The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Episode Date: August 29, 2020

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez Kristindumez.com/ A scholar of American Christianity presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism that identifies the forces that have turned Donald Trump into a hero of the Religious Right. How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate’s staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which delves beyond facile headlines to explain how white evangelicals have brought us to our fractured political moment. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping account of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, showing how American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism, or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the role of culture in modern American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals may not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex―and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical popular culture is teeming with muscular heroes―mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Trump, in other words, is hardly the first flashy celebrity to capture evangelicals’ hearts and minds, nor is he the first strongman to promise evangelicals protection and power. Indeed, the values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today―patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community―are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office. A much-needed reexamination, Jesus and John Wayne explains why evangelicals have rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us. Kristin Kobes Du Mez 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. She has written for the Washington Post, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Christian Century, and Religion & Politics, and has been interviewed on NPR, CTV, the CBC, and by CNN, the New York Times, the Economist, the Christian Post, PBS News Hour, and the AP, among other outlets, and she blogs at Patheos’s Anxious Bench. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in we have the most excellent author on today. I think you're going to be excited to hear from her. To see the video

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Refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go to thecvpn.com. You can subscribe to all nine podcasts there. You can check out our new book club we're trying to get rolling here. It's at patreon.com forward slash Chris Voss. We talk about the background of the show, authors, books, all that sort of good stuff. Kind of go more in depth into some of the things that we learned from all the reading we did and the interviews we did with authors. So be sure to check that out as well. Today, we have a most excellent guest.

She is the author of the new book. You want to check this baby out. It's Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. And this kind of goes along with the serendipity that we've been talking about with a lot of different things going on with Black Lives Matter, some of the questions we're asking ourselves in the environment. The author's name is Kristen Kubas-Dumais. She's a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University.

She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, and her research focuses on gender, religion, and American politics. She has written for the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and Christian Century, and her work has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, the BBC, the CBC, and several other national and international outlets. She blogs at Patheos Anxious Bench. Welcome to the show, Kristen. How are you today? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Good, good, good, good. And so give us some dot coms, plugs where people can check out your book and also learn more about you online. Sure. I have a website,

kristindume.com. Dume is D-U-M-E-Z. And I have a Facebook author page, Kristen Kobus Dume. And I'm on Twitter at KKDume, K-K-D-U-M-E-Z. There you go. There you go. And I was excited to get this book on because I've been going through an exploration. Hopefully my audience has been following along as we've been going through this, uh, with Baldwin and, and, uh, Black Lives Matter. Uh, John Wayne was something that Baldwin spoke about, uh, and you know, what he represented and, and we've been having lots of different discussions like the city on the shining city on the hill author and, uh, white, white, and white privilege and white exceptionalism. And, of course, the whole perception of America's destiny or the perception of America's destiny, I should say. So what was the reason that you wrote this book?

And give us an overview of it, if you would, please. Sure. I actually started work on this book. I didn't know quite what it was going to turn out to be, and I didn't know that Donald Trump would be the culmination of this research 15 years ago. And what brought this all to my attention, I teach at a Christian university, and some of my students said, you know, Professor Dumais, there's this book that you're really going to want to see. I'd been lecturing in U.S. history on Teddy Roosevelt and Teddy Roosevelt's kind of militant

masculinity and how it was connected to foreign policy and religion. And they handed me the book Wild at Heart from John Eldredge. And it was a book that was selling millions of copies in the early 2000s. And John Eldredge loved Teddy Roosevelt. He loved this very militant masculinity, and he was really promoting this as ideal Christian manhood. Now, this was right around the time when we started seeing survey after survey showing how evangelicals were pro-Iraq war, pro-preemptive war, condoning the use of torture. And so I started to look at how evangelical ideals of gender are tightly linked to militancy, militarism, and foreign policy. That's where it started. And again, it ended up with Donald Trump. Wow, that's just extraordinary. Some of the path we've been going on is,

like I say, the shining city on the hill, which comes from the Puritan background, the founding of this country. And a lot of discussion we have is, you know, a lot of the ugliness and violence that we have done in the name of, well, this is America. And, you know, the manifest destiny perception of, well, we have a right to enslave people that we think are less than us, even though they're human beings. We have a right to kill, murder, rape Indians and put them on reservations because, you know, they're dirty heathens was the saying back then. But they're human beings. And we've done over across

america's history we've done some of the most extraordinary hateful evil ugly murderous uh things in the name of of god loves america and america is god's country and you know that sort of thing um and uh and it was interesting to me, you picked John Wayne through this, because I grew up with John Wayne as my masculinity thing. And I didn't grow up Christian. I grew up in a Mormon cult, but I really didn't espouse to the religion. I kind of knew it was a fraud from the beginning. But to me, it was still that era of, I don't know,

I think everyone in that era grew up. But you talk about how white Christians pretty much took that and ran with it. Yeah. Yeah. So when I started looking at other books, too, not just Eldridge's, but other books on Christian manhood that were being published, I was really surprised because evangelicals like to talk about being Bible-believing Christians, right? It's all about the Bible. But when I was looking at their books on Christian manhood, you know, there was a Bible verse sprinkled here or there.

But they really looked to Hollywood heroes for their models of kind of this mythical masculinity. And their favorites were William Wallace from Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Love William Wallace. And then John Wayne just kept popping up. So I did not set out to write a book about John Wayne. In many ways, this book is not about John Wayne, but it is about how white evangelicals have embraced a largely kind of secular ideal of masculinity and then called it Christian. And in doing so, they've actually changed Christianity itself. So now, you know, their Jesus of the Gospels is a warrior Christ. And, you know, with a flaming sword and going to do battle and slay all of his enemies instead of the Jesus of the Gospels, you know, which is, you know, love your enemies and give up yourself and give up your power.

