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

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Kristin Kobes Du Mez - Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Paperback The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked 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 acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might 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 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. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans. 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.

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We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Be sure to give us a like, subscribe to us on YouTube. You can see the video version of this on there for free. It's available for an unlimited time. You can go there and watch all the brilliant authors that we have on the show and all the good stuff that we do, all the product reviews and things of that nature. Refer to the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them listening to the show. Tell them that if they really loved you, they would also listen to the Chris Voss Show and subscribe to the podcast.

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show. But now we have some serious stuff to get to. We have a returning guest on the show. She's an amazing author and brilliant mind. And she's a returning guest on the show. I think I mentioned that once before, but I just felt like I needed an emphasis. Kristen Dume is on the show i think i mentioned that once before but i i just felt like i needed emphasis kristin dumay is on the show and she is here to talk to us her new book this is a book that came out last year but she's got a new preface in the uh paperback version jesus and john wayne how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com and their micro IDSD signature. It's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones.

It has two Brown Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com she's on here she's the

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's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, Religious News Service, and, or I'm sorry, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed by NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book, the one we just mentioned, is pretty near and awesome. You can grab it now on paperback or order the hardback. I like hardbacks. They're pretty cool, but order the paperback. It's got a new preface, so you can take and do that as well. Kristen, welcome to the show. Have I done enough promoting of your book yet?

I think we're good. I think we're good. Thanks. People should buy the hardback and the paperback. I think so. I would recommend that. Yeah. Welcome to the show, Kristen. We're glad to have you back again. Give us your plugs for people going to find you on the interwebs and look you up. Sure. I have a website, kristendumez.com.

Dumez is D-U-M-E-Z, like Dumez. I'm very much on Twitter at KKDumez. That's at KKD-U-M-E-Z. And I'm on Facebook also at KKDumez. And I've been following your journey over the last, well, I'm not sure if it's been a year since you've been on the show, but it feels like a year after all the ending stuff there in the last administration. But you've done some amazing things. Let's lay a foundation on the book for anybody who's new to you and the book. What motivated you want to write this book and give

us an arcing overview about the book? Yeah. So essentially this is a book about white evangelical masculinity and militarism. And I trace that I'm a historian. So I trace it over the last 75 years or so showing how white evangelicals really embraced the assertion of white patriarchal authority. And that's at the center of family values, evangelicalism, that's at the core of their identity. And you can trace that from the Cold War era response, reaction against civil rights, against feminism, against the anti-war movement, trace it all the way up to 2016. And the culmination is that white evangelical support for Donald Trump, if you understand this history, is not a betrayal of evangelical values. It really is the culmination of those values.

Wow. That's a pretty powerful statement. So you wrote this book and how did it turn out? So it's not a gentle book. The subtitle, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. And it was described by an earlier reviewer as urgent and sharp elbowed. And I think that gets it about right. So I was bracing myself, right? I'm actually a Christian myself. I teach at a Christian university and I was told to prepare for vicious trolling. That's actually not what

happened. Within a couple of days of the book's release, I started getting letters and messages, mostly from evangelicals, almost all of them saying, this is the story of my life. And thank you. Thank you for helping me to see because I never understood how all the pieces fit together. And I still get several every day by white evangelicals who say it's true and enough is enough. That is awesome. I'm really, I'm pleasantly surprised. When we had you on the show, we had a number of great authors who were, like you said, that you folks are Christian. You guys are calling from inside the church going, Hey, there's something wrong here. And I think that was so brilliant because I think people sometimes

look at books like these and go, Oh, they're probably an atheist throwing rocks or something. You guys are calling from inside the church going, there's issues here and we need to fix them. And I just thought it was so great that you guys were calling this out and identifying it because it was really full on display what was going on with the prior administration. Exactly, exactly. And I think as this book suggests, this goes way back. This is not a new thing. All of this, the misogyny, the militarism, the racism, it's hidden in plain sight in some ways. This is evangelical history.

But the thing is that evangelicals themselves ignored this part of their history. They tended to tell stories where they were the heroes, right? Where evangelicals are the good guys. And these are incomplete histories, but they wrote them, they published them, they sold them in their own circles, they consumed them. And so this actual history is really jarring for many evangelicals. And it's really, the response is deeply emotional, but you're right. This is, I write as kind of insider outsider. I write as a critic, but I write essentially as a historian. This is just history. Yeah. And we had Ruth Bengate on the show. She wrote the book about strongmen. Yes. And she really traced the connection between all of this male masculinity and right-wing to fascism, the rise of fascism stuff. So this is a factor, I think, that I'm scared lately. We seem

to be in this thing where Biden's president and everything's just fucking fine. But I'm really scared about 2022, 2024. I'm really scared about what's going on with all of that. There was a recent poll that you, or a recent Axios article that you helped write or quoted in. And a lot of the churches now have been overrun by the QAnon stuff. Tell us about that. Yeah. QAnon is a real thing and it's prominent, particularly in white evangelical circles. It's not limited to white evangelical circles. The survey out from PRRI this past week is really disturbing, right? These conspiracy teaching or conspiracy beliefs are quite pervasive. You have categories of around a quarter of evangelicals, white evangelicals embrace QAnon.

