Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Donald Trump & Evangelical Masculinity: An Interview with Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Over the last century, we've baked politics, masculinity, and religion together. In this episode, Keith interviews https://kristindumez.com/ (Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez) about her book https://kristindumez.com/books/jesus-and-john-wayne/ (Jesus and John Wayne). She explores how evangelical concepts of masculinity and political playbook merged together to bring about the rise of Donald Trump. If you like this episode, make sure not to miss https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/is-it-okay-for-christians-to-be-nationalists/ (Is It Okay for Christians to be Nationalists?) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

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Hey, we have a special guest on 10-minute Bible Talks, the person that I'm really excited to talk with. She is the author of Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Her name is Kristen Kobus Dumay. She is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Welcome, Kristen. Thank you. Thank you for having. me. So this book, Jesus and John Wayne, it is a spicy book. Have you gotten a lot of people who thought it was kind of controversial or what's been the reaction? I expected more controversy up front than I experienced.

Within days of the book publishing, I started getting letters. People think I get a lot of hate mail. I actually don't, almost none. But I've gotten now hundreds and hundreds of letters from evangelicals themselves saying, this is the story of my life. And thank you for writing. So it's really been overwhelming. That said, yeah, if you go on to Twitter, you can find a little controversy on a regular basis, but it is a provocative book. Well, your research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. And that puts you right smack dab in the middle of the cultural conversation that's happening today. So I can imagine that you have stirred up a hornet's nest in some circles.

But I have to agree with all the people who wrote you letters that were positive. I really enjoyed your book. It doesn't mean that I necessarily agreed with everything in it, but I thought it made a really intelligent argument. And it was super well researched. So where I disagree, I'm not sure I'm right. It might be more me wanting to disagree than having good grounds to. Well, I disagreed with myself from time to time as I was writing it.

So this is where I ended up in those disagreements. So there's definitely space for debate. Well, I say that all the time. The best argument is within my own mind sometimes. So let's start here. It's June 6th of 2015. Donald Trump comes down the golden escalator and he announces his candidacy for the Republican nomination. And I have to tell you that when I saw that, I thought, well, this is ridiculous. This is like a carnival. This is a clown show.

We've now gotten a point to our politics where this kind of, I don't know, charlatan TV star, Blowhard, he comes down a golden escalator and announces his candidacy. And it turns out that Donald Trump won, not just the Republican nomination. but he won the presidency. Now, I didn't vote for either candidate in 2016 or 2020. I couldn't get myself comfortable with either option. But I thought when 81% of evangelicals voted, or 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, I thought this is a crazy aberration.

This is weird. This must be because of the cultural climate we live in. But you kind of take a different tact. You say, in reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Can you help unpack a little bit of why you think evangelicals so quickly transition to being in favor of Donald Trump? The research behind this book goes back long before Donald Trump descended that golden escalator. It goes back more than 15 years, actually, when my students at Calvin University, Christian University, brought a book to me, and it was John Eldridge's Wild at Heart. And they said, Professor Dumae, you have to read this book. And I had just wrapped up a lecture on Teddy Roosevelt where I'd showed how gender works in history and how ideas of masculinity are linked to militarism and American power and race and religion. And so I opened Eldridge's book and I saw what they were talking about on the first page, a quote from Teddy Roosevelt. And then Eldridge went on to sketch this very militant and militaristic conception of what he called Christian masculinity. And so I started researching it. After a time, I set it aside, in part because what I was discovering was so disturbing.

I discovered just incredibly misogynistic teachings, a very militaristic, what seemed to me to be very unbiblical teachings about masculinity and then honestly about Christianity itself. It did seem a corruption of the faith. But it seemed to me that maybe I was looking at a really extreme example. And then there was Mark Driscoll and I thought, well, maybe he's really extreme too. And then I thought as a Christian, is this my job to be shining this bright light on the dark. darkest underbelly of American Christianity. Because again, what I was seeing was really disturbing. So I set the project aside and it was in the fall of 2016 that I pulled it back out. And I was watching like everybody else evangelicals come to support Donald Trump and then support him through the

Access Hollywood tape release, support him through the election. And that's when I thought, this reminds me of things I've read. This reminds me of evangelicals who have embraced a strong man, a militant man who's willing to do what needs to be done to protect Christianity, to protect our interests. And even if that requires an abuse of power. And so when that kind of clicked for me, I took out that old research and I came to see that kind of consistency with respect to evangelicals family values politics was really an embrace of white patriarchal authority. And if you put that at the heart of family values politics, as I think history places it there for us, then what we see in terms of evangelical support for Donald Trump is no longer this betrayal of family values politics.

