From there, Du Mez invites us to recall Billy Graham’s defense in The New York Times of Lt. “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless communists.” That’s Pat Boone in 1961 at a “freedom forum” hosted at Pepperdine College in Malibu, which included Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers, and a televised luncheon with Barry Goldwater. She catalogues the harm by drawing on the public record of unscrupulous men, famous and not so famous, exercising inordinate power over other people’s lives by partnering with and covering for one another. She begins with Theodore Roosevelt, whose image of “the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” opened John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul, which Edgar Maddison Welch, popularly known as the Pizzagate gunman, claimed as his inspiration when he walked armed into Comet Ping Pong, hoping to save children kept in a dungeon by Democrats.Ĭompared to the pastors, pundits, presidents, and other personalities whose abusive speech and behavior Du Mez recounts in painstaking detail, Edgar Welch, who surrendered to police after firing a gun at a locked door and realizing his error, can seem like a marginal figure, but they all share a vision of sanctified aggression constantly reinforced through confusing the voice of God for the voice in their heads. This attempted fusion of the peasant-philosopher Jesus of Nazareth with a popular cowboy icon both names and characterizes what Du Mez describes as “the evangelical cult of masculinity” and its accompanying patterns of misogyny and abuse. The title Jesus and John Wayne comes from a song of the same name from the Gaither Vocal Band. Du Mez offers a granular take on her subject by isolating and analyzing an observable phenomenon in American life which, upon processing her study, readers are likely to see everywhere: “militantly patriarchal expressions” of a toxic faith which is, in turn, toxically political. Kristin Kobes Du Mez tells in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.ĭu Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University, casts a critical eye upon a culture she knows well - the demographic group labeled “evangelicals” in polls and election cycles and its strange but alarmingly decisive bearing within local, state, and federal governments in the United States. “Crushing truths perish by being acknowledged.” This hopeful aphorism from Albert Camus is one avenue for approaching the breathtakingly thorough and eye-rubbingly sad story Dr.