Then you've got a pretty large swath of, I think it was like somewhere near another 40, 50% who are doubters, not deniers. They're not going to shut it down, but say, I don't think it's true. And that's actually this chunk that really concerns me. That rings true to what I see. You've got the kind of the full-on conspiracy theory believers, just like you have the hardcore Trump supporters. You've got the kind of hardcore authoritarians. Then you've got a pretty big swath of evangelicals, it turns out, of other people of other religious faiths too, who are just not quite sure. So where those folks in the middle end up, I think could determine the

resiliency of American democracy, frankly. It's interesting that churches are having to deal with a whole new level of batshit crazy. Are they, how are they, like, like what is happening with the churches and what are they seeing? And are they just seeing people bringing it into the church and bringing it up on the speaker's podium and talking about it? Are they seeing that, how are they seeing it overtake their churches?

You know, I think that one thing that social media does for us is it makes a lot of things visible that otherwise were beneath the surface just a little bit. So pastors are on Facebook and they can see their people in their church, what they're posting, and they can hear in just in conversations. If you know what to listen for, you'll pick up the phrases and that's where their ideas are coming from. And so what that looks like in churches right now is there are just deep divisions. And like I said, the response among some evangelicals for Jesus and John Wayne is incredibly enthusiastic, but not all, obviously. And this division runs through churches, it runs through organizations, it runs

through schools, and it runs through families. And so what you have right now is people like in the same church, people in the same families who are just looking at each other, who are you? And they are understanding their faith and they're understanding their role in our country as citizens in conflicting, really antagonistic ways. And so it's a time of deep division right now. And this is a dangerous place because this is what happens with the rise of fascism. There is a suspension of truth. There is a suspension of reality. And it becomes this dimension. And it comes from a compressed society that's failing economically, which we are. We're about to enter hyperinflation.

If we enter hyperinflation, we're already in inflation. That's already a given at this point. But if we run into really bad hyperinflation, we could run into a stalled economy. Things could get worse. And then there you go. There's the seeds for fascism. And then people go, things seem to have been much better with the last administration because we didn't have hyperinflation. They're already trying to run up that flag where they're like, I see all these memes, $4 gas, thank Biden. And you're just

like, seriously, man. And so, yeah, it's really scary where we're going. And then of course, the embrace of the GOP, they're still embracing Trump. Who's, I guess this morning, I think Maggie Haberman was talking about, or yesterday, maybe it was yesterday, she's talking about how he's just wandering around talking to himself like Nixon, talking to the paintings going, yeah, I'm coming back into August. So scary. Yeah. No, it is a precarious place right now, I think. And some of the trends that I observed in my historical research really gave me pause. As I was researching, and we weren't where we are now, but there were warning signs, right? There were warning signs in terms of distrust of the media. Like this distrust of

the mainstream media goes back decades in evangelical circles. And it makes a lot of sense that enables them to control the narrative. It also enables them to make a lot of money, right? They have money's changing hands and they have alternate media empires. And so you have that, you have the suspicion, this kind of us versus them mentality, the idea of authority and God's authority. And so you don't want to give authority to people who aren't kind of God appointed authorities. All of this stuff, it's real. And one of the things that I really have my eyes on

right now is voter suppression and the core democratic value and the idea that so many Americans are apparently comfortable with denying fellow citizens the vote. And to me, that's one of the most disturbing trends that I'm observing right now within the Republican Party. And of course, white evangelicals make up a significant portion of the Republican Party. And of course, white evangelicals make up a significant portion of the Republican Party. Yeah, definitely. For the longest time, the Republican Party has been a dying party. And if they don't cheat, they can't win. And so they have to pull all these games to cheat. And yeah, it's really sad that I follow right wing watch on Facebook a lot. And so I see the videos from the preachers and the stuff's off the rails, man, as to

what they're feeding these people. And then you hear the cheering of the audience. You're like, holy shit, they believe that dude. Yeah. So for me as an observer, one of the things I'm always asking is what is the connection between the fringe, right? The extremes and the mainstream and the stuff that And the stuff that'll get featured on Right Wing Watch, that tends to be the extreme.

