The Dispatch Podcast - Jesus and Evangelical Politics

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Sarah and David (who is stepping in for Steve this week) talk to the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Du Mez, about how the definition of masculinity for white Evangelical men has had a damaging impact on the whole country. “Once you have the eyes to see this, it’s hard not to see its pervasive reach,” she said. “The politics and the faith are so intertwined, and that’s what I try to pull through, those threads, and see how the influence really does go back and forth.” Plus, find out what friendly, neighborhood, sweater-wearing, former PBS television star is surprisingly not impressive to the mainstream Evangelical community. Show Notes: -Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation -Kristin’s Blog “The Anxious Bench” -Kristin’s next book on Christian femininity announcement -Kristin’s Twitter -Donald Trump riding a velociraptor -Kristin’s Faculty page at Calvin University -“A Man For All Seasons” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined this week by David French. And we are talking to Kristen Dumay. She is a professor of history at Calvin University and has written the book Jesus and John Wayne, how white evangelicals corrupted of faith and fractured a nation. The paperback is coming out in June so you can pre-order it now or you can enjoy the hard copy as David and I did. this is going to be a fascinating discussion. Let's dive right in. Kristen first. Just tell us the thesis of your book.

What is the argument that you are making? Essentially, Jesus and John Wayne is a history of white, evangelical masculinity and militarism. And so it traces this story through the 20th century, really focusing on the last half century, examining how evangelical ideals of masculinity have changed over time, how they're connected to cultural shifts, how they're connected to politics, and really bringing us up to the present to show how evangelical ideals of gender are linked to broader cultural and political issues. one of my questions after having read the book was how much of this, though, is really the story, the history of evangelical's relationship to masculinity versus the story of simply the rights relationship to masculinity, or maybe even broader than that, American culture's relationship to masculinity. You know, in my head while I was reading it, you start sort of in the 1950s, it obviously goes to

the election of Donald Trump. And I'm thinking, yeah, and in double indemnity, Hitchcock's bad is kind of effeminate, right? Because effeminate men were considered not trustworthy, kind of evil maybe. And you move up to fatal attraction. You know, the bad guy, woman, in fatal attraction, Glenn Close, dresses very manly. She comports herself like a man.

And that's, she's the bad guy. And, you know, to bring in David, obviously, in any conversation, the change of Batman since I first started watching, you know, the Batman Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah, exactly. I mean, basically my point being, American culture has been wrestling with concepts of masculinity for the last 70 years as well. Why is this specifically a story about evangelicalism? Oh, you're absolutely right. And that's kind of the point of the title, right? Jesus and

John Wayne, John Wayne was not an evangelical. So what we see happening within evangelicalism is this influence of secular ideals of masculinity, of a more rugged militaristic conception of what it is to be a man, which then gets kind of sanctified as this is what it is to be a Christian man. And it ends up not just transforming ideals of Christian manhood, but ultimately I argue the faith itself, Christianity itself, gets refashioned according to this ideal. But it's very much a story of the interplay between secular cultural ideals and American evangelicalism. And that's important to point out, I think, especially because evangelicals tend to have a really kind of oppositional posture towards secular culture, you know, thinking that it's us versus them and

that what we're doing over here is religious and is biblical and we're against culture. And as a result, they're often blind to the ways in which their own conception of faith and values are deeply influenced by secular culture. And so that's really very much a theme of the book. And then we can see how affinities between a kind of secular conservative ideal of masculinity, the John Wayne model, and a religious version of the same, end up creating alliances across theological differences. And I think that's what we see really in American politics today, including the Republican Party. You know, one of the things, I don't know if you follow Phil Visher on Twitter or listen to his Holy Post podcast. Yeah. He said something interesting the other day,

and he described the way some people view Jesus is not the Jesus of the cross, but the Jesus of the whip. That is when he was cleansing the temple and that that is sort of the archetype of Jesus masculinity. And that is something that I would have to say of all of the episodes of Jesus's life, I have heard disproportionately growing up in first fundamentalist than evangelical in first fundamentalist than evangelical world. I heard more of, I'm not going to say more of Jesus in the Whip than I did of Jesus in the Cross, but a disproportionate emphasis on Jesus in the whip. Is this something that, you know, that you're, that, that is symptomatic of this sort of larger issue of trying to bring Jesus himself into conformity with, you know, late 20th century