Instead, it's very much in line with much of what we've seen. Yeah, so you make the case that, and you just said it, that this election of Donald Trump, your book isn't so much about Donald Trump, as much as it traces the rise of a certain kind of evangelical masculinity. And you start, if I remember right, all the way back with Billy Sunday at the turn of the century, turn of the 19th century, and during World War I and all that, a former baseball player who turned into a nationwide phenomenon as an evangelist. Can you kind of help unpack the argument of your book about this certain brand of masculinity starting wherever you want, but maybe with Billy Sunday and just trace that through to where we are today?

Yeah. And when you go back that far, you're going to find continuities, but you're all also going to find a lot of change. I thought that's kind of history is filled with both continuity and change. So yes, we could find kind of a precursor in Billy Sunday, but at the same time, things were different back then. So in the early 20th century, this kind of muscular Christianity was all the rage. And Billy Sunday was a great example as a conservative Protestant who embraced this. But liberal Protestants at the time also embraced this muscular Christianity. And then if you go to the First World War, Billy Sunday, conservative Protestant, this muscular Christian man, embrace the war effort, gung-ho. But not all conservative Protestants did. Many conservative

Protestants were against Christian nationalism and against American militarism in the First World War. Many liberal Protestants embraced militarism. So things looked different back then. Where my story really starts coming together is in the 1940s. And that's when we can see these strands really emerging and at the center of this new evangelical identity. So this is, the Billy Graham era starting up, the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in the Second World War. But by the end of the 1940s, we're in the thick of the Cold War already. And that's when we see evangelicals embrace the idea of Christian America, Christian nationalism that we need to defend our country. And they hold that together with gender traditionalism,

the idea that God made men to be this natural aggressive protector. And they hold these things together and understand that that is their particular role as this faithful remnant of American Christians, to defend Christian America and to defend the quote unquote traditional family. So it's this Cold War militaristic context that goes on to shape evangelicalism really through much of the last half century or more. This is a good place for me to jump in because I want you to keep telling that story as it went through the 70s and all but. But I've been kind of doing it, I don't know, for me going down the rabbit hole of trying to

understand Christian nationalism, and I've been reading different books that maybe will come up here and how your research interfaces with them. But one of the things I've been doing is asking my friends, what's the motto of the United States? And a few of them give me a blank stare like, there's a motto in the United States. Some say e pluribus unum. A few get in God we trust, which became the motto officially, at least legally, by Congress in the 1950s, along with the first National Prayer Breakfast, along with the Pledge of Allegiance being amended to include the phrase under God. Billy Graham is friends with Eisenhower. He's the first, and I think if I'm right, the only president baptized while holding office. I mean, he opens his cabinet meetings with prayer.

And so there's this fusion of evangelicalism with American civil religion, I guess, with the Republican party, all in opposition to communism. Help us understand that union between Republicanism and Christianity. So communism was anti-God, anti-family, and anti-American. It's perceived as such. And so against everything that evangelicals held dear, against everything that many Americans held dear. And that's important to keep in mind. The 1950s say this is kind of Cold War consensus. So it's not just the Republican Party versus the Democratic Party. These values were held across political parties. And this was also the baby boom era. So this is kind of the high point for quote unquote traditional family values as they were propped up through government spending in the years

after World War II. So in championing these values, evangelicals were not going against other Americans for the most part. And they felt that they were like at the center of things. They had moved from this kind of marginalized, almost fringe movement after they weren't able to kind of hold on to power in mainstream denominations. They had kind of scattered. And so in the 40s, they came together and said, we're going to reassert ourselves. We're going to ban together. And it was easy to do so in some ways because they were part of the mainstream when it came to these values. And all of that changed in the 1960s. Yeah, in 1960s, you got the Supreme Court making a decision against prayer in schools, making another decision against reading the Bible in schools, in the sexual revolution. What is it that flipped America?

from embracing evangelical Christianity or Protestant Christianity to all the sudden running the other way from it. Because it seems like evangelicals were in control and then they were on the run. They were scared of the culture. So a number of things happened and not any one thing, but they all work in tandem. One, we have to appreciate the disruption that the civil rights movement caused to a large number of white evangelicals. White Southerners, the vast majority were white evangelicals, incredibly disruptive to the status quo, to their quote unquote way of life and to their understanding of Christian social order. So they have the civil rights movement. You have the rise of the feminist movement, really challenging

this quote unquote traditional womanhood that was really just flourishing the previous decade or two. And then you have also the anti-war movement. You have the Vietnam War and a war where more and more Americans started to question American greatness and American goodness. And so questioning in Cold War militarism, again, these values that just half a generation before, a lot of Americans kind of held in common. And in this moment, evangelicals are going to double down on these values. And even as many Americans start to question them. And so they start to feel like they are this marginalized group, this remnant, but that they also feel this obligation to keep America safe, to keep America Christian, because they see that their power, their