And it's horrifying. And it's not like super fringe, but it is extreme. But then my question is, how does this connect to the mainstream? Are there sympathetic tendencies within the mainstream? Are there affinities here? Or is there a kind of hard no? No, we are going to resist this. We're going to oppose that. Or is there a kind of hard no? No,

we are going to resist this. We're going to oppose that. And that's the kind of thing that I'm looking for. There are strong voices of resistance in religious communities, but they are definitely in the minority. And again, I'm watching that kind of mushy middle, which way are they going to fall? And what I'm seeing thus far, it doesn't give me a lot of optimism. Wow. That's scary, man. Now you're giving me nightmares. Oh, I'm a historian. I can't tell the future. I don't know what I'm talking about. I can just talk about the past, but I'm trying to read the tea leaves just a little bit and understand power dynamics, that you can have some strong voices of protest, and then you're going to have those

who are all in on the other side, but it really is where the silence is. How many people are just going to stay silent no matter what happens, tacit approval, or actually joining the resistance. Yeah. The quote that I have for me is the one thing man can learn from his history is the man never learns from his history. Exactly. Everybody goes around the cycle. I was trying to find this really quickly. I'd seen it skim across my news somewhere, but somewhere there's a Utah person editor opinion page that just came out this morning where they're saying that the Mormons, the Utah Mormons here are spending more time on politics than religion and the Mormon church is concerned or something along those lines. I can't seem to grab it off the edge here, but I would imagine some of that's going to be an

inference to the QAnon stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And this question of what is religion ultimately, and sometimes we're working with a pretty narrow understanding of religion is reading holy texts. Religion is going into houses of worship. Religion is participating in institutional religious spaces, organizations. But then there's religion as a source of identity, source of meaning, right? And that's where it's really connected to politics, connected to these cultural identities. And that's really what's operative right now. I think in LDS communities, in Catholic communities, and in evangelical communities as well, that religion is not just about reading

the Bible and going to church and singing. Religion is about you're consuming this cultural identity. You're participating in these cultural values. And it's really hard to separate faith from politics the way many people are living their lives. You know, thinking about what you're saying in the arc of fascism and then the road has to take, there's a collapse of the economy and that's what drives people to madness. And then there's a collapse and attack on the press and there's attack on truth, which we've been through. And then it has to go completely batshit off the rails. And then millions of people have to get murdered in some sort of horrific crime. And then somehow somebody has to step in who's a policeman of

the world and go, you guys are fucked up. We're fixing your shit. The problem is that's us. Like that's not Germany twice. That's not Chile or pick your fascist Ecuador, Ecuador, pick your massacres. But yeah, somehow we have to cut the train off, man. Yeah. That's the thing. It's really hard to see where we are at any given moment. It's easier as a historian to look back and say, ah, 1933 Germany or 1931 Germany or however. And then you can see where it goes and you can interpret it in that light. In the present, we don't have that luxury. So we're trying to figure out where are we?

And history doesn't perfectly repeat itself. You're right. We have the, we're in a kind of post-truth moment, very much so. Echo chambers where religion, politics, identity are very closely intertwined. And we do live in an increasingly polarized society, right? All of these pieces are in place, but we so far have economic stability for the most part. You're right to point out that's a key factor. And then war is also often another factor that could really trigger something. So where are we now?

It's so hard to say. I read Timothy Snyder. Keep it on my bedside table. And, you know, just so what should we be doing right now? What should we be doing? We should be protecting institutions. We should be supporting those institutions. We should be defending truth. We should be not obeying in advance. That's a mantra

that I love. So rather than acting out of, oh, I'm going to get in trouble for this. I better just keep my mouth shut. In religious spaces, this happens a lot. I don't want to disrupt. I don't want to offend. I don't want to, I think that do not obey in advance means you just, you push and you keep pushing and you don't silence yourself. You don't let other people silence yourself. And this is the time to keep doing that, right? If you don't silence yourself in advance of what might come your way, this is the moment when we should be speaking out as much as possible. Let me ask you, and I think that's really important for people in faith to do. I grew up in religion and when I would ask hard questions, I would just get told, shut up and just have faith and sometimes ignore sometimes that seem obvious it

depends on whether they want to believe it or not but because of that the what's really interesting about your book and what you've covered and discussed and and pri with robert jones is is there's this hard right that's just been on it's basically the kkk really rebranded a white nationalism and then there's this thick middle of people that are just i don't know whatever let us slide we'll just go whichever way it was i think robert jones said there was four but then there's like the the people who aren't crazy and they're like no we're not doing what those guys are doing but it seems like those two batches seem to be the biggest bucket, which is the scariest. And so somehow that little segment that's left over that's not

on the batch of train needs to go, Hey man, we're not doing this anymore. And you guys need to fix this stuff. But maybe now that's, let me ask you this. Maybe now it's risen to the level of where pastors are concerned and they're seeing it's just probably a matter of days till somebody goes and starts a QAnon church and that becomes some new, you know, bloody religion that runs the nation or something. I don't know. Yeah, we do seem to be, the last four years have been clarifying and that's where I think a lot of people that would have located themselves somewhere in this middle are waking up and realizing it's been hard to ignore what has

happened these last four years. And we have January 6th that just really in people's face, is this really where we're at? First the 2016 election and then January 6th. Those two events really were catalyzing for some evangelicals in this middle space, evangelicals who maybe didn't really consider themselves all that political, just nice people, not trying to cause trouble, trying to do good, going to church, raising their kids. And enough of those right now are saying that this is not okay. This is not what I meant. This is not what I meant by my faith. This is not. And again, there's this disconnect right now. And yeah, I think maybe this disconnect or this tension was there. I know it was there before.

