Jesus and John Wayne, or how American Evangelicals Came to Support Trump

 

I generally resist arguments that trace straight lines between events, showing how a certain cause led to a defined effect. 

Life is way too complicated and complex for simple solutions, even if they help us try to make sense of the world. 

But when it comes to how evangelicals in the U.S. ended up supporting Donald Trump for president, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, makes a convincing case for how and why it happened. 

Earlier this year I wrote about a webinar presentation on the book by Kobes Du Mez, a professor of American Christianity at Calvin University, a Christian Reformed university in Michigan. 

In the book—which is well-researched and informative, but also by turns depressing and angering—Kobes Du Mez traces evangelical support for Trump back to the arrival on the scene of Billy Graham in the 1950s and through the rise of the conservative evangelical right in the 1970s and beyond. 

It was during that time conservative white American evangelicals began promoting and adopting a hyper-masculine, authoritarian, patriarchal, patriotic, nationalistic, pro-military and anti-feminist approach to their faith. 

They were, she said, creating a version of Christianity in the mold of John Wayne, something tough, rough and muscular. 

It was the kind of Christianity that was led by a “warrior Jesus”—not a more traditional meek and mild saviour who spoke about peace, love and brotherhood. 

For these American evangelicals, Jesus became more Rambo than Mr. Rogers. 

This pro-Trump development can’t be traced to one person or one event. It occurred over decades through preaching, teaching, books, conferences, activism, music and other media. 

Leaders included well-known men such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, Tim Lahaye, and a host of TV evangelists, along with lesser-known ones like Mark Driscoll, Tony Perkins, Bill Gothard, Paul Weyrich, and many more. 

Their goal was to kindle fear in the hearts of American evangelical Christians about things like Communism, secular humanism, feminism, multilateralism, Islamic terrorism, and the erosion or religious freedom.

It was, she says, "a tried and true recipe" for success, enabling them to rally followers "to fight battles in which the fate of the nation, and their own families, seemed to hinge." 

The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 invigorated their efforts. 

“The first African-American president, the sea-change in LGBTQ rights, the apparent erosion of religious freedom—coupled with looming demographic changes and the declining religious loyalty of their own children—heightened the sense of dread among white evangelicals,” she says. 

But the message did not need to be invented for when Obama became president; evangelical leaders, she says, had been “perfecting that pitch” for 50 years. 

And the pitch? “Evangelicals were looking for a protector, an aggressive, heroic manly-man, someone who wasn’t restrained by the values of political correctness or feminine virtues, someone who would break the rules for the right cause,” she says. 

When Donald Trump came along, he proved to be the one who embodied that vision, someone who flaunted “an aggressive, militant masculinity,” the “ultimate fighting champion for evangelicals.” 

The result of all this is that, today, Trumpism and much of conservative white evangelicalism have become one and the same. 

“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,” she says. 

For them Trump is a throwback to a time when “rugged masculinity was forged in 1950s America, a time when all was right with the world.” 

He became “the culmination” of all their efforts and desires, a someone who represented their decades-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity that would make America strong and great again. 

Altogether, it resulted in their worshipping a “badass” Jesus, a tough guy who took no guff or prisoners when it came to faith—a Jesus like the Hollywood image of John Wayne.  

It was, as she puts it, a Jesus who “was over a half-century in the making. Inspired by images of heroic white manhood, evangelicals had fashioned a saviour who would lead them into battles . . . the new rugged Christ transformed Christian manhood, and Christianity itself.” 

As someone who grew up in an evangelical in the 1960s and 70s, some of what Kobe Du Mez writes feels autobiographical for me. 

The church I grew up in was influenced by some of these authors and preachers—especially Tim Lahaye, whose apocalyptic vision fueled my view of the future. 

Although I narrowly missed going to one of Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminars, in my later teens the Jesus movement group I was part of was heavily influenced by his patriarchal authoritarianism—the leader was always right and could never be questioned, a stance that ended up badly for the group and also for me.

As for the book, although it is written by an academic it is not an academic book; the prose is accessible. That doesn't mean it isn't hard to read at times, what with the stories she tells of how the evangelical movement was co-opted to support Trump. 

And the last chapter, about sexual abuse and sex scandals among some evangelical leaders, is especially difficult to read; it made me sad and angry.

Looking back, Kobes Du Mez says that writing the book was a difficult and depressing experience. When her editor asked her to try to end on hopeful note, she couldn’t. 

“The best I could muster was ‘what was done can be undone,’” she says, adding the current state of affairs for American evangelicals doesn’t have to be this way forever. 

It was “not handed down by God from the beginning of time.”