influences ebbing away. And that is what they take with them as they really emerge as a partisan political force because it's in the 1960s and through the 1970s that we have this kind of modern political realignment where pre-1970s, talking about the Republican Party, you're talking about the Democratic Party, you're talking about very different parties than what we see now. And so it's really by the 1970s that you see conservative white evangelicals reinforcing these particular values and doing so as part of the Republican Party. So let's fast forward to 1976. And we have the first, I guess, modern evangelical president in Jimmy Carter.

He was a Democrat, obviously had been the governor of Georgia. But almost everybody at one point in the South was a Democrat. Every Christian, Billy Graham, was a registered Democrat. And so the evangelicals, I think Time magazine called 1970, the year of the evangelical, and they help get Carter elected. But by 1980, they've turned on Jimmy Carter. And now they've left the guy who taught Sunday school in his church, Baptist Church. Is it a Baptist Church? Yeah. So they left the guy who taught Sunday school at his Baptist Church in Georgia. And instead, they've

embraced Ronald Reagan, who may have been a person of faith, I don't know, but was surely not as evangelical as Jimmy Carter was. What's happening there? Is it as simple as saying this is an issue of abortion or is a little more complicated than that? It's much more complicated and quick correction or tweaking. So everybody in the South was a Democrat, every white person probably were close every white person for much of the 20th century until this party realignment takes place. But yes, Jimmy Carter on paper, it looks to be the perfect candidate, especially in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. So Nixon, incredibly corrupt. We need to rethink our engagement with politics. Billy Graham was appropriately chastened. And then Jimmy Carter comes along and he has this breath of fresh air. He's a legit Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher. He has a military record. He's kind of everything. A peanut farmer. What's not to like? And so many evangelicals say, yeah, he's absolutely one of us until they realized that on many social issues, he wasn't. He wasn't one of them, not as they had been formulated. their cultural and political identity over the past decade or two. And so he came out in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. He was supportive of feminists. And that felt like betrayal to many evangelicals.

But it wasn't just on social issues or family values issues where they felt betrayed. They had also come to embrace a very militant, aggressive foreign policy, a very clear presentation of American power on the global stage. And in some ways, I think that was card. Carter's greatest sin that he looked weak in terms of U.S. foreign policy. We also had an economic downturn. And then he's suggesting that it's a time for national soul searching and kind of good Christian fashion calling for some repentance. That very much against this kind of American goodness and greatness belief system. And so he committed all kinds of sins in terms of where conservative evangelicals were going culturally and politically. He also did not.

strike a very powerful image. He was not traditionally masculine. He was kind. He was gentle. He smiled a lot and he wore cardigans. Mr. Rogers. He was very, very much like Mr. Rogers. And so he did not strike them as the kind of leader that the nation needed that Christian America needed in that moment because the threats loomed so large. And then in Waltz's Ronald Reagan, fresh off his California ranch, wearing cowboy boots, cowboy hat, he talks tough, and he does not apologize for America. And he asserts American power. And all of those things make them love Reagan. Reagan changed his views on abortion.

Not long before, he had been a Democrat, switched to Republican Party. So his history is one of kind of transformation. But in that moment, he was the right candidate for them. And maybe this is a good time to bring out that. title of your book, Jesus and John Wayne, because Ronald Reagan used John Wayne and some of his advertising embraced one of his daughters, or John Wayne's daughters embraced Reagan. And so explain to us a little bit about your title, how you came up with it and the connection between Jesus and John Wayne. When I started looking at Beyond Aldrich's book, other evangelical books

on Christian manhood that were being published in the 2000s, then I went back and looked in the 1990s. And I started to see that John Wayne just kept popping up because these authors loved their heroes. They based much of their kind of teaching on what it is to be a Christian man on these heroic ideals of masculinity. And what struck me is very few of these models of masculinity came from the Bible. And Bible verses were actually few and far between in many of these books. But they loved their mythical heroes. So they loved Mel Gibson's William Wallace from the movie Braveheart. They loved just random American color.

boys and soldiers and General MacArthur. And they loved John Wayne. John Wayne just kept popping up. And they loved John Wayne because of his on-screen persona. He was the cowboy hero. He was the World War II hero. He was the hero in Vietnam. He was the powerful white man who was going to bring order through violence if necessary. And that was the kind of model that they were looking for. Now, if you know about John Wayne's history, which I write about some too, not just on screen, but off-screen, He was also a leading figure in the rise of conservatism in the Republican Party in the 1960s, 1970s. He promoted Barry Goldwater, big supporter of Ronald Reagan, supported Phyllis Schlafly. So he's right in the thick of this. So both his personal politics, his views on race, his views on the Vietnam War, his views on anti-war protesters, all of these things align with this emerging ideology. And so it's no coincidence. that conservative evangelicals look to him as a hero and have a certain nostalgia for this nostalgic America that John Wayne represents. So that's the Jesus and John Wayne of the title.