It was more easily papered over. It can't be papered over anymore. And so people are sorting themselves out in churches, in communities, and even in families. And I'm not sure where that's going to go. Right now, what I'm seeing in evangelical spaces is a lot of individual soul searching. People are leaving their organizations, they're leaving churches. And we have Beth Moore leaving the SBC. We have this week, Russell Moore leaving the SBC as well.

And so people are leaving. But what's happening is, as far as I can tell, the institutions are staying, right? The institutions are not changing for the most part. They are maintaining the status quo. And if anything, as these voices of protests leave, they're becoming more radicalized. Wow. And then you're just seeing the abortion things because that's what they use to bring people back into the voting base.

The abortion, the attacks on abortion, everything else we had. I forget the else we had. I forget the author we had on, but she did a great book where she, I think a couple authors where she studied the Center for National Policy, the Betsy DeVos organizations that do all the umbrella work to, and that Stan Nelson was on and we had another guy, Catherine Stewart. Yeah. Brilliant authors, great books. And so they detailed that. Yeah. Maybe in the pews of the church, they should just have, here's the QAnon section. So they could try and figure out QAnon section pews are over here. And you're like, wow, that's a lot of people. I think between the time I talked to you last and now, I think there was that seminal moment where

Donald Trump held up the Bible upside down. Yes, yes. What sort of impact did that have on evangelicals? It was another of those moments where it just made plain. Because for those who are already critics, it was blasphemy. It was just so in your face. And it was in the context important, right? The context was you forcibly use violence to clear out peaceful protesters advocating for racial justice, right? The context was forcibly use violence to clear out peaceful protesters

advocating for racial justice, right? That's the context. And into that, he can go and hold up this Bible in this awkward photo op against the wishes of St. John's Church, where he was standing for this photo op. It just encapsulated everything that was wrong with the religion and politics for the critics. But again, for many American Christians, that was a sign of his faith. It was a sign of his power. It was a sign that he was on the side of righteousness and he was enforcing law and order. And so again, it was just this, this Rorschach test, people cool with it and people absolutely horrified by it. Yeah. Cause Jesus used to do that when he gives his like sermons and stuff in his parables,

he'd have like attack helicopters come in and buzz the crowd and just get everyone off the beach. So he can clear a spot for himself. I remember that in the Bible all the time. Yeah. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? Yeah.

I wish people more. I'm an atheist. And I asked that when I'm like, should I be a good person today or should I be mean to that person who's being stupid to me? And then I'm like, oh, Jesus, suffer the idiots or whatever. I don't know what you're saying. But yeah, I do actually, I'm an atheist and I do actually ask myself that. Now, we won't get into my beliefs, but I do think it's a subscription for a subscription.

I think it's a thing for being a good human being and we should be good to each other. But yeah, it's interesting to me that moment. And I didn't think about the other side that you talked about where people see it as a good hand of God, kick an ass thing. And you're just like, wow, man. To me, I grew up religion, so I can fade back and go, what would I have thought then? And him holding a Bible that even I'm an atheist. I never hold a Bible. I was stupid, especially upside down. I'm like, what are you doing, man?

It was so obvious. What's the word I want to say? I have plagiarism stuck in my head, but it was such an obvious overt act of, I don't know what the right word is you might have a better word than i do but it was such a it was such a fake act that that to me it would have been insulting if i would have been religious i've been like man yeah i see your play that's not yeah yeah you're just playing us man right i mean That is how many, right? The division just runs so deep. The country's polarized.

American Christianity is so deeply polarized. And it is baffling, right, to look across that divide, look at friends, at family, at colleagues, and just say, how are you not seeing what I'm seeing? Because, yes, that was ludicrous. It was shameful. It was absurd. It was just, how are people falling for this? And yet they're looking across at this side and saying, what is your problem? You're supporting racial violence and you're supporting the defunding the police and you're anti-hero and you're all of these things. You're anti-American. And this is,

this is our polarized world right now. The manipulation, that's probably the word I was looking for. For some reason, I was really stuck on plagiarism. I don't know why. That's really weird. That's not plagiarism. But what do you think? There's interesting things that the Biden administration is doing because one of the collapses our society is the financial collapse. And that's just leading to this mania and every fascism rise. And doing this thing where he's trying to beat child poverty, put money in the pockets of families. I'm wondering if that's going to have an impact on maybe stabilizing people, put money in their bellies. He's trying to make the trains run on time, even though he's not a fascist. I think it's a good thing. I think