And so it really, that's the corrupted of faith part of the subtitle, really. But yeah, they were drawing on these secular heroes like John Wayne, I think in large part because these models of militant masculinity had been kind of untainted by traditional Christian virtue. So they were the true kind of rugged manly man who was strong enough to protect them and to protect their interests. Did we, did we go from, I mean, I remember, you know, my grandfather was, both my grandfathers were, were tough men, tough as steel. They were just, but I didn't, I don't know, I don't know if I was just too young to tune into it, but they didn't come across as toxic masculinity. And now I'm thinking about it actually a little bit more,

and I'm probably thinking about it more after the show. But they kind of had, they were kind of the rock in their relationships. You know, I didn't ever witness my grandparents fighting and stuff. I think they kept some of that from us. I think they both reached a point in their marriages where they were, you know, they were on the settled point in their marriages where they were, you know, they were on the settled side in their 60s and 70s where they're just like, hey, we're just writing this out until the end.

You reach a certain point in your life where I'm just not going to fight about stuff anymore because I'm just, you know, we're just all going to get along and make this work. And, but, but yeah, I think, I think in the 70s, I saw my father, this, this, this kind of new age sort of thing. And, and I went through the 80s where, you know, a lot of things were changing with, with, you know, what men sort of were expected to do. You know, women started working. When I was a kid, I was going with my mom out to ERA events, you know, when they were trying to get ERA going and rolling.

And then there was a real dichotomy of masculinity then, and you saw more divorces became very normal. I remember how shocking it was to see divorce and the issues there in the movie, ET, you know, when the mom's divorced and they're going through this, you know, it, I grew up in the area where there was that one divorced woman on the block and all the women would whisper about it. That's, that's, there's a guy over there today. The, and then, you know, and then over time I saw where now, now it's the, there's that one married chick on the block now who has never been divorced.

What's going on over there? You know, it's totally flipped the model. But, you know, come to think of it, so I guess my question is, did you see a rise of this during the John Wayne era that wasn't prior? But no, you saw a lot of that in Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. So, you know, as a historian, I sketch a longer history here. And I do glance back to the 19th century, even before Teddy Roosevelt, you see this kind of militant, patriarchal, Christian manhood in the American South, and right linked to kind of control over women, children, and enslaved peoples. And then you have the rise in the early 20th century of this kind of muscular Christianity. And so you can find precursors and influences that will kind of shape the later history,

but there are also differences. And so in the early 20th century, a lot of progressive Christians actually embraced muscular Christianity. And many conservative Protestants, for example, in World War I, were not kind of rah-rah war. They were much more ambivalent. And so the kind of set of issues that we identify today with, you know, conservative evangelicals and militarism and patriarchy and all of these things really did kind of come together in the early Cold War era with earlier precedents, but there was a lot of change over time. And so it's really in the late 40s, 50s, 60s that this comes kind of into shape. Billy Graham is part of this story, and the Cold War is the backdrop. So, right, you have this danger to Christian America, and we need strong men to stand up

and fight. And then you have feminism coming along and the civil rights movement. Each of these things is disrupting white patriarchal power. And so by the 1970s, the time when evangelicals really start to coalesce as this partisan political force, this militant white masculinity and patriarchal authority moved to the center of their identity. And that starts to define kind of who they are over and against many other Americans, even as it unites them with some secular conservatives who also think that this kind of John Wayne masculinity is an antidote to everything that had gone wrong in America in the 1960s. One thing that we talked about with Eddie Glaude Jr.'s book is the intersection of where,

like you say, the civil rights, and then how things flip back under Nixon, where Nixon became very, you know, we saw what Trump is copying right now, you know, the persecution of people of color and race, and I believe he's anti-Jewish when it comes down to it in his heart. I think he just plays to that to, you know, get votes and whatever money. So was it during the Nixon era? Did this really come to fruition? I think we saw it again in the Reagan era, and Reagan really brought it back because Reagan pushed the city on the hill concept, manifest destiny you know um uh and of course uh Jesus I just I just got done reading the Playboy interview from John Wayne that that is so heinous I had never read

before I've just had to give him up as a as a masculine identity and and hero. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's definitely kind of comes to fruition in the Nixon era, even before that with Barry Goldwater, right? You see some of these pieces falling into place, especially among Southern California evangelicals, right? And that really becomes the epicenter of the new Christian right. And many of those folks had recently settled in Southern California, and they had come from the American South, right?

And so here again, you can see some of these connections. But it's true that this vision of kind of militant Christian manhood was always a white ideal, even if they didn't explicitly state it. But I noticed early on when I was reading all these books on Christian manhood, all of their militant heroes were white. And many of their militant heroes happened to be white guys who had subdued non-white populations. So, you know, the heroic cowboy out on the plains, you know, or John Wayne, either fighting the Japanese or fighting Vietnamese, right? This was a very white model of militant masculinity,

and it did not extend to, for example, black manhood. This was very much a white tradition, and evangelicalism, white evangelicalism, is, you know, a very white racial identity, and I think it's important to note that. Yeah. And what was interesting, I saw in one of your interviews, you talked about how John Wayne becomes the epitome, the embodiment of the end justifies the means, whether it's, you know, basically killing, destroying, enslaving, you know, dominating other races. Like the one thing i didn't tune into and and i like i say i i think i was just a child of that age like that was what was on tv we grew up with john wayne i mean if you were to put someone else in front of me and i didn't and like you said in

some of your other interviews i didn't really tune into heston heston was kind of cool but uh i mean john wayne was just there but i didn't tune into the to Heston. Heston was kind of cool, but, I mean, John Wayne was just there. But I didn't tune in to the whole part about, you know, dominating people and shooting Indians and, you know, the whole toxicity of it. And even as a pinch, just personally, you know, I watched Kirk Douglas just kind of eviscerate him on the Dick Cavett show a little bit last night.

