Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. But it is a good sign that you did and you are…you are growing.How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which explains how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment.
It makes sense that hypocrisy offends and confuses you. You have been through some very profound philosophical changes in these past few years and it must have been very hard for you. Even nations need enemies to justify their sense of self-righteousness (and to justify funding of the defense establishment). They need an enemy so they can feel better about themselves. The belief of many evangelists that they have all the answers leads them to be attracted other folks who also think they have all the answers…and these folks usually need an enemy to justify their own sense of superiority. car dealers have to close on Sundays for example. I wonder what our Jewish friends thought of those laws? We still have some of those laws here in Illinois yet. I remember as a boy growing up in Pennsylvania the “blue laws” restricted just about any behavior on Sunday except going to church. I have always wondered why so many Christians (and other faiths as well) wish to pass laws that will restrict the behavior of the “unbelievers”. I find that many who evangelize are convinced that they understand all the subtleties of God and are glad to explain them to you, even though God is so far removed from human thinking that it would be impossible to understand Him so readily. There are many aspects of evangelism that disturb me. Trisha, I understand your feelings and reactions, at least I think I can. Recommended to people outside of evangelicalism who are confused by the violence inside and to people like me who grew up evangelical and don’t know what to do about that.
It was a depressing read, but an enlightening one as well.
#Jesus and john wayne ebook full
But for now, I’m reading it like it can reveal the world to me, explaining how the world I grew up in was full of so many cancers. Someday I might be able to read a book like Jesus and John Wayne with emotional distance. I want to defend “not all evangelicals!” I’m tired. I sometimes agree with the people who call it a cult. Writing just this much makes me want to curl into a ball and avoid everyone forever. She also charts how evangelicals became more patriotic and patriarchal, how they consistently lauded immoral men who shouted loudly about right wing values. Du Mez charts the connections between evangelical leaders and the military since the 1920s. And what better to fight an enemy with than an army? Militarism and Christianity go hand in hand more often than not (will I ever forget that 4th of July church service that started with a montage of war machines?). Evangelical Christianity thrives on an enemy, though its face has changed over the decades: Communism, feminism, Islam, progressivism. Although the evangelicalism that I grew up with included lovely, kind people who cared deeply about each other, I kept recognizing the stories laid out in this book. I want to talk about Jesus and John Wayne, and how it put these past four years into a historical context that finally made sense to me. I couldn’t reconcile what I had been taught with what I was seeing.
Yet the people who taught me those values were supporting a man who was the antithesis of everything I held dear. I had been raised to value humility, forgiveness, understanding, and love. A few months after he was elected president, I remember had coffee with a friend and tried to work up the courage to admit: my faith was shaken. I have never understood the passion evangelicals have for Donald Trump. I was both shocked and cynically unsurprised. On Wednesday, January 6th, Trump supporters rioted and broke into the Capitol building while many waved “Jesus Saves” flags. I immediately checked out the ebook from the library and compulsively read Du Mez’s historical explanation for a movement that has baffled me for over four years. I saw this book on a friend’s Goodreads page on Sunday, January 3rd. “ A scholar of American Christianity presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism that identifies the forces that have turned Donald Trump into a hero of the Religious Right.“
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