that economic security is necessary. It's not fail safe, though, because the way that this works is that if we look at polling data from 2016, for example, I imagine it was repeated in 2020, but I've looked at the 2016 election particularly closely. And even though a lot of people thought that people were voting for Trump out of economic anxiety, the data doesn't actually support that, that the lower classes, including lower income whites, were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. And so it's not necessarily your economic standing as much as the one factor that was very clear in terms of predicting votes for Trump was status anxiety. So the fear that you have something to

lose. And so what we understand too, is that the narratives are absolutely critical here, not just your actual economic status, but how you are interpreting the world and how you are perceiving threats to your economic security. And so by all means, Biden should be doing that. It will not be ineffective, but that's not going to solve all of the problems. I've seen some people that were pulling the Trump line and the anti-vaccine line, like, I'll never get the vaccine. And they're finally capitulating to peer pressure, it seems. And that, or just if you want to really do anything anymore, you got to get the vaccine. And it seems, I don't know, the air has come out of it too,

where it's kind of like trying to fight with people. I'm not going to get the vaccine. And people are like, I will get the vaccine. Now we're just got the vaccine. And people are like, I'm not getting the vaccine. And we're just all like, yeah, whatever, man. So there's no gas for them anymore. Depoliticizing that issue, really important. So rather than trying to shame people into getting the vaccine, just saying, hey, free beer if you get a vaccine. You get cheap tickets to a concert. I think that exactly. I think that's been much more effective because we have to walk back from this politicization. And if only one side really

wants to, it's all the more difficult. And so that one side is really going to have to work to depoliticize things that really should never have been politicized. Yeah. What an insane thing to do. Technically, if he would have played the pandemic right and got on it, he'd probably be in office right now, but then that would be the smart thing to do. And he's not. Isn't that funny? I like to think about that scenario, too. He could have taken this whole kind of warrior motif and said, I'm going to beat this. I'm going to beat COVID. I'm going to I'm going to we're going to do it.

Then you probably have some liberals who are out there saying authoritarianism or whatever. But I can imagine how this might play out. But this was not the only script he could have followed and stayed in character. And yet here we are. Now, he pretty much, I think he pretty much had the office up until pandemic, which is it's scary to think about what the next four years would have been. Because I remember he told Bob Woodward, they sent us the book and Rage, I think we're supposed to have him on the show.

But he told Bob Woodward, you will know me in the second term. And he said that a couple of times. And I just looked at that and I went, I know exactly what that is. He was going to go full freaking authoritarian fascist in the second term and try and seize power. I was really surprised. Technically, they did try to seize power. We're finding out more and more. So what do you see for evangelicals?

Are evangelicals going to keep leaving the church? The Axiom article you guys had was pretty surprising. And then a year ago when we had Robert Jones on from PRI, he had talked about how there was, I think, a huge 10%, I think, fall off. He did a show with Eddie God Jr. And I think there was like a 10 or 11, 12% fall off that had happened. So now there's even more. Yeah. And it's hard to gauge right now because we're coming out of the pandemic and a lot of churches had been closed for much of the last year. You know, people got used to not going to church every Sunday. And so I think we're in this real moment of transition. I don't know what's on the other side. We can also look at young

evangelicals and they look quite different from older evangelicals. I know, always keep in mind, they grew up to be older evangelicals if they speak in the church. Oh, grain of salt. But certain issues that really mobilize older or many white evangelicals politically do not speak to younger evangelicals the same way with young evangelicals. We have differences on LGBTQ, on racial justice, on climate change, on immigration, tend to be much more progressive, not so much on abortion. That's one where you'll see more consistency across the demographic categories. I think that times are changing. I would say it's not just this liberal drift, but because I, as a scholar, look at the importance of evangelical popular culture

and consumer culture, right, kind of creating these media bubbles and just bubbles, like people can live inside of these spaces. Those are not nearly as coherent, as powerful as they were a generation ago, not by any stretch. Young people today are on TikTok and they're watching, they're binging on Netflix and they just have so much access to so many more sources of information. Whereas when I was growing up in the 1990s, it was pretty possible if you grew up in some of these conservative subcultures to be fairly isolated in those conservative subcultures. It's much harder to live in that kind of isolation today.

So if I look for what is going to change down the road, I'm looking at that younger cohort. And I just don't think that the evangelical gatekeepers have the same hold on this generation as they have in past generations. So we'll see where that brings us. They definitely will. I think I can attest to when I grew up in religion, I had my own ideas and I thought I was insane being told I was insane. In fact, I was sent to a psychiatrist once because I wasn't being Mormon enough or something who is also Mormon and the psychiatrist paid for by the Mormon church. So it was clearly

a hands off, but because I was turning into Satan, I guess that was the problem. Nothing's changed. So anyway, that's a joke, but it is true. So anyway, the, when I grew up, I, I couldn't find anybody who thought like I did. And thank God I discovered George Carlin. And I think there's a couple other voices that I discovered that I was like, holy shit, there are other people out there like me. And I did grow up in that community like you talked about. But now there's so much more information. I'm wondering if the vaccine thing where people are finally going to have to embrace the vaccine brings them closer to science and the embrace of science. One thing that's interesting, too, because I think you're like me.

