Book Review: Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.

The animating puzzle of Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne troubled many observers of "American" religion after 2016: how could white evangelicals, self-appointed guardians of "family values," rally so overwhelmingly behind Donald Trump, a thrice-married casino magnate whose conduct seemed to contradict everything they professed? Du Mez's answer is bracing and counterintuitive. Trump was not an aberration or a pragmatic compromise but a fulfillment. "Rather than seeing him as the latest defender of a Christian America," she writes, evangelical support for Trump becomes explicable only as "the culmination of evangelicals' embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad." In this review, I will argue that Du Mez largely earns that startling claim, and that she earns it by taking evangelical popular culture seriously as a primary source rather than a sideshow; the consumer catalog is her archive, and the archive convicts.

The book is a work of cultural and religious history spanning roughly seventy-five years. Its method is not archival in the conventional sense but a sustained reading of the popular media through which evangelicalism reproduced itself: bestselling books, radio broadcasts, magazines, films, and the celebrity pastors who packaged a gendered gospel for mass consumption. John Wayne serves as Du Mez's organizing symbol, the rugged, violent, unapologetically masculine hero who, though no Christian himself, became an evangelical icon of the manhood the movement came to prize (the icon, as ever, takes on a life of its own). Around this figure she traces a lineage: Billy Graham's Cold War fusion of faith, family, and anticommunism; the muscular Christianity that recoiled against a "feminized" church; the family-values politics of the 1970s and James Dobson's Focus on the Family; the Promise Keepers stadium rallies; John Eldredge's Wild at Heart and its cult of the warrior soul; Mark Driscoll's pugnacious Seattle ministry; complementarian theology and the purity movement; and the smooth alliance of evangelicalism with gun culture, military valor, and Christian nationalism.

Du Mez's central contention is that these disparate phenomena are not incidental but constitutive. Militant masculinity, patriarchal authority, and a nostalgic Christian nationalism form, in her account, the connective tissue of white evangelical identity, more reliably unifying than doctrine itself. This reframing lets her read the tradition's recurring scandals not as failures to live up to its ideals but as expressions of them, a deflationary move I find persuasive. Her chapters on abuse and its concealment (within Bill Gothard's ministries, Sovereign Grace churches, and the Southern Baptist Convention) rank among the book's most damning, showing how a theology of male headship and female submission created both the conditions for predation and the incentives to suppress it.

The book's strengths are considerable. Du Mez writes with narrative propulsion and an eye for the telling detail, marshaling an enormous body of popular-cultural evidence into a coherent and readable synthesis. She takes evangelical media seriously as a formative force, and in this way she corrects accounts that privilege theology or electoral politics while ignoring the devotional consumer culture where most believers actually formed their instincts. Her insistence on the adjective "white" shows analytic discipline: by distinguishing white evangelicalism from Black Protestantism that shares many doctrinal commitments, she isolates race and gender, rather than belief alone, as the movement's decisive variables. The result is a genealogy that renders 2016 not shocking but legible.

The book's ambitions also generate its vulnerabilities. Its cumulative, catalog-like structure (one damning episode piled upon another) achieves rhetorical force at some cost to analytical precision; the reader sees a striking pattern but less often sees the mechanism, and Du Mez does not always draw the line between correlation and causation. She treats militant masculinity as a remarkably continuous through-line, which can flatten genuine ruptures, internal dissent, and the substantial minority of evangelicals who resisted these currents. Specialists may note that the theological substance of complementarianism receives thinner treatment than its cultural packaging, and that dissenting or moderate voices appear mainly as foils. Here is history written with a thesis firmly in hand, and readers unsympathetic to its framing will find confirmation harder to distinguish from demonstration. Yet these are the characteristic risks of synthetic cultural history, and in my estimation Du Mez largely earns her interpretive confidence through the sheer density of her evidence.

Jesus and John Wayne has already reshaped both scholarly and popular conversation about American evangelicalism, and deservedly so. It is essential reading for historians of religion, gender, and modern American politics, and accessible enough for the general readers who have made it a phenomenon. Whether or not one accepts every link in its chain, the book poses a question the tradition cannot easily evade: whether the militant masculinity it baptized was ever a corruption of the faith, or something closer to its operative creed, the gospel of John Wayne writ large.