masculinity? Exactly. Exactly. So that's one story that gets quite a bit of airtime, you know, Jesus in the whip and overturning the tables and, you know, really acting out of, out of a righteous anger. And the book of Revelation is the other favorite, where you have this warrior Christ who, you know, charges into battle with a sword. Now the sword's coming out of his mouth, but that's, you know, it's really presented as this idea that to follow Christ is to fight the battles that need to be fought. And so they'll talk about, yes, there's, there's, there's an eschatological pacifism. Jesus will ultimately bring peace, but only after he slays his enemies. And that's where we're at right now. And so we need to join this battle. So Jesus and the whip

and this warrior Christ are kind of the favorite biblical passages that proponents of this militant Christian masculinity will point to. But it's important to realize to that it's not just the Bible that they're drawing on, right? And this is where popular culture comes in, mythical ideas of warriors. Mel Gibson's, William Wallace for the movie Braveheart, a huge favorite. These are, again, these kind of secular cultural models that do, as you suggest, end up reframing understandings of Jesus in the Gospels. And so other passages are set aside or explicitly dismiss, you know, turn the other cheek, love your enemies, love your neighbors. You know, that's that's that, you know, you can't really be a

man if you do that. That's not, that's not what we're talking about here. So it really is quite blatant. I noticed in the book that when you're discussing masculinity and sort of these popular political figures, on the one hand, Glenn Beck stood out to me as someone who didn't really get a lot of treatment in the book. Someone who, I mean, it's incredible when you think back of how popular Glenn Beck was at his peak. So I found this that said at his peak in September 2009, Beck's Fox program drew more viewers than all three

of the competing time slot shows combined. But Glenn Beck is not a particularly traditionally masculine figure. He cries on air a lot, actually. He's a crier. He did. He did. And then contrast that with You could pick John McCain, sort of a very traditional masculine guy with a traditional masculine

military hero background who evangelicals didn't like. Even Bill Clinton, very traditionally masculine in a lot of ways, very charismatic, loved the ladies. And so I was curious what your response was to that sort of counterargument that actually evangelicals have been attracted to these non-masculine men like Glenn Beck, and they have rejected otherwise traditional masculine men like Bill Clinton and John McCain as totally anathema to evangelical culture. Yeah. So, you know, traditional masculine, and that's where we have to, we have to dig in a little bit there and see, you know, what actually constitutes masculinity? How is masculinity defined? Because it changes over time. It's fluid. So if we look at somebody like Bill Clinton,

yes, charismatic and popular with the ladies. But that is not how evangelicals portrayed him, right? Not at all. He was a draft dodger. He was, um, You know, he had a feminist wife. He couldn't, you know, lead in his own home, let alone, you know, lead the nation. And so he certainly wasn't portrayed as the alpha male, not at all in terms of foreign policy. Same thing applied. So whereas, especially post Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton kind of had earned this reputation as a certain kind of, you know, virile man. But pre-scandal, not so much. And even after that, you know, evangelicals, it's really interesting how they responded to Clinton at that time. It wasn't, oh, he's a man's man. It's he, you know, we have to remove this immorality from,

from the White House and from our nation, really. But I think Glenn Beck is a really interesting figure. And that is a gap. It's, it came back and I thought, oh, I could have done more with him. I should have done more with him because he is really interesting. and then he just disappears. So he's Mormon and our member of LDS. And so there's an interesting dynamic going on there.

