be right about guns and. Vea reseñas y calificaciones de reseñas que otros clientes han escrito de Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (English Edition) en. Many of today’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 before they learned about sex?and they have a silver ring to prove it. It is a temptation within American evangelicalism to conflate cultural and political values with biblical teaching.
Trump, by all appearances, is the antithesis of Jesus. Liberals can’t understand how a follower of Jesus could be so enamored of an arrogant, ignorant, spiteful, vicious, unforgiving and brazen casino magnate like Donald Trump.
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 in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”Īs acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism.