I remember being staggered a few years back when an American evangelical contact of mine told me that, in the presidential elections, he had voted for Donald Trump. It seemed crazy to me. I would have understood it better had I read this book beforehand. It is
Jesus and John Wayne: how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020).
This university professor and historian has directed her skills (including excellent writing skills) to surveying the growth of militant white patriarchalism in the evangelical wing of the American church in the twentieth century and up to the present day. She shows how it linked up 
with rampant Republicanism to bring Christian faith and right-wing politics into an unholy alliance based on a white, militant masculinity. It was an approach to life eptomised by the film-star John Wayne.
She demonstrates how this baneful evangelical influence reached to presidential level and helped mould American domestic and foreign policy. In due course, it was brought forward to justify pre-emptive wars and to uphold almost everything that stood opposite to what Jesus himself modelled and taught.
I left schoolteaching to enter Christian ministry in 1976, and ripples from much of this were already crossing the Pond at that time. Many of the names that figure negatively in the book were exercising some influence in my native Britain, names like James Dobson, C.J. Mahaney, Bill Gothard (I attended his seminar when visiting Detroit), Jerry Falwell, Marabel Morgan, Tim LaHaye, Mark Driscoll, Rousas John Rushdoony, Pat Robertson, John Piper, Ted Haggard and Bill Hybels. Sadly, many of those public figures fell from grace through sexual misdemeanours or lack of financial integrity. Even Billy Graham and his son Franklin got sucked into some dubious connections.
This book really is grim reading. I cringe at some of the episodes and alliances it describes, all of which are methodically documented, with copious footnotes and references. Were I American, I think I would be wanting to renounce any claim to be a Christian of the ‘evangelical’ variety. No wonder it became a New York Times bestseller—this is the kind of stuff that those who oppose Christianity of any kind lap up.
For us who aim to follow Jesus, it is sobering and saddening material. If nothing else, it will hopefully keep us from falling for the same kind of pseudo-Christian hysteria that messed up so many lives in the USA, and encourage us to pray for better things in that country in the future.
Here’s a selection of quotations, with page numbers.
Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally. (p5)
For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity. (p6)
For [Billy] Graham, a properly ordered family was a patriarchal one. Because Graham believed that God had cursed women to be under man’s rule, he believed that wives must submit to husbands’ authority. (p26)
Wayne didn’t have a born-again experience. Unlike [Pat] Boone, Wayne could hardly be called the poster boy of “family values.” Thrice married, twice divorced, Wayne also carried on several high-profile affairs. He was a chain-smoker and a hard drinker. Yet despite his rough edges, Wayne would capture the hearts and imaginations of American evangelicals. The affinity was based not on theology, but rather on a shared masculine ideal. (p30)
In 1968, Richard Nixon knew that conservative evangelicals could hold the key to his victory. A lapsed Quaker, Nixon wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he understood that anticommunism abroad and “moral values” and “law and order” politics at home could woo this coalescing voting bloc. And he knew that one man—Billy Graham—could help him win over this crucial component of his “great silent majority.” (p44)
Conservative evangelicals…not only supported the war in Vietnam but also held the military itself in high (and often uncritical) esteem. (p48)
Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist. All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans. (p56)
This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around. (p71)
[R.J.] Rushdoony believed that the disorder of modern society could be remedied with the institution of Old Testament law, and at the heart of this project was the assertion of hierarchical authority. (p75)
James Dobson encouraged parents to reassert authority over unruly children. Spanking was a good way to accomplish this, and Dobson offered detailed instructions. (p79)
Tim LaHaye is best known today as the coauthor of the Left Behind books, a fictional series based on the rapture, a premillennialist end-times scenario in which believers are taken up into heaven before an apocalyptic series of events unfolds on earth. LaHaye’s novels are rife with paragons of rugged masculinity and redemptive violence. (p89)
[Jerry] Falwell fashioned a Christianity that was…anticommunist, pro-segregationist, and infused throughout with a militant masculinity. (p96)
Falwell’s authority depended on maintaining a sense of vulnerability among his followers. This was achieved through the continual fabrication of new enemies. Danger, discrimination, and disparagement lurked around every corner. Malevolent forces aligned against true believers. Outsiders were likely to be enemies. (p100)
Accounts of the battles over the SBC [Southern Baptist Convention] commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender. (p108)
It was James Dobson who would play the most critical role in cementing ties between evangelicals and the military. (p129)
Dobson’s Family Research Council ran television ads calling for [Bill] Clinton’s resignation due to his “virtue deficit.” Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem signed a public letter criticizing Clinton for his “ill use of women” and his “manipulation of truth.” (p144)
Conservatives continued to mobilize against measures to address sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts. (p146)
Under the leadership of [Wayne] Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” The statement attested that God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership. In 1989, CBMW [Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] published this “Danvers Statement” in a full-page advertisement in Christianity Today, drawing “a huge response.” (p167)