But the Glenn Beck phenomenon was, I think, still needs to be explained to a certain extent. It puzzled me as I was kind of watching in real time. He does not embody this masculinity physically, certainly, emotionally. And at the same time, he had a way of kind of rallying this us, versus them mentality and really kind of fueled into the culture wars mentality in a way that was, I think, transformative to a lot of his listeners and a lot of his evangelical listeners. And a part of this bigger kind of Fox News talk radio culture that just really did build up the militancy in terms of not trusting outsiders and the S versus them mentality that goes

hand in hand with then that you need to fight because our enemies are so great and the danger is so present. But no, you're right. I could certainly have investigated Glenn Beckmore. And then he just, you know, kind of disappeared from the scene. And just recently I was thinking, too, you know, we need to understand more the role that he has played in defining this movement in terms of popular culture. But to push on your explanation of Bill Clinton a little, you mentioned that's not the way evangelicals portrayed him as a manly man. But isn't that just then the question? Because Bill Clinton and Donald Trump actually had quite a bit in common in terms of their masculinity,

and evangelicals portrayed them very differently. Doesn't that mean that actually the thread there that connects the two is partisanship, not evangelicalism? If evangelicals portray two men who are otherwise relatively similar in such different lights, What explains the difference is, well, one was a Democrat and one was a Republican. So I guess I don't, I see them as relatively similar in one aspect, right? In terms of their sexual morality, perhaps. But again, that was not the dominant portrait of Bill Clinton in the 1980s, in the 1990s, up until, you know, he was in the White House, really.

So you had rumors. You had, you know, you had talk of that. That certainly was not his, he brought a lot more to the table, shall we say. Certainly than Donald Trump, reality TV star, did in 2016. I thought Bill Clinton was an actual evangelical of sorts. Donald Trump is not, again, like sort of fascinating. Well, let me, let me jump in as being a fully, full-grown adult evangelical in 1992. Okay.

I remember this very well. Bill Clinton was a pot-smoking, draft-dodging, feminist-marrying person who couldn't get his wife to consistently take his own name, okay? But that's how he was portrayed. That's the point. Is that what the right was saying about him? No, I know. And then flip it around, Donald Trump is a model marrying, lib-owning, alpha male. And by the way, how dare you say he dodged the draft? He really did have bones. spurs, Sarah. And so the reason why the portrayals are different is because that's, you're connecting, what you're doing is you're actually taking the partisanship, which is there, but you're filtering it through a cultural bubble that rationalizes and justifies the partisanship.

And without that, without that, I mean, I remember that. And in fact, it was one of the reasons why evangelicals had trouble warning up to George H.W. Bush, which was so bizarre because he was an actual war hero who'd been shot down in the Pacific joined at a very young age. I mean, in many ways, more masculine and sort of some of these objective measures than Ronald Reagan before him. And yet, H.W. Bush has to declare, I am not a wimp. And has this whole sort of, how strong are you question that is put to him in the, in the, during his first term. And then, so, yeah, there was a lot of, there was a lot of, there was a lot of,

of denigration of Bill Clinton as a man that went on in the early 1990s. And that continued through Lewinsky because it reinforced everything. That he's not even man enough to be faithful to his wife. It was all wrapped up into this. And the weakness of Bill Clinton was a constant theme early on. It was the draft judging, the pot smoking, And then Hillary, when she said, you know, I'm not a standby or man kind of person, and that just absolutely poured into all of this. But yeah, partisanship is totally a part of this because Donald Trump is a draft dodger who doesn't even really have the courage to fire people in person, unlike, you know, you see in The Apprentice.

but he's completely cast as the alpha male, the Trump trucks, the boat parades. How many times have we seen those ridiculous paintings that are sort of meme-like of him with rippling muscles riding a velociraptor? You know, I mean, so it's a, yeah, no, I hear you, Sarah, but as a fully grown evangelical adult in 1992, I know exactly how Bill Clinton was portrayed.

Well, Kristen, you do have visuals in the book. Why didn't you include the Donald Trump Rippling Muscle Velociraptor picture? You know, there are many to choose from in that genre. I thought about it, played around with it. Some of those are hard to source. And, you know, also one of the challenges of this book was to capture the absurd

without making it a joke, right? Because there's a lot of absurdity a part of this. And it was, I felt like I was walking a fine line between kind of extreme expressions and mainstream. And that really is a question throughout the book. It was when I wrestled with when I was researching the book of, you know, what stories do I include here? Which ones are outliers? Which are fringe? And outliers are still, you know, worth paying attention to, but you need to contextualize them appropriately. What's mainstream here? And how do we know where this center is and and I think you know the center was shifting even as I was researching and writing this

