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Jesus and John Wayne Revisited

Jesus and John Wayne Revisited

Last updated on: November 27, 2024 at 4:02 am by Andrea L. Turpin

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Jesus and John Wayne Revisited 2024-11-27T04:02:01-04:00 Andrea L. Turpin

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Just weeks after the 2024 election, I discussed Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne with my graduate seminar on “Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History”—for the third time. Each time was an election year. I taught the book shortly after its release in 2020, then again in 2022, and now again in 2024. I was curious what might ring differently after Trump’s reelection.

(I am not the only Bencher whose mind went in this direction recently! Check out Jacob Randolph’s reflections here.)

I’m teaching this course for the sixth time overall, and on only two occasions have people not in the course asked to sit in. Once was when I taught my own book—because it’s always cool to hear authors talk about their own work. The other occasion was the first time I taught Jesus and John Wayne. I let in multiple dissertation-writing graduate students already beyond coursework because they wanted to grapple with Du Mez’s argument.

Because I organize the course chronologically, the book always falls right after our national election. The first time was just after Biden’s win in 2020 (but before the January 6 insurrection), the second just after midterm elections, and this most recent time just after Trump’s reelection.

Du Mez’s now famous argument is this: “In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote [for Trump, at the rate of 81%] despite their beliefs, but because of them.” (3)

In other words, values voters were not voting for the lesser of two evils in their mind, or because the potential to roll back Roe vs. Wade trumped Trump’s unchristian character, but rather because of Trump’s unchristian character. Du Mez includes in this category Trump’s tendency to mock perceived opponents, incite violence, speak crassly, and reject Christian sexual morals, by any definition. As Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, described what he was looking for in a president: “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.” (14)

Du Mez argues that evangelicals wanted someone who would defend their perceived interests more than they wanted someone who looked like Jesus. After all, Jesus let other people kill him.

Jesus and John Wayne traces a long historical trail that Du Mez argues led to an affinity for a brash type of “militant masculinity” within American evangelicalism, especially for leaders both internal and external. She further argues that this affinity is not intrinsic to the theology held by evangelicals but is rather the product of historical contingency. And, in the final words of the book, “What was once done might also be undone.”

So how have events since 2020, and especially the most recent election, influenced my understanding of Du Mez’s argument? In 2020, Trump’s opponent did not have a questionable record with Benghazi or email servers or the name Clinton. But Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land. The white evangelical vote that year may have swung slightly more Democratic but not much—estimates of evangelical Trump support that year range from 75% to 81%. In 2024, Trump was still not running against Hillary Clinton and Roe vs. Wade had been overturned and the Republican Party had removed the pro-life plank from its platform. And yet, once again, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

I do not consider myself a partisan. I lament the fact that American politics are dominated by two powerful parties. I think we’d be much better off with more options. It seems self-evidently obvious to me that neither party encapsulates a vision for society that matches the message of the New Testament—protecting the weak from womb to tomb, welcoming the foreigner, respecting liberty of conscience for all, caring for the poor. Though I did not parse the issues this way myself, I could nevertheless understand why evangelicals who believe that abortion kills an innocent human person might argue that opposing abortion carries more moral weight than all other political concerns.

What is striking is that in the first election after the consideration of abortion was removed, nothing changed. If evangelicals were just voting their values, it seems 2024 would have been a much tighter race for them, as different evangelicals weighed different moral issues differently.

So I must confess, the election results lent weight to Du Mez’s thesis for me.

She had always convinced me that an obsession with militant masculinity existed within white American evangelical culture. Simultaneously, the most compelling criticism of the book for me had been that Jesus and John Wayne did not clearly argue how prevalent or pervasive that obsession was. (In fairness, that is a notoriously difficult style of historical argument to make, and Du Mez did, for example, list book sales numbers for representative works.)

To try to answer the question myself, I therefore conducted my own completely unscientific research. All three times I’ve taught the book, I polled the class and asked of those who grew up in evangelical traditions (which is many Baylor graduate students) whether they recognized the culture Du Mez described, and, if so, how pervasive it was in their experience. (I grew up mainline and became theologically evangelical later when I could choose my own churches, so I did not have the type of first-hand experience to contribute meaningfully to the poll.) For those who grew up in evangelical churches, the average percentage match of their experience of evangelicalism and Du Mez’s description of militant masculine evangelical culture was about 70%.

That’s pretty pervasive. With Du Mez as a springboard, the class discussed a variety of possible explanations for the pervasive idealization of a type of masculinity that was foreign to Jesus himself, as well as for the voting patterns of white evangelicals. (She had made a strong case in the book’s introduction that the evangelical vote did not reduce to race, class, or gender. In other words, being evangelical was in and of itself a meaningful factor in shaping a person’s vote.)

The explanation I found most convincing was fear. Evangelicals were on average voting in their own perceived self-interest–perhaps particularly after the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, attendant fears about liberty of conscience for those who disagreed, and an accompanying general fear of the loss of power and control as they perceived the culture turning against them. Hence Jeffress’s articulation of the desire for a strongman protector.

Here’s the thing: that’s only human.

It’s just that I had hoped to see something more divine.

A friend pointed out that sanctification may be the missing component in our analysis. People who look like Jesus would be more interested in voting on behalf of others than on behalf of themselves. To be perfectly clear, I am not saying that more sanctified people automatically vote for one party or the other. I am saying that a more sanctified church would show more voting diversity as genuine wrestling with various moral considerations takes place, a less pervasive ideal of masculinity as brash and combative, and more concern for the implications of leaders’ character and its effects on the least of these, prominently including the sexual abuse survivors whose experiences Du Mez details in her final chapter.

That said, I am blessed to know many such Christians and Jesus tells us a little leaven can leaven the whole loaf. May it be so. Lord, have mercy.

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