And so I didn't tune into that but now i see the subconscious interlay of it in in how it it plays in that theme of well we we've got a you know the perception of the well they're heathens and we're white and and god this is a god's country you know every time i hear donald trump say know, our heritage and our nation and, you know, anytime he uses the word our, it's like, I know exactly who he's talking about. He's talking about white people. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's important to realize, too, that John Wayne is such a great kind of model for this militant Christian manhood because he didn't always present as ruthless, right? He presented as just this model

of, you know, kind of controlled militancy that often, you know, there was a charm there, there was a wit, but when the going got rough, right, he wasn't afraid to use violence when necessary. And I think that's this ideal that, you know, you portray strength and you have respect and you have authority precisely because you have the potential to use violence as needed. And again, this was against the Cold War backdrop. And so, you know, they were preaching that, you know, the very fate of the nation was at stake and the very fate of Christianity, of God was at stake. And so if that's what's at stake, I mean, you have to use all means necessary. And Vietnam was such a critical backdrop here. And Vietnam really did focus attention for conservative Americans and conservative

evangelicals on what's wrong with American masculinity. Why can't our boys defeat this ragtag enemy over in the jungles of Vietnam? What happened to us? What happened to our greatness, right? And that's where feminism and civil rights and so come into this equation. And they want to kind of, well, make America great again and do it by making American men strong again. So does the Vietnam War and how a lot of people wanted to not go to that war and the whole Nixon thing, I mean, this ties into so much of what I've learned already

with how we really went off the deep end to Nixon. There was basically this blowback or kickback from Civil Rights era. And then, like you say, out of that came, and the, and the one of the real problems with the Vietnam war was the, like you say, the identity of us itself. And we'd never lost the war. We'd never surrendered. We never gone away without winning. And, and that's why that war unfortunately went on. And so many people died in it because we just kept throwing bodies at it,

trying to you know under this assumption that we could that like america doesn't walk away and you know eventually we just kind of you know afghanistan with russia had the same sort of problem um and so this is really interesting and then it plays into uh reagan brings it back uh that's really interesting what you said to me too about how uh during the 60s that makes sense why that became such a hub there in southern california we just had uh jean guerrero's on with her book uh hate monger and she talks about how uh stephen miller was shaped with his racial uh bias and how how republican california was at the time and anti-immigrant. So when they moved there, they were probably like,

hey, there's all these immigrants from Mexico. And that's probably where the evangelical persecution of immigrants came into play, maybe. Yeah, so the historian that I want to give a shout out to in this kind of background is Darren Dochuk. And he has this phenomenal book that's from Bible Belt to Sun Belt. And he traces this story where you have this kind of Southern militancy, Southern patriarchy that gets transported, transplanted into Southern California. And it's very individualistic. And that's why this cowboy mythology just resonates so strongly. And this is all unfolding right in the shadow of Hollywood.

And so films and this myth-making, it's all part of the mix. And this really is. This is the crucible for the religious right. And John Wayne is right there. He's speaking at the events. He's speaking at Pepperdine University, this evangelical institution. He and Ronald Reagan are good friends. They're appearing together.

And that's really this key moment in 20th century history. And it does all come together. Wow. That's just, everything is just making sense. Like, the more I read, the more I see this map. I'm going to check out that book. You know, Orange County is John Wayne Airport. They're thinking about renaming there's a giant statue of him the thing i mean even i've had to reconcile through you know a lot of what i've been learning and stuff i've had to sit down

and go uh okay we gotta give up the john wayne which i'm cool with you know i'm kind of getting used to giving up stuff at this point and going wow i, I didn't realize there was this other part that was bad. But, you know, I did see, like I said, I grew up in the 70s. My mom was supportive of the ERA and we used to go with her as kids to the events. And it was really, we were trying to understand why this was such a big deal because we were just kids and, you know, there was a lot of angry men about it and, you know, women's work and all this stuff. You know, this is still back in the era where there was usually just one income.

And, you know, we didn't understand it as children. But, you know, hey, your mom, you know, says it's important. We're doing it. But, yeah, this is really interesting. Now, how much does that play into the gun sort of thing? Because I grew up in John Wayne, you know even now i'm a gamer i like shooting stuff and killing stuff i i don't know if that comes from my john wayne background or my just toxic masculinity i don't know i don't know why i like good stuff i don't know i do have some

probably some interesting psychosis over the years from growing up in a cult. So maybe I'm just taking on my anger. I'm a big Metallica fan, so I like anger. But, you know, I try to be a nice guy the rest of the time. No, guns are a huge part of this, right? They are an essential part to this proper militant Christian masculinity. And this goes way back, too. So already in, there's a book written by a fundamentalist pastor in 1972, How to Rear Children. And this is right around the time that Dobson is also making

some of these points. But this one book on how to rear children had a chapter on how to raise boys. And I mean, he recommended giving toy guns to very young boys and then, you know, and then kind of building them up and giving them real firearms. And of course, your boys have to be trained to fire real firearms. And they need to only play with other boys and with boys' toys because otherwise they might become, quote unquote, a homosexual. And because we needed strong enough boys to become strong enough men to defend America on the battlefields of Vietnam, right? It's all there.

And then they believe that because of what was happening in the rest of America with the feminist movement, with the counterculture, the hippies, that it was really up to them as conservative Christians, as the faithful remnant, to promote and preserve true, rugged American manhood. They really took that upon themselves. And that's where you have somebody like Dobson too, by the end of the seventies, talking about, you know, testosterone is key to masculinity. And you've got to, again, let your boys, you know, play with guns and, and grow up to be rough or be rough and tumble. So they can grow up to be strong men to defend the nation because it's never been more important. So did Roe versus Wade play into this? I mean, certainly women got a lot more power

with Roe versus Wade and then birth control. Yeah, yeah. So not initially, not as much as you might think. In the late 60s and early 70s, even conservative Protestants actually had a kind of mixed views on abortion. And that was seen by many conservative Protestants as a Catholic thing. And many conservative Protestants did not like Catholics at the time. A lot has changed, right? There's kind of new friendships have forged across precisely these issues. But, I mean, in the late 60s, there was a whole issue of Christianity Today that considered the question of abortion. And there was a lot of, you know,

it's not a good thing, but it could be necessary. And it's really hard to say, and the Bible doesn't really speak out very clearly. By the end of the 70s, abortion had become highly politicized. And that's when you see this unity between conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics, so that by the 80s and certainly by the 90s, you don't have this diversity of view on abortion, at least not publicly stated within evangelical communities anymore. Yeah, it's interesting what you researched about how people were, you know, putting in their guns. And I've written down some of the books that you've referenced here that I'm going to have to go research. I know that my grandfather or one of my friends, his grandfather or great-grandfather back in the day,

the way they made sure their kids didn't grow up gay or homosexual or however you want to put it, was they would take them down to the whorehouse at 11 or 12 years old and they would make sure they would inlay a first sexual experience with a woman um and i don't know how often that happened but that was like back then their way um it's interesting the gun part because like i say i grew up with john wayne i grew up with uh uh who guy, Clint Eastwood, you know, Clint Eastwood was, you know, a big thing with his thing, but everything was about guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns. And now that I'm looking at it, maybe I should go more into a psychology session. I mean, I love modern warfare, but you know, I mean, I, I try and, you know, I mean, that's the outlet.

But maybe there's a reason why that's such a thing to me. But, you know, so this is really interesting. So you get into Ronald Reagan years and John Wayne, and I didn't know they were such good buddies. But reading his Playboy thing where he just says the most heinous things about the Indians and enslaving other people and you know basically from this context of manifest destiny and it's God's will does a lot of that play into like what the NRA is today and why evangelicals you know they hold tightly to that second amendment yeah. So guns are seen as, you know, formative really in the development

of proper Christian masculinity, proper masculinity, right? The two are kind of the same. And again, historically in the Cold War era, Vietnam era, the identity of Christian manhood really focused on the idea of being a protector, the protector of women and children, the protector of the church, the protector of the American nation.

And so to be that protector, again, use violence when necessary, and the ends will justify the means in such a noble cause, right, the pursuit of righteousness here. And so, yes, guns were central to that identity. But also, it was part of a backlash against feminism, against, you know, quote, unquote, political correctness, which they labeled, you know, the emasculation of the American man. And really, that takes on a life of its own by the 1980s, certainly by the 1990s, that this becomes, you know, not just an issue, but at the heart of their identity, that real men embrace this kind of militant masculinity, real men are going to embrace guns, and that's just central to identity. And all of our critics are, you know, on the other side of righteousness. So,

you know, the feminists, the liberals, the secular humanists, and, you know, those who are politically correct. And obviously, this is very familiar to our present moment and kind of how the lines have been drawn. But there's a deep history here. And I imagine the gay movement, the rise of the gay movement the rise of the gay movement in the 70s as well of lgbtq uh culture and i forget the name of the gentleman who was killed uh uh in san francisco uh but there was the whole rise of that and that was probably another wrench in the harvey yeah it was another wrench that was uh in the in the uh in the in the you know uh the challenge of perceived masculinity. Yeah, yeah. And that was seen as a threat to gender difference and sexuality.

That was really critical with regard to sexuality, gender performance. So this idea of God made men to be men and women to be very feminine. So the feminine side of thing is to be weak, to be submissive, to be sexually alluring, just this kind of hyper femininity and to be utterly dependent on the strong, rugged masculinity. And that was preached over and over again by evangelicals to be God's will. Like that is inseparable from God's will for humanity. So if you cross that, you know, if you're a woman who's not properly submissive, not properly feminine, you know,

you're not properly a woman and you are going against God's order. Same thing on the side of masculinity. And so, yeah, both abortion and homosexuality in the 1970s were these issues that became such hot-button issues, in part because they seemed to challenge this all-important gender difference, right? Because abortion was undermining a woman's role as mother and her place in the home because it freed her from that. And homosexuality, right, absolutely undermined this idea of stark, stark gender difference. Interesting. Now, how does this all play into, you know, for me, I'm an atheist. But I've studied religion, why people believe things on their lives. And one thing I've always looked at is how women the women's, how women are treat, have been

treated by religion and, and how that's been fomented by the Bible. Because, uh, you, you look at, you know, the, the earliest story is the blaming of the woman for the Adam and Eve adventure, right? You know, the woman, although it's the woman's fault, we got thrown out of, you know, everything starts from there. And if you read enough in religion about how a woman has been always kind of treated, in my mind, or my opinion, as a second-class citizen in the way she's presented. You know, one of my friends is Muslim, and when she's on her period, she's not allowed to go to church. There's like a special area they can go attend church, but they're cut off because, and she'll say it to me. She goes, we're deemed as filthy according to the Quran.

And I'm like, that's like a human, this is a human body thing. This isn't like, you know, like whatever. whatever so um uh but but there's you see different different uh discussions about that from church leaders you know women you know there's this whole sort of uh male toxicity male dominance uh this whole thing of of keeping not only like you mentioned women down but enslaving other peoples and everything else there There's this whole thing of white male thing going on. And I understand it because I'm part of the club. And so I see it. But how much of that intersects with the Bible and all of that women blaming that goes on with religion? Yeah. So what's really important to realize is that even though this is about white masculine power, that white evangelical women are critical to propping this up. And not to be confused that

this is just kind of men asserting their power, but many women are actively participating in this equation as well. And so I look in the book at some of the women in the 1960s and 1970s who became very prominent proponents of this kind of patriarchal authority. Women like Maribel Morgan and Elizabeth Elliott. And then on the Catholic side, you have Phyllis Schlafly, of course. And what was really interesting to me is when I started to read these women's books, they acknowledged that most women, most housewives in the 60s were miserable. Like they agreed with Betty Friedan.

But they decided that there was a better solution. Women's liberation was not the solution. They didn't think it was biblical perhaps, but honestly for many of the women kind of who were already housewives, they maybe had two, three, four kids already. They didn't have a college education. They didn't have a career.

And then somebody like Betty Friedan comes along and says, liberation, go do whatever you want to do. That really wasn't practical. And so somebody like Maribel Morgan comes along and says, yes, you're miserable. Here's the key to happiness. You have to utterly submit yourself to your husband and you need to prop up his ego and make him happy so that he doesn't treat you poorly um and you make him

happy by um uh you know keeping yourself beautiful meeting his every sexual need so he doesn't take up with his secretary and uh really fulfilling him and then he's going to be so much happier that he's going to treat you well also. So it's just kind of a pragmatic solution. And, you know, she offered some very specific and graphic advice for how to please your man and again, Christian publishing. And so that was a lot of women kind of, it made more sense given where they were at. And then there was, of course, that this was also being promoted as this is God's will. And many Christian women really wanted to do God's will. They wanted to be faithful wives, mothers, faithful Christians.

Gloria Steinem, too. I just realized Gloria Steinem was coming up in that age of 70s, and that was a challenge to manhood as well. So, wow, I'm just really thinking about now that whole 70s thing that was going on. And, you know, that's really interesting. God's will, that's always what gets me every time. The, yeah, it's interesting to me. You know, I've seen the thing. I grew up in an era, too, where some denominations were starting to question, okay, should we have women preachers?

Yeah. Should women preachers? I grew up in churches that were like, okay, well, women, men get the priesthood. They get this special invisible powers, and women don't. And you're like, well, women, men get the priesthood. They get this special invisible powers, and women don't. And you're like, well, why not? Like, I mean, that was the kind of kid I was. That was the reason I didn't buy any stuff. Because I was always like, oh, why not?

And they're like, shut up, Chris. You just have some faith. And I'm like, but I don't, I just want to know why. Like, how can women get the shaft? They don't, they just got to go make quilts and crap. They can't like, why can't they have the priesthood? I mean, it seems like a cool thing, you know? And I think I have some references to it that are the, the word priesthood that are, but

you know, I always have some references to it that I think identify the male part of it. But we won't get into that. But I think you get my drift. But I was like, why is the Pope always a man? Why is their deacons always a man? What's the big deal here, man? Why can't women want the priesthood?

I don't care. When women, they did the whole thing with, I don't know what different variations of the churches it was, but they're like, we're going to make women priests. And everyone was really upset about that. And I was like, so what, man? Hey, run with it, baby. Free. Run free.

Do what you want. Free yourself. I don't know. But, yeah, it's really interesting to how this all ties together where it's these generational eras that, you know, for yourself. I don't know. But yeah, it was, it's really interesting to how this all ties together where it's this, these generational eras that, uh, you know, now we live in an era, like a lot of my friends and me, uh, really had trouble with like the me too movement because I, unfortunately I've always kind of had a pretty good standard of what women like and what women don't like when, um, you know, I've never sent a picture of privates to anyone, including girlfriends. I just never would because I know the Internet very well.

And I'm just like, yeah, that's going to end up on the Internet and go places. But I never realized how ugly there were some men being until the stories came out. At first when they came out, most of us were resistant to us, but then we started hearing the stories and we're like, holy crap, there's some really, there's some dudes that are way out of control. And so, you know, we started having to deal with this. Okay, where's our masculinity and where are we in the place? And I dealt with it very early on in the 90s when there was the rise of sexual harassment. And as a CEO, I had to, you know, talk to the state and go,

okay, so where does this fall? And how do we, how do we apply this because I don't want to get sued for sexual harassment. I don't want any part of it. And you know, they're like, you have, you have two write-ups you do. One is the warning. The second one is you go, cause if you do a third one, it looks like you're being complicit. And I'm like, that's fine with me, man. And I fired a lot of guys for over sexual harassment. And it was a hard thing to do, but it kind of taught me, it made me go, hey, man, you don't want to be on the other end of the stick. So be cool. So I'm not sure where my

question is. I'm kind of so i'll i'll pull a question out of there so i mean because if you look at white evangelicalism or conservative evangelicalism uh you this is a real problem this uh the existence uh you know despite their you know quote-unquote family values um commitments that what we see is there are deep problems of sexual abuse in evangelical circles. And the Me Too and Church Too movement has really brought that to the fore in the last couple of years. But like I said, I had first started kind of paying attention to this topic 15 years

ago. And then I set it aside for a time, finish another book, do some other projects. But I never stopped paying attention. And what I saw happen is one after another after another of the men that I had been tracking who were proponents of this militant Christian masculinity became implicated either directly or indirectly in sexual abuse scandals. So the entire last chapter of my book is horrible. It is one sordid tale after another of all of these guys who had appeared earlier in the book who are kind of caught up in really, really terrible situations. But when you look at the history of their teachings on masculinity and femininity, this makes perfect sense because they had taught that God filled men with testosterone and gave men this kind of

virility and this sexual appetite. And it was up to women to either, through their own modesty, to protect male virtue because we could not leave that up to men because of the way God made them. And then, or if as soon as you married, then it was up to the wife to meet all of her husband's sexual needs. And, and so what you have then is this kind of rhetoric that comes up again and again, when there are instances of sexual misconduct or abuse. It is always the woman's fault. Because if the man, so even somebody like Ted Haggard, who was pastor of New Life Church, president of the National Association for Evangelicals, like, you know, center of evangelical power in Colorado Springs, he ends up taking up with a male prostitute.

Even then, his wife gets blamed because she clearly wasn't meeting his sexual needs, and she had let herself go, another male pastor had said, Mark Driscoll. And so, come on, ladies, right? So this is the way this goes. Or even young girls get blamed for, quote-unquote, seducing grown men because this is what their ideology has taught them. And so it really is toxic. And then this is all caught up in these very hierarchical institutions, families, subcultures. And so it really is a devastating story. And that's something that just in the last

couple of years, I had been following these stories initially just on blogs, on victim and victim advocate blogs. And now, you know, there are stories that are in the national news with the SBC, Paige Patterson, Independent Fundamental Baptist, you know, we can just throw in Jerry Falwell right now too. Yeah. Yeah. Now was Target the guy who, it was, he was hanging out with a gay dude at a massage thing and doing meth, too, on top of it. Yes, that, too. And he was very anti-gay and very anti-gay marriage. Exactly.

