Many of the Christian newsletters and magazines were especially important for Du Mez’s book as they represented the power of the evangelical consumer marketplace. Books that were religiously charged were used to serve as inspiration for evangelical views of the army as well as guides for the family and this was especially true with James Dobson’s 1970 book Dare to Discipline. Each type of primary source adds its own contribution to show why this demographic was such a strong force, especially in social and political issues this was one of the book’s greatest strengths. Many of her sources include televangelist talk shows, interviews with prominent religious leaders, evangelical newsletters and magazines, public opinion surveys, and books by evangelical authors. She notes that books such as John Eldredge’s 2001 book Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul explored this same topic and inspired her to write Jesus and John Wayne to describe the evolution of the Religious Right in recent history (xiii-xiv). At this point of the book, their support for Donald Trump shows that nothing has changed in the evangelical movement as they still valued leaders that asserted masculine, chauvinistic, and militaristic values (272).ĭu Mez’s book is not a brand-new topic discussed by historians as there were other authors that have addressed this specific phenomenon. Chapter 16 and the conclusion looks at the evangelical movement in in the Trump era, ending in 2020.
She then returns to the idea of the Christian military in Chapters 12 through 15 in regard to foreign policy, especially towards Islamic nations. Chapters 9 through 11 are dedicated to explaining Christian masculinity and its perceived threats the theme of masculinity strongly compliments the theme of the military. Chapters 7 through 8 explain their views on the American military. Chapters 5 through 7 elaborate on evangelicals’ influence in the political sphere, especially in presidential politics. The first four chapters assesses the formation of their ideology from the 1940s to the early 1970s, with discussions about the origins of American Christian nationalism, John Wayne as an archetype, women’s role, and the patriarchal domestic sphere. Du Mez’s book is chronological, but each group of chapters are dedicated to a certain subtheme. This formation of an evangelical identity was the reason why this demographic was able to have such a strong hold on traditional social conservatism. She explains that since the 1940s and 1950s, white evangelicals synthesized an identity composed of traditional gender roles, militarism, and Christian nationalism this was first challenged during the social movements of the 1960s and a response to these changes was mobilized during the 1970s onward through evangelical influence on the marketplace and mainstream politics (11-12).
Bush, and Donald Trump.ĭu Mez’s central argument with this book is that the Evangelical Christian movement influenced right-wing politics with their ideas of family, nationalism, and masculinity shaping their own subculture, which in turn, linked with the ideology of social conservatism.
This topic she explores is centered in the continental United States ranging in the decades from the mid-1940s through 2020, assessing the importance of prominent figures and archetypes such as John Wayne, evangelical leaders like James Dobson and Billy Graham, and Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. The book assesses how white evangelical Protestants forged their own political alchemy of Christian nationalism in the United States based on chauvinism, masculinity, and religious fundamentalism. Her new book under review, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020), likewise combines the frameworks of religious, political, cultural, and gender history. These topics inform her writing, including her first book The New Gospel for Women: Katherine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford, 2015). Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of History at Calvin University, specializing in gender, religious, and political history while also teaching social and cultural history.