book so I had a lot of material that actually didn't get included in this book and the original manuscript was 60,000 words over word count and so there's a lot that had to be cut but also you know images like that too I thought you know it's it's illustrative and many of those were not from some now are from kind of religious spaces others are are just again secular and they're out there. I think that that's certainly the context into which this book has been received. And so I think it rings true to a lot of what people are experiencing, what they're seeing in their own, with their own eyes, what they're encountering in their own circles. So one of the things that when I was reading the book, because again, you know,

it's funny, I'm reading the book having grown up first and fundamentalist. I grew up in the Acapella Churches of Christ in the South. So we were truly sectarian in the sense that we were taught that the Church of Christ was the only church. Not everybody believed that, but that's what we were taught so that literally my youth group of like 40 kids was like the only Christian kids in central Kentucky. But we were in, we were part of the evangelical subculture, but not really. So I wasn't allowed to listen to Christian music. And so, you know, in a real way, Amy Grant was more subversive than Metallica. I'm not even making that up.

But from the beginning, I do remember a lot of this ambiguity about masculinity. And you hit on something, I think, and that is prior to sort of the modern turn of the economy, there was no real question about the role of a man in a society. I mean, literally for a family to live, there had to be a lot of. hard physical work done. And I think the whole culture, as we see from deaths of despair amongst men, increasing achievement gaps in educational attainment among men, you know, everything from drug abuse to alcohol abuse, et cetera, et cetera,

a lot of people are struggling with masculinity at this time. And it struck me that what we began to see was a, an evangelical culture that was struggling right along with everybody else and not really able to reach a satisfactory sort of definition that was both Christian and culturally compatible. And I think the thing that is a key inside of your book was that ingredient of culturally compatible was always there. that in other words

if you're talking about what is the solution to our wrestling with masculinity it has to be Christian but it also has to fit the culture and I think that if you're reading this

with an open mind and you're a conservative evangelical like me quite conservative theologically that's the key insight because that's not how we see ourselves

if that makes sense and I think that when you see it, you can't unsee it is sort of the way I took from the book. I emailed with you some weeks ago, and it's like, I just watched a video where the evangelist came running into the room in boxing robes with like rocky music. And that was the intro to this very popular,

very mainstream event. So that's not a, a question that's kind of just just my own observation. But I feel like, you know, and that's something that I think it should be humbling for the church is to realize as much as they have critiqued the main line like Episcopal Church and others for cultural conformity. In this masculinity definition, that cultural conformity was always part of the ingredient. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you're right, too, that once you have eyes to see this, it's hard not to see it. It's pervasive reach. And, you know, I, one of the historians who read this in manuscript form, kind of one of the leading old guard historians of evangelicalism and an evangelicalism, an evangelical himself, I know he was skeptical before he'd asked to read it before it went into press. And I, I, I, I, I sent it off to him with a bit of anxiety and I have to say, I think it won him over.

And certainly, I really knew it had when ensuing weeks after he had sent it back, send it back with comments. And then I just kept getting emails of him sending, hey, look what I just saw. Look what I just came across. You know, look, I think it was Al Mueller has a list of, you know, 10 books to read for ministry and eight of them had to do with the military or things like that, you know. and I kind of, I'm paraphrasing there, so don't quote me on that, but, you know, essentially, like, once you have eyes to see and then the images, and I think another thing that this book did is

because it's, it's really a history of evangelical popular culture, right? And so it's not just what's happening in seminaries, just not just the more elite conversations, but really what's the evangelicalism that ordinary believers encounter in their day-to-day lives. And that's where the book has resonated so deeply with so many evangelical men. So I get stories, you know, multiple messages every single day in so many videos and images and especially the memories of this was my story, right? This was what I encountered. And so many Christian men who deeply, you know, cared about being faithful Christians ran up against these ideals and found that they fell short. And then they had to make a choice. You know, what do we do here? And for some, it was it was leaving

the church. For others, it was feeling like a second-class citizen, second-class Christian, and for some, it was buying in. And it was, you know, either trying to