And being an atheist, this is something we always watch. It's the old saying from, I think you say, you're promoting male masculinity, the more, you know, we're going to find you one day in a corner with a prostitute male or female, usually male, and we're going to find out that, you know, it's like whatever. But yeah, Jerry Follwell just got busted on that, which we talked about pre-show. It's kind of funny. I mean, the dude was watching the corner. I mean, I know I've known a few people that this is their thing and i'm not judging but uh you know there there

is a i i would almost bet that he interacted with the with the whole he did a menage a trois basically that's it i don't know that's my yeah. I mean, I think that day to day, I think more information is, is coming out on this and we are nowhere, I think near having the full story. But what has always interested me isn't just the, the perpetrators as interesting or horrifying as they may be. It's the cultures that have enabled them, the cultures that excuse this behavior. Like this is not the first time that there that there was any kind of red flag around Jerry Falwell Jr.'s behavior, not at all. But these systems of power that end up just, you know, defending this patriarchal authority no matter what, and there is such a long history of that. And there is this idea that,

you know, this is the person God has put in charge. And again, the dangers out there are so great. The threats to us are so urgent that we cannot kind of depose our leader. We have to at all costs prop him up. And then the real victims, well, the victims are those on the outside, but also many on the inside as well, especially women and children. And you make a good research point, too. He blamed his wife. Yeah, he did. Now, I mean, it turns out a new story just came out yesterday, I think, wasn't it, last night or this morning?

I can't even keep straight in Politico. And Becky Fallow did have her own agency, and this is something that we also need to get to the bottom of, that she was perhaps a predator in this situation. Again, it's a developing story. So it's really hard to know what the takeaways are of the Falwell saga yet, because we're not to the end of it yet. You know, I had a friend who started a website called Swingular.com.

I don't know why I'm plugging that. I don't get any money from it. But he had a swinger site, and he used to tell me about it and, you know, the stories. And he was a swinger himself. And I don't know why I had these friends, but I've been single all my life. So I've dated a lot. I've known a lot of people. And I've just been on this adventure

all my life for different adventures throughout my life and so uh for some reason i've been exposed to a lot of people i'm just i'm very social i guess um but he would tell me the stories and so this is how i kind of got to know about swear life and what went on it on on it and my business partner had gotten exposed to it accidentally one time and then i had a i think i had someone work for a company that that uh they they had cameras and everything and i think that's been applied with the uh with the follow thing but what's interesting to me and there's nothing wrong with that lifestyle it's just if you're preaching that you're this this jesus christ sort of figure and i don't drink and I'm moralistic, whatever, you know,

I mean, Hey, if that's your thing, just own it, baby. Just, just be like, uh, yeah. But, um, the sexual, the sexual, uh, abuse thing is very interesting to me. Uh, when I grew up, uh, where I grew up in Utah, uh, in my teens, 50% of the girls that I dated in a very highly religious area, 50% of the girls I dated had either been raped, molested, and incested. Incest is really big here. And I think even on Pornhub, one of the biggest searches is brother-sister sort of thing, to my understanding. And at one point, we were like the number one porn consumer in Utah,

which is a state that is highly religious and, and moralistic, you know, and, and, and interesting enough voted heavily for Trump probably will vote again. Um, but I can attest to that.

And one of the things that I've had, I've kind of had a unique experience being seen all my life and dating all my life and always being on just adventures. So I either, either owning my own businesses, which we had a lot, uh, or just doing it, just doing stuff. I just never have settled down, but it means I've dated a lot. And so because of that, I've heard the stories from women. I've heard the stories of abuse, sexual abuse. I've seen the continuum of it i've dated women in their 40s that are still cutting because of the sexual abuse that they inherited when they were um uh children and so kind of the arc of what i've seen which is kind of this weird unique experience because

all my friends are like married um is i've seen the beginnings of it, and then I've seen what has happened with it and the arc of damage and psychology throughout their lives. And so if I hear a woman is cutting, especially at a young age, it really trips me out because I know what that's like, and I know the guys that she's going to pick in her life, not 100% of the time but it's it definitely shapes them and and it's a it's you know murder is almost sometimes better than child molestation or sexual abuse because it's over with but the sexual abuse and i've

seen the way that it it currents through life and the damage that it does and, you know, rape, etc., etc., the damage that it does from a psychological basis and the scars that single in some of these religions, or at least the ones I was affiliated with or knew of in the state, the bishops would become predators because they have like a yearly private meeting with the people. And you're supposed to confess all your sins. Instead of like Catholics doing the weekly thing, you do the once-a-year thing. And so there would be these conversations that were just really like creepy that they would have with these single women. And, you know, they're married guys, and I always give my married guys a hard time about how weird they can be sometimes. Not all married guys, but pretty much all of you.

So I can attest to what you're saying, and I can tell you it really is a valid thing, especially with religion. And to me, I have this saying that if you repress something, you create dementia. It's like if you build a dam that blocks water, what does the water try and do? It tries to go around it. And so if you build this life where you're like, sex is evil, sex should only be for reproduction, sex, you know, was a Catholic thing, you know, you shouldn't do anything that, you know, wastes sperm because every sperm is sacred.

And so, yeah, a lot of that plays into it. I can totally support what your research is on that because I'm validating that. Yeah. So, you know, there's, of course, a long history of emphasis on chastity and sexual purity within Christian traditions. And so I don't want to discount that. And this is not something that conservative evangelicals invented in the 1960s or 1970s. But then what we do see is the rise of what has come to be called purity culture, where again, this is very gendered. So it's women who bear the burden of sexual purity.