You look at things from a strategy point of view, like not only in the past, what past would have gone with this, the variations. It's fun to go down those roads in my mind. And then it's fun to look at where we're at right now and go, what are the next five, what's the next five roads that can go down? I was looking at this survey of who they would, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, you probably saw it, of who voters, GOP voters would vote for the next election for president. And like Josh Hawley was like at the bottom for all the selling out of the country he did. But Donald Trump was like a rager still at the top, double digits. And then it just fell off a cliff for whoever was second. And you almost have to wonder if he loses his mind, which if he's

wandering around talking to himself, like they're claiming this morning and he's out of his mind with dementia, or he goes to prison with what's going on with the New York stuff, or he's criminalized some way. I don't know, somehow you can't run for office. Can you run for office if you're a criminal and be president? Let's say no. I would hope not. We need to make some new rules. Right. It's going to be like Berlusconi is going to just run again.

That's basically what Trump is. We had Tom Hartman in the show, and he said, you know what January 6th was? And this is shortly right after January 6th. And I go, what? And he goes, a warm-up practice? I was like, about to fall out of my chair, but he's right. You've studied the Hitler's beer hall thing. It was just the warmup. So I, hopefully we don't go, but you look at the things and you're like, if Donald Trump or that, or he kills over he's 70, whatever. And it's really not in the best condition. If he falls apart or he doesn't

run for office, there's really not much the Republican party has for backup to run for office that I think that would fire up voters. Yeah. Yeah. Because with Trump, we had his policies, which was a lot, but then also his charismatic personality. And it was the combination of the two really, and then his power, the way he wielded that power. And I think that has been really, was important for evangelicals. They called him their ultimate fighting champion. He was their protector. He promised to protect them, to give them power. And he came through on that. He did that. But he's out of office now, right? So he's not wielding that same power. As you say, there's questions about his health, his mental health. And at the same time, this charismatic personality

has not yet faded much. And I think that's what we see happening within the Republican Party. So at CPAC, I was watching that and people were trying to claim the mantle. They were trying to step into that place. And Ted Cruz embarrassed himself with his Braveheart battle cry. But that was just such a patent attempt to, I could do this and no, you can't. It's hard to see who that next person is. There is no heir apparent. I actually wondered or have been wondering for a long time if it isn't going to be a woman who steps in. I think there's some buying for, I was thinking first it'd be inside the Trump family because it's a different kind of power, right? You can work within the same ideology, but in a different way. You don't have to be the

warrior, but you can be this model of conservative white femininity that complements this kind of warrior masculinity. And this is Sarah Palin model. She was a harbinger, I think, of much of what we're seeing now in terms of Republican femininity. And now we have Marjorie Taylor and Taylor Greene, and we have Lauren Boebert and others. But I'm watching that. I'm not sure that they have what it takes to be at the top of the ticket, but that's an interesting dynamic. I don't know they have what it takes to be at the top of the ticket. But that's an interesting dynamic. I don't know who has what it takes to be at the top of the ticket because anybody who tries to be Trump pales in comparison to what Trump is and was and just no limits to

what he would do. He just broke the system. And so I'm not sure where that leaves us right now, frankly. It's hard to see him being in the kind of place where he could step in four years from now, again, because of age, because of health, because of all these things. I think his power will be very clearly diminished at that point. And he was all about that power, wielding that power on behalf of those who are loyal to him. It was even hilarious that his blog shut down because he was so pissed off that no one was reading it.

It's interesting. But does his audience read? Anyway, can they read? No, I'm just kidding. I'm being mean. Taking Twitter away from him. That was huge. That was everything, really.

It was. It really was everything. That and Facebook. I remember I was so scared they were going to put it back on Facebook. But yeah, taking away that megaphone was really important and seminal. And it should have been taken away prior to him running for office. But how did, you know, you mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene, her and Matt Gates, who are doing this whole tour thing as the face of the party. They've taken the legs out from Liz Cheney.

And I think she's done. She could probably run for office, but I just don't think anyone's going to carry her. From your book, this is a male chauvinist, male white dominance thing. This is the rise of fashion. It's always male based. It claws back power that women and LGBT communities and disabled communities have gotten and takes back the white patriarchal power. But Matt Gaetz running around as basically a pedophile, and we all know he's going down at this point, but him just still running around with the thing, is that turning off any religious people where they're just like, oh my God, what's the newest level we're sinking to this week?

No, I don't see much chatter at all about Matt Gaetz in evangelical communities. And we've been here before. We've been here before so many times that I think that the responses are automated at this point. First, you cast doubt, you question, you ignore, you just don't pay attention. That's not my thing. And so he's not a national figure really. And it's also a question of news coverage. Who is covering this and how are they framing it? And so where are you getting your news? And a lot of people, it's just not really on the radar because of where they're tuning in. So I've seen no soul searching among evangelicals.