And when you talk about evangelicals, there's different ways to define that, of course. And I have an idea that maybe some of our listeners are defining it maybe differently than you. So there's kind of a classic definition by a British scholar named David Bebbington. And he writes that evangelicals have a high regard, high commitment to the Bible, high commitment to the cross and a personal relationship with God, that they are about advancing that throughout the world in conversionism, seeing people put their faith in Christ, as well as kind of a social activism. But when I read your book and even hear you talk today, you're using evangelical maybe in a little bit different way than just a commitment to certain theological principles.

Can you help us understand how you're using evangelical here? Because some people, I think, I will go here next, but might not think of themselves as in this group you're referring to. But I don't know, I'll let you handle that. When I started this book, I just planned on using that Bebbington definition. That's what we scholars tend to do. And the more I looked at my sources and why I thought, that doesn't really capture what I'm talking about here.

And I don't think that really captures how many people experience evangelicalism. One thing I was aware that a lot of evangelicals are fairly theological illiterate. Those that I get in my classroom sometimes. It bears it out in Bible studies I participated in. But also survey data also bears this out. And evangelicals themselves lament this high level of theological illiteracy. At which point I start to ask, well, is theology really central then to this identity that we're trying to get at? But most importantly, I think we need to consider the issue of race.

So if you use this theological rubric, actually, the majority of black Protestants in the United States would count as evangelicals. But the problem is, more than two-thirds of black Protestants do not identify as evangelicals. This was several years ago. I'm guessing the number's a lot higher today. So just to be clear, the black and white evangelicals share a lot of the same common beliefs, the same theological beliefs, high regard for the Bible, the cross, a relationship with Jesus, a desire to be active and sharing that message. but they don't identify the black. What you might think of is people who should be evangelicals don't identify with the group. So you're trying to figure out, okay, why not? Maybe this is in a theologically rooted category.

Or maybe they mean quite different things by those theological markers. So what do they mean by who is there Christ to them? What is their Jesus like? So what does it mean to follow that Christ? Which passages of the scriptures do they really uphold the authorities in their Christian life? which ones are they quite dismissive of? And then also as a historian and as a cultural historian, I care about not a kind of aspirational ideal or theological ideal as much as a lived reality. So who's going to churches with whom? Who is part of the same religious community? I also really

emphasize the role of popular culture here. Christian media, Christian radio, Christian television, Christian music, the Christian publishing industry in defining a cultural identity and in really forming the values of evangelicals. And there too, in all of these respects, you see a pretty big racial divide that white evangelicals are a distinct religious movement with a little bit of back and forth, a little bit of overlap. But I'm trying to describe the reality that I'm seeing as it manifests historically and as it finds expression in people's lives. So a much more kind of practical definition of evangelical is, did you grow up listening to James Dobson on the radio? Did you shop at a Christian bookstore?

Did you like, have you been formed by this world of cultural values? And then I also see evangelicalism as a series of networks, of alliances. It's a culture, but not entirely without structure, even though it doesn't follow traditional denominational structures. Who is wielding power? Who gets to define who's in and who's out? Who gets to decide if your book gets distributed? through Lifeway Christian books or which lines you cross so that you're on the outs.

That's how I understand evangelicalism as a cultural and historical movement. So that word evangelical is so elastic that sometimes I wonder if it does us any good. And yet it's so often used that I don't know that we can sit out and not use it. But when I read your book, I find myself sometimes reluctantly, sadly agreeing with the case that you lay out. You can't help but say, yep, this stuff is true. I also, though, find myself responding in a way that says, man, it feels like she's writing about my crazy uncle who I don't really like, I don't know, I don't agree with, but he is in the family, and everybody in his family thinks he's the bomb, me not so much. And so I guess I wonder if you feel like you were fair to the broader

definition of evangelicals, or if you took kind of the crazy train people, the Jerry Falwell juniors. I could care less what Jerry Falwell Jr. says. I didn't become a Christian until I was 19 in college, and so I didn't grow up in an evangelical household, a Christian household at all. So James Dobson, am I familiar with him? Absolutely. Am I familiar with Mark Driscoll? Of course I am. But it's not like these are my mentors or the people I pick up and read. So help us think about that. Do you paint with two broaded brush or how should we think about it? I love this question. Again, this is a question I was asking myself all the way through.