And it is this impossible ideal, right? This absolutely impossible ideal of first perfect, perfect purity pre-marriage, and then a real sexual objectification starting the wedding night on. And in recent years, more and more evangelical women and many men too are starting to speak out about exactly what you're talking about, the damage that this has done to their own relationships, to their own sexuality, and to their faith. And many of these people ended up really leaving the faith in part because their faith had been so wrapped up in these sexual proscriptions. And it just was impossible for people to hold that all together. And so many just walked away from the faith itself. That said, within Christianity and within evangelicalism,

there have been other models. There are other models. But this conservative emphasis on purity and patriarchy really did move to the center and exert enormous amount of power across the evangelical world. And the Mormons had that as well. You couldn't have sex before marriage. But in my research of dancing all my life, I've only met one woman who has pretty much convinced me she was a virgin when she got married. It's kind of interesting. They do different games where there's like partial penetration. There's even backside sort of stuff that, well, that's not vaginal,

so, you know, that's fine. It's interesting people rush to marriage in those situations but i saw a lot of that um to me uh in the study of like women and women's role in religion or women's perceived roles as men have dominated and pushed them it all comes down to control in every sort of tribal thing because to me i just see religion as another tribal tribal thing. Now, I hope I'm not being offensive, but to me, I just see it as a tribe, as anything else. And tribes are always about control. They're always about, there's a leader,

there's rules, and the rules are about control. Everything is about control. It's the Machiavellian sort of prince concept, if you read the prince and so and so to me that that always has to play so there always has to be somebody who's the dominant and somebody who's the submissive and and that's the role it has to play and so to me i see a lot of that in religion when i see you know the people saying well women did this women did that and you know it's women's fault and And you see, you see the Bible, the, the, the persecution of women or the discussion of women, um, in,

in how they're and how they're thought of or treated. You know, I've even seen, uh, God, who's that Denver guy who, who he, he's really big on having the wife serve the husband, you know, the guy I'm talking about oh there are so many so there's one guy who really sticks out he's been like banned like he can't go to other countries now but he does these things and you're just like maybe you should see a psychologist you and your wife and work that out because it clearly you're over you know thou dost test too much so um as we wrap this um a lot of this gets translated into trump as this as this uh kind of like braveheart visceroy i don't know if that's the right word but this this kind of they embrace him even and that's when what the really hard thing is for me to do i'm like

this guy isn't very jesus like i thought you guys were about Jesus. I read the Bible, man, and this isn't Jesus. But you talk about how a lot of this stuff transferred into him, and even though he's not, you know, this guy is a believing guy. You know, you can't quote a Bible verse if you have a gun to his head. But they go after Trump. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, initially a lot of people were saying, oh, you know, how could evangelicals have betrayed their values? Or this is purely transactional. And I really push back against both of those interpretations. That if you're looking at, if you look at gender and if you look at authority, and like you said, you know, there's so much about control and so much about evangelical, conservative evangelicalism over the past more than half a century has been about proper authority and control and submission. And again, it's white patriarchal authority at the

heart of this, and it's a militant masculinity that is required. If you understand that, then it's not a huge leap to get to somebody like Donald Trump, especially after the trauma that many conservative evangelicals felt they were experiencing during the Obama administration. And you can just see this direct connection of feeling that they're under siege, feeling that they're becoming further marginalized, not just demographically, but also in terms of LGBT rights, their own perceptions of religious freedom. And so you hear this rhetoric of, you know, we need a warrior masculinity, we need a strong man, we need an ultimate fighting champion. You know, Robert Jeffress,

one of Trump's leading evangelical supporters says, you know, we need the toughest son of a you know what, and that's who Trump is, and that's why we love him. And so they're very clear about this. And as soon as you appreciate that, this isn't a betrayal of their values. This is actually quite consistent with many of their deepest values. Now, that said, right, this is not the only form of evangelicalism. This is not the only form of Christianity. I'm a practicing Christian myself, and the faith that I have embraced is in many ways the opposite of this. It's one of liberation.

It's one of loving neighbors. It's a very different understanding of spirituality and of being in the world. And I think that's a tension you see right now within Christian communities where sometimes this cuts right through families, through churches, where there are two fundamentally different faiths operating, even though maybe for a long time they've been using some of the same words, singing some of the same songs. There are these fundamental differences. That's really interesting.

You just blew my mind there because now it starts to make sense. I mean, this is a quandary that I've been dealing with for five years. You know, with Donald Trump, I knew people like Donald Trump that were malignant narcissists and liars. I had a good friend who was, and, you know, I tried to, I tried to kind of be as friend and loving as I could to him, or I'm like, you're just a special person. I realize that you're lying all the time. I idolized Donald Trump in the 80s and then quickly in the 80s and 89s. I think when he wrote a book, Surviving, you started to realize this guy was a bankrupting idiot who just inherited his

father's money. At least I did. Anybody studied him really well. And most New Yorkers knew that. It was just the rest of the country had never been exposed to this snake oil salesman but wow you really blew my mind there that makes a lot of sense um what scares me too about about that relationship that they have with trump is they seem to be willing to give up the constitution the democracy of what this country was founded upon for that shining city on the hill, that God thing.

And they're willing to make him a deity or a fascist leader, an authoritarian leader. They're willing to give up the Constitution in what they perceive as the name of God for Trump, and they don't realize where this leads. I mean, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, this is an old freaking road, and that scares me. It is. You know, I became more and more frightened the further into this research that I got because of the authoritarian tendencies. They are very clear, and I will say that the first time I published any of this research was back in 2017, time to Trump's inauguration. And one of the first people who reached out to me back then was a historian of 20th century

Germany. And he shared with me some of his documents on the German church and German ideals of Christian masculinity in the 1930s. And they are indistinguishable from the documents that I was working with. And so the similarities are certainly there. It was harder to say that in public and be taken seriously in 2017. I think it's now easier to say that and not be shouted down. And you're so right.

I had friends that come over here that grew up in Germany. In Germany, they force you to learn about the rise of the Third Reich and Nazism. In fact, they have cobblestones. I forget what they're called. The cobblestones? There's a name for them. But they have stones throughout their cities of the names of the Jews at that place that was at that home or that business that were taken and everything is enshrined into uh german uh education and culture to remind them of don't do this crap again um and my german friends are like this is everything we've started studied the

rise of of nazism and people don't realize how much you'll seize power. And then once he wins a second term, he's not going to play it at his base anymore because he's a lame duck president. He doesn't give a crap about anything. And I think there's the recent advisor to him that's speaking out right now who's saying he's going to go full shrunken off. He doesn't have to get reelected.