Right now, evangelicals in terms of sexual misconduct, sexual abuse, and so on, the focus is actually on controversies that continue to bubble up within evangelical communities, within evangelical churches, within the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention. And so there's enough going on there. Connections can certainly be made between what they were willing to condone or cover up in their own circles, and then what they're tolerating on the national scene with people like Roy Moore, with people like Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz. But in this particular case with Gaetz, I just don't see much chatter about it. I think that people are just ignoring it.

It's the liberals who are like, hey, guys, look what's going on here. And I'm just not seeing much chatter right now. Yeah, I'm just astounded. If I would have been in the church, I would have left it like 50 times already. So it sounds like what you're saying is Fox News is still a problem. Yeah. Fox News and now Fox News is on the left edge of sources. So it's, yeah, it's very much echo chambers and in talk radio and conservative Christian news spaces. Christian radio is really interesting because they'll have their news features and things like that. And it's not as overtly political as what you're going to get on Fox News, although it's the end of politics are

very much there, but it's just what is ignored? What do we not talk about? And so we're going to celebrate our military heroes and we're going to celebrate our law enforcement. We're going to celebrate this and that, and it's all, and we're not going to deal with inequality and we're not going to deal with some of these more challenging issues. And so it's not just that everybody's consuming this ultra right-wing news, but they're also just in spaces where they're not engaging what folks who are consuming mainstream media are being confronted with every day. Yeah. I want to talk just a little bit about your book as we round out, because it's a great book. It helped me. I grew up idolizing John Wayne and I used to tell people my manhood and what a man was about was what I learned from John Wayne. He exemplified manhood on the thing

and masculinity. And I grew up in the seventies. That was on TV. And I didn't even catch the subtle clues, the stuff that you talk about in your book. There's the ugly playboy interview of John Wayne. I think at one point they were trying to take a statue down at the Orange County and take his name off the airport. Yeah. John Wayne Airport. Yeah. There's been a move there a couple of times now and haven't succeeded. Yeah. And it's interesting, but I had to take that whole thing apart. I talked to Eddie Glenn Jr. when he was on the show and I'm like, I had to give up my John Wayne, but I didn't, I didn't realize, but I did listen and went, okay, I can see give up my John Wayne, but I didn't, I didn't realize, but I did listen

and went, okay, I can see that now. And looking back, you can go, wow, there's some, there's, yeah, there's some messaging there. And, and so your book is really great. Anything you want to tag onto the book and plug on the book, we've been talking about the new things. Yeah. Let's see. I think it's, I think it's a pretty fun read. I'll say that much, right? It's a history. It covers a lot of territory, but I had some fun writing it. I think it's a pretty fun read. I'll say that much. It's a history. It covers a lot of territory, but I had some fun writing it. I think it's very accessible and a bit of a page turner here and there. There's a lot of shocking stories there in the book. And what I'm hearing just from people, it's a book that evangelicals have surprisingly embraced.

It wasn't written primarily for evangelicals. It's a secular publisher. It's really written for Americans. It's written for people who care about American democracy, who are watching what's happening and who really need to understand what has been going on, where we are now, what has brought us to this point so that we can make some smart decisions going forward. Yeah. And it's really important. I think what you say, it's time for Christians to clean up their own house and get their story straight and pick what they want. So they need

to speak out and then you say, Hey, we're not with those KKK white nationalist people. They get off our stage, get out of our, out of our religion. Sad part is that, like I said, if you separate the pews every Sunday, you might, it might be alarming to see how many people are sitting on the QAnon side. It's almost like a religion. In fact, I'm half tempted thinking about it right now because I can get the tax write-off because that's a benefit. You're going to start it. You're going to start the church. I'm going to start the church of QAnon and I'm going to start holding Sunday things and crap. I'll come around on your door on Saturday morning when you're going over.

I'll be like, have you heard of our Lord and Savior QAnon? And hey, I'll make sure I knock on the Mormon doors because they're the people that always do that to me. But there you go. So it's been wonderful to have you on Kristen. I've been following you over the last year since you were on the show. And so I've been seeing all the things. In fact, I think I've seen people put your book at the foot of the statue at the Orange County. We've got this great picture where the book is in the hand next to the holster of John Wayne at John Wayne airport. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's my profile picture on Facebook right now. So the guys that work at the airport are like, seriously, again, with the book, we got more copies of this book than anything, but no, I think it's an important read and I love everybody. I may be an atheist, but I fully support everybody. Honestly, if we could put just everyone's religion on justice department steps and stuff, I'd be all for it. Just, it just can't be the 10 commandments. You got to do the, you got to do the Jewish star and you got to make sure that everyone's included. It's got to be inclusive and then you can do whatever you got to have quans on there

and whatever. You got to have me on there too. It just be like an empty space going, the atheists, this is where they hang out. And I've talked with a lot of atheists this year, actually, too, about this book. And I think there's a lot of common ground, right? It's within any faith tradition or non-faith tradition, working for justice, working for human flourishing, working for the common good. There are resources within any tradition and outside of traditions.

