Evangelical enthusiasm for Donald Trump, I argued, suggested that that militant masculinity of John Wayne had eclipsed the spirituality of Jesus.ĭu Mez came across my article because she was thinking along similar lines. I first became aware of Du Mez’s project shortly after writing a piece for Baptist News Global in October of 2016 called Jesus and John Wayne: Must we choose? When I Googled “Jesus and John Wayne,” the first item up was a 1980s song by that title by the Gaither Vocal Band that portrayed American evangelicals as living in a healthy tension between the fierce masculinity of John Wayne and the radical grace of Jesus. In 2015, as she watched evangelicals lining up behind the strutting embodiment of the militant masculinity celebrated in Eldredge’s book, Du Mez decided to take a closer look. Instead of repenting of these traits, Eldredge said, Christian men should embrace them. Men are dangerous, unpredictable, combative and aggressively sexual - characteristics that fitted them for lives of adventure and leadership. Men are brimming with testosterone, Eldredge explained, because God needs warriors.
First published in 2001, the book sold more than 4 million copies in the United States alone. The majority of white American evangelicals support Trump, she says, because he embodies the kind of militant masculinity they have learned to love.ĭu Mez’s first hint that a radical shift had taken place in the world of white American evangelicalism came when students directed her attention to John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul.
In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she explains why. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin College, isn’t buying either of these explanations. Others see evangelical support for Trump as nothing more than transactional politics. Why Donald Trump? Why are American evangelicals so enamored of a president who could serve as a poster boy for the seven deadly sins?
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