He doesn't have to embolden anything. He's going to go full out whatever, and I think he's going to go full Putin, or the Chinese president, who now has a lifetime appointment. So this is really scary. But, yeah, you've explained why I've had a hard time with, like, Christians were supposed to be about this Jesus dude. And, like, what the hell?

It's like you hired, I don't know, Satan. You sold your soul to Satan for these ideals. And the original perception was they did it for the seats on the SCOTUS. Right. But it seems like this is more the attunement of that. Yeah, yeah. It's deeper. It's much deeper than that.

So it's not just this transactional thing of you give us this and we'll support you. It's really rooted in a common identity. And again, like the John Wayne figure, somebody like Donald Trump is the ideal leader for them. He was better than Ted Cruz, way better than Mark Rubio, way better than Ben Carson, because he wasn't constrained by these traditional Christian virtues. He was not at all constrained by political correctness. He didn't care what you thought he was going to do, whatever needed to be done. And that's exactly what they needed.

Wow. You're just blowing my mind with this data. That makes so much sense that, I mean, he blew through, I think it was like 12 different GOP contestants. Yes. And everyone just kind of went,

I mean, even Hillary Clinton didn't see that thing coming. They're like, there's no way, you know. Even I was like, yeah, there's no way, man. But you saw this undercurrent of stuff. And what do you think is going to happen in November? Do you want to put anything on the record? Oh, my gosh.

I mean, whatever I put on the record should be very quickly dismissed. I'm a historian. I just look at the past and I'm terrible at looking forward. So I have no idea what will happen. Do you see in your communities? Yeah, I was feeling cautiously optimistic until this week and watching the Republican convention. And what I saw was just how skillfully they accomplished that for their base, for their white conservative base, that's when I realized that this is going to be close. And this is not at all a sure deal. Despite everything, despite coronavirus, despite the economy, all of that, there still is this identity at the core. And there are many,

many Americans and many American Christians who believe that this is actually the virtuous, the moral, the righteous cause. We're going to lose the Constitution, man, if he wins again. Like, it's over. The whole democracy experiment dies, and this dies just like any other authoritarian rule we've seen. And I agree with you. I didn't really watch the RNC, but I watched the shape of it and the tone of it. And what about the lying? Like, how do Christians reconcile the lying that support him?

Yeah, so, and this gets back to the history, this idea that, you know, that this us versus them mentality and that evangelicals, those inside the fold have access to God's truth. And so those outside the fold, those who aren't reading the Bible, aren't reading the Bible in the proper way, who aren't in this kind of hierarchy of authority from pastor to patriarchal father, you know, down to kids, those on the outside are not to be trusted. And why should we empower them? Because they don't have the source of truth. And if we want to bring righteousness to this society, then we need to be in charge because clearly they don't have access to

righteousness and truth. And so there are deep anti-democratic impulses, also a long, long history of mistrust of the media, of the mainstream media. This goes back decades and decades. And so you listen to your own sources, you listen to your own sources of truth, and you empower people who have access to that truth, and you actively disempower people who do not. And that's why, you know, democracy is, I actually don't hear a lot of conservative evangelicals talking about democracy all that much. I hear them talking about authority, and I hear them talking about, you know, religious freedom, meaning very clearly their own freedom as holders of truth to be able to maintain that truth, hold that truth, and enforce that truth.

And that does not extend to those who are holding different ideas of what is true or what is good. Now, not all evangelicals will fall into that category. Not all proponents of religious freedom will. But if you pay attention to which cases they're supporting and to their own rhetoric, this is absolutely a theme. Wow, man. It just plays right into the Germany thing. So this has been really enlightening. I've learned a lot and I'm scared now really for the election even more. I've been a little paranoid and anxious, but

now even more so I am because I really see the psychology behind it and how dangerous Donald Trump is. I mean, he'll sell out the evangelicals once he becomes reelected. He'll sell out everybody. I mean, he will just go for ultimate total power and the destruction of everything. I mean, it's just the stomping of what the RNC did of, you know, watching the political event at the White House and the fireworks, the thing. This has been really enlightening. Anything more we should plug about your book before we go?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's available everywhere and it's, I think it's a pretty good read and yeah, it's going to give you the backstory. It's going to make sense of a lot of things that are playing out right now and what's going to play out in November. Wow. And it's really important to understand these things. I mean, what everyone's dealing with, you know,

the different things of manhood. You know, like I said, I've had to give up John Wayne recently and go, okay, you know, there goes another hero down the toilet, and that's fine, that's cool. I see this, you know, a lot of it was unconscious bias, so that was real important. Guys, be sure to check it out. Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

And wow, hopefully we don't fracture it more in November, man. I'm really liking that constitution right now. Well, give us your plugs one more time, Kristen, where people can check you out on the interwebs. Sure. I'm on Twitter at KKDumez, that's K-K-D-U-M-E-Z, author page, Facebook, Kristen Kobus Dumez, and also kristendumez.com. I put all my writings up there. Thanks for being on the show, Kristen. We certainly appreciate it. And be sure to pick up the book, go to Amazon or other different places you can take and get at your local

bookstores, support them if you would. And also, you can see the video version of this if you're listening to the audio podcast on youtube.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. You go to the ecvpn.com or for the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. You can go give a five-star review to the show on iTunes. We certainly appreciate that as well. Thanks, Amonis, for tuning in. Hopefully, you'll stay for more of the conversation we'll keep having as we go on with what's going on in the nation

and all these great books and authors that are mapping out this history. And hopefully we'll learn from history. One of the biggest problems with, I always say, this is my quotation, is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. So there lies the great cyclical dichotomy of revolution, as it were. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.