And that's really what we can come together around. So you're right. Those of us in particular traditions, we can clean up our own houses. We can talk to each other, but we can also partner with people outside of those traditions. And we're in a pluralistic society. We have a constitution and in a democracy. And those are the things that we have too. Those are the guardrails. And then if we can just work for the common good, I think that we can cross a lot of different traditions, lines, boundaries,

and be engaged in this common project. And that's certainly what I've seen in terms of the response to Jesus and John Wayne. And it's been really heartening to see that that's how it's being received inside the evangelical fold and outside. Yeah. It's just, to me, I'm really, I hate being gaslit and I hate hypocrisy, even my own when I find it. I'll call it out usually, but it's just, I just want people to live their, what they say and do what they say. If Jesus said that, then do what Jesus would do and follow those morals. Because I don't know if Christians really get this, but when we see them operating in the exact opposite of what Jesus would do or what they claim to do, we just sit there and go, yeah, man, do you see what's going on there? And I think like you say, and wrote in the Axios

article, a lot more people are saying that and going, wait, I thought we stood for good stuff and not bad stuff. And so I think this is really good. I think people, I think, I think one last question I have for you, are women recognizing that this is a white male power hierarchy problem? And are women recognizing that? Because most women will support the hierarchy. Senator Collins and stuff, I think it is in Maine. They'll support the hierarchy because this is where their children are raised in. They want to keep the model going so that there's not a disruption. Are you seeing that breaking at all? You're right. The majority, this kind of

a patriarchal authority structure would not exist without a lot of buy-in from women. And I have a chapter on that in Jesus and John Wayne, and it's real. And I do see women contesting this. I see, I get the majority of my letters I get from readers are from men, but I get a lot from women, particularly from women who have run up against these power structures. I get a lot of letters from survivors of abuse in Christian spaces and from women who just said, yeah, I had enough. This is not, this is not cool. The submission and this oppression. And so I do get a lot of that. Still, there are many women who are actively supporting this, who are in comfortable spaces,

privileged spaces, perhaps, or who have decided the trade-offs are worth it. And there are all kinds of reasons that women will support this ideology and this system. In fact, I talk about that somewhat in Jesus and John Wayne. I have one full chapter on women supporting this, but there's so much more. And that's actually the topic of my next book. I'm working on it. It's called Live, Laugh, Love. And it looks at how this cultural construction of white Christian womanhood ends up propping up neoliberalism, post-feminism and white supremacy. So there's more to come. That is brilliant. I'm excited to see that book out because I think-

It's so much fun to research and horrifying. And yes. I think that's amazing. I think at one point, weren't you talking about just doing a whole other book about something else? And then you came back to this, if I recall. Yes. I was thinking about, I'd originally set aside, I was working on a religious biography of Hillary Clinton back in 2015, 2016. I set that aside to write Jesus and John Wayne because it seemed a little more urgent. And then we decided, let's let the dust settle a little bit more on that one. We need a few more things to come out.

The air to clear a little bit. And this was just live, laugh, love was the obvious follow-up. And yeah, it's, it's, there's a lot there and it's fascinating. And even more so than Jesus and John Wayne, you can see how culture works, this commodified Christianity and how it ends up shaping politics in ways that people often miss because it just seems so fluffy. In my valuation, I've always said women are treated like second-class citizens of religion. The shaming, everything goes back to the Adam and Eve sort of thing. I think we've had a few authors have talked about that in the show. The origin of the, well, women, they started this

whole mess. And it's just that whole thing. Even in a lot of different churches, the men are the leaders, the women are, well, go have kids and stuff. And so I think this is important to call out. I think it's important for women to understand that patriarchal hierarchy that they're supporting. And yes, maybe it's great for their sons, which I understand is some of the psychology, the buy-in, because they want a future for their sons, but this also affects their daughters and the future of their daughters. And you're seeing the attacks that are going on now taking away a lot of their rights. And that's what happens with these fascist regimes. They come in, they take away the rights of women. The Trump administration did a ton of that. They're having to dial back and I'll be interested to see where it goes. Kristen,

it's been so wonderful to have you on the show and follow your journey over the last year. And thank you again for coming on. Oh, thank you. My pleasure. There you guys go. Give me your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. Sure. At KKDume, K-D-U-M-E-Z. I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook and kristendume.com. Check it out, guys. It's the new paper book out with the new preface, Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured Nation. Share it with your friends in the religious community.

Get this word out. I've been following, like I said, Kristen on Facebook for last year. It's just extraordinary, the data that she has and insight that she has. Then, of course, listen to some of the stories about some of the trolling and the good stories, too. So there's a little bit of both in there. But it's been fun. So

thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Thanks for Kristen for being here. Be sure to be good to each other. You don't have to wear your mask so much anymore, but stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.