Like “servant leadership” and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change. (p171)
At frenzied BattleCry youth rallies, evangelist Ron Luce warned students that communists, feminists, gays, and Muslims threatened to destroy the nation’s morality as surely as Osama bin Laden had destroyed the Twin Towers. (p183)
In 2002, ordinary evangelical Christians were “the biggest backers of Israel and Washington’s planned war against Iraq”: 69 percent of conservative Christians favored military action, a full 10 percentage points higher than the general population. (p185)
[In the 1990s] The Christian homeschool movement remained a steady source of teachings on militant patriarchal authority and Christian nationalism. (p188)
Building on a foundation set by R. C. Sproul, John MacArthur, and John Piper, Driscoll helped fuel the movement of the “young, restless and reformed,” a revival of Calvinism that swept through American evangelicalism—and denominations like the SBC—in the 2000s… Suppressing the emotive side of evangelical revivalism, they emphasized the existence of hell and the wrath of God, which required Jesus’ substitutionary atonement, his bloody death on the cross to atone for humanity’s sins. Theirs was a properly masculine theology, the story of a vengeful Father-God taking out his rage on his own Son. Strict gender complementarianism was at the heart of this Calvinist resurgence. For leaders of the movement, patriarchal power was at the core of gospel Christianity; in the words of John Piper, God had given Christianity “a masculine feel.” (p199)
[During the 1990s, Doug Wilson wrote that] …horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda. The life of a slave had been a life of plenty, of ample food, good medical care, and simple pleasures, marked by “a degree of mutual affection between the races” that could never be achieved through coercive federal legislation. (p203)
[Re Wilson, Driscoll, Piper] Within this network, differences—significant doctrinal disagreements, disagreements over the relative merits of slavery and the Civil War—could be smoothed over in the interest of promoting “watershed issues” like complementarianism, the prohibition of homosexuality, the existence of hell, and substitutionary atonement. Most foundationally, they were united in a mutual commitment to patriarchal power. (p204)
In the wake of September 11, Islam replaced communism as the enemy of America and all that was good, at least in the world of conservative evangelicalism… Evangelicals’ pro-Israel sympathies had fueled anti-Muslim sentiments even before the terrorist attacks. (p219)
A 2009 survey revealed that evangelicals were significantly more likely than other religious groups to approve of the use of torture against suspected terrorists. (p227)
Barack Obama challenged the values—spoken and unspoken—that many white evangelicals held dear. As an adult convert to Christianity, he could speak with eloquence and theological sophistication about his faith, but for many evangelicals this mattered little. (p233)
In 2010, [Wayne Grudem] published what amounted to a systematic guide to politics; weighing in at over six hundred pages, the book offered an exhaustive guide to the “biblical” view on all things political. (p239)
No other candidate could measure up to Donald Trump when it came to flaunting an aggressive, militant masculinity. He became, in the words of his religious biographers, “the ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” (p253)
Wayne Grudem, author of the primer on “biblical politics,” had spoken out against Trump in the winter of 2016, but by July he’d penned an essay arguing that voting for Trump was not the lesser of two evils, but rather “a morally good choice.” (p261)
Three months into Donald Trump’s presidency, three-quarters of white evangelicals approved of his job performance, nearly twice as high as his approval rating among the general public. (p272)
C.J. Mahaney’s friends were loyal because of a shared stake in a patriarchal “gospel,” and also, it turns out, because Mahaney had been lining their pockets. (p282)
In 2014, Bill Gothard stepped down from his Institute in Basic Life Principles after more than thirty women—including some minors—accused him of molestation and sexual harassment. (p282)
Writers on evangelical masculinity have long celebrated the role guns play in forging Christian manhood. (p296)
Two years into Trump’s presidency, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals did not think the United States had a responsibility to accept refugees. In 2019, nearly the same percentage supported Trump’s border wall. Given that the Bible is filled with commands to welcome the stranger and care for the foreigner, these attitudes might seem puzzling. (p297)
Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. (p297)
In 2016, CBMW’s Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware advanced a theology of the Trinity that made Jesus “eternally subordinate” to God the Father, in order—according to critics—to justify the eternal, God-ordained subordination of women to men. Grudem and Ware might have been following in the footsteps of Elisabeth Elliot, who had written about this notion in the 1970s, but in doing so they were parting ways with roughly two millennia of Christian orthodoxy. (p298)
Over the past decade, groups like Focus on the Family, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have funneled more than $50 million into right-wing European organizations. American evangelicals have also forged ties with Vladimir Putin, who is known for flaunting his bare-chested masculinity, and with conservative elements in the Russian Orthodox Church; in 2014, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s Decision magazine featured Putin on its cover, and Franklin Graham praised the Russian president for standing up to the “gay and lesbian agenda.” (p301)
If this theme interests you, take a look at this review of a related book: https://dmatthew34.wordpress.com/2023/03/05/review-freeing-women-from-oppression/
Dave's Deliberations 