Who's part of this story? There are plenty of crazy uncles in this book. More than I anticipated that I would include up front because I did not want to discredit this narrative. So, for example, I had no intention of including Bill Gothard in this book, not at all, until in conversations and interviews, time and again, these mainstream evangelicals, People I knew, people I didn't know, I never would have guessed would tell me, you are going to include Bill Gothard, aren't you? Please tell me you're going to include Bill Gothard. And then I had to say, how deep did his influence run? And then what I ended up doing throughout the book is taking somebody like Bill Gothard, absolutely fringe, extreme.

And then pairing him with somebody indisputably mainstream in that particular chapter, James Dobson. And when you hold the two together, you see, yes, one is very mainstream, popular, the other is fringe. but what they're saying has remarkable resemblance from one to the other. Their basic teachings about gender, about authority and submission, very similar. And that's a thread that I bring throughout the book. So other crazy uncles, let's talk Doug Wilson, Doug Phillips and other one. Like, Doug Wilson in particular would never. He'd be insulted if he suggested that he's anywhere near the mainstream of evangelicalism.

And so I try to make that really clear. He's extreme. But he's tapped into these. networks and has these alliances with people who are indisputably mainstream. We can talk John Piper. We can talk Christianity today, establishment of evangelicalism. And they are platforming Doug Wilson. And John Piper is defending Doug Wilson.

And so those are the dynamics I'm trying to tease out. What is the relationship between the mainstream and the fringe? And ultimately, where is the mainstream and what gets relegated to the margins? And maybe we need to question this and maybe it's a shifting center. And that evangelicalism is more of a populist movement than perhaps many intellectual leaders of this kind of, maybe they're actually more marginal. Maybe Wheaton College and Christianity Today ends up by 2021 being much more marginal than they ever imagined themselves to be. And so those are precisely the questions this book is asking. And that's how I'm kind of actively asking this as I write, where is mainstream now?

More importantly, what is the relationship between any mainstream and fringe? And how is power wielded across these relationships? Can you give us a couple of books that you would recommend that we could pursue this topic? If we're wanting to dive a little deeper in it, read some other perspectives out there, maybe some of the books you came across during your research. Any books that you would recommend to those who would like to keep pursuing this? besides yours? Oh, yes. There's so many. So Greg Boyd's Myth of Christian America, I think I get the titles confused. Let's see, John

Fias, Believe Me, specifically on evangelicals in Donald Trump. Let's see, a church called Toff by Scott McKnight and Laura Berenger on kind of abusive systems in American Christianity. After evangelicalism is for people who are struggling to hold on to their faith, but not finding that they can hold on to kind of evangelicalism that they've inherited. There are just so many books out there right now in so many different directions that connect to different threads here. That's a great start. And I've read the FIA book. Is that how you say his name? F-E-A. And I had no idea how to pronounce it. So thank you for that. I've read a couple of his books and they're really good. You're working on another book. What's the next book going to be?

The next book is called Live, Laugh, Love. And it is a cultural history of white Christian womanhood. So kind of the flip side to Jesus and John Wayne, looking at a religious consumer culture from inspirational fiction and mommy blogging through HGTV, direct sales marketing, and looking at how this kind of consumer culture ends up shaping Christian values, shaping a culture of white Christian womanhood that ends up reinforcing conservative political ideals, neoliberalism, and in some cases also white supremacy. Oh, your research is right smack dab in the middle of the cultural conversation. So I think that book sounds like it's going to be a great read also. And we didn't even get a chance to talk about it. But in the 70s, the I believe her name's Maribel

Morgan. Maribel Morgan. And Phyllis Schlafly. So if that's any hint of what's coming in the new book, yes. It's going to be excellent. It's picking up that thread. Yeah. It's going to be great. Where can people find you on Twitter or wherever you are online? I am on Twitter at KK Dumase. That's at KKDUM-M-Z, like Dumez, on. I'm on Facebook, Facebook author page, also at KK. Dumay. And I have a website, Kristen Dumay.com, where I put a lot of my writings. Well, thank you to Kristen Dumay for a great book, Jesus and John Wayne. I would encourage you to read it. Patrick and I absolutely loved it.

And we look forward to talking to you after your next book comes out. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks, Kristen. You are delightful to talk with, and I appreciate your time. Oh, thank you. Thank you for these questions. And thank you for inviting me on.

tag me when it comes out. I'm happy to share, and this is a great conversation. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.