Christian masculinity, pre-figured and conceptualized according to biblical manhood models in evangelical home life, was grafted unto new visions of American military power in defense of free-market capitalism and liberty, and to rebuff the hold of “godless communism” and liberalism. This brand of reconstructionism also spotlighted American military strength: the reconstruction of families under God and the patriarchal authority of men was the macro-level representation of authority, strength, and order that guided, or should guide, militarism and national defense. The defense of evangelical gender norms, more than just embracing a theology of biblical manhood and womanhood, was grounded in the pursuit of patriarchal power, not only at the familial level, but also as a collective cultural project for white evangelicals.ĭu Mez traces these trends to the post-war emergence of a “Christian reconstructionism” which held that all social ills dealt by feminism and progressive social policies could be traced to the breakdown of a social order that lacked divinely ordained male leadership in the family and the larger culture.
The writings on sex, marriage, and Christian womanhood from Marabel Morgan, as well as the writing and political consciousness of Phyllis Schlafly, Du Mez argues, helped “defend traditional femininity and masculinity” while also becoming central to the grassroots activism (and later the Christian literature marketplace) that energized the Religious Right (66). While Graham and others built alliances with conservative politicians and presidents, definitions about Americanism, patriotism, and specifically, manhood and family, were also entering the cultural imagination in provocative ways.ĭu Mez’s attention to white evangelical womanhood as a catalyst for many of the debates on family values and traditional gender roles, is particularly noteworthy. Between the 1950s and 1960s, white Christians, displaced by the changing of the cultural guard(s), looked to evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, among others, to reclaim the social order thought to be waning in influence. Du Mez illustrates that the ingratiation of evangelical Christianity into American culture began with early interventionist and disciplinary cultural scripts that lauded the myth of rugged individualism, family values, and traditional gender roles as a response to the cultural uprisings linked to communism, women’s liberation, and the Civil Rights Movement. Christian nationalism stipulates a moral and social order in American society in which righteousness, virtue, and normality is wholly encapsulated by white, male, and Christian embodiment and worldviews. The central thematic foci addressed throughout: (1) the centrality of Christian nationalism to the evangelical vision, (2) masculinity as an evangelical cultural and political project, and (3) the shift of evangelical Christianity as a pillar of far-right politics.Ĭhristian nationalism, as Du Mez notes, is premised upon the belief that “America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such” (4). As such, this review is framed thematically rather than strictly chronologically. Du Mez’s study persuasively illustrates how the fusion of race and gender have effectively transformed religious and theological notions of sex, power, and political choice among white evangelical demographics, thereby shifting the course and tonality of American evangelicalism in the process.Īs an historical survey, the book covers several overlapping historical periods in American Christian culture.
As a religious history at the intersection of gender, white evangelicalism, and popular culture, Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation advances a provocative argument: White evangelical Christianity over the course of the last century has been distinguished more through its endurance as a cultural and political movement than by its theology (298), and the mark of its particular cultural moorings is its coalescence around the assertion of authoritarian white masculinity. This Jesus, or rather, the evangelicalized trope of Jesus, is an archetype of a militant masculinity that evangelicals have fashioned to anchor their battles against the major wedge culture wars of our time (295). The Jesus of white evangelical Christianity, writes Kristin Du Mez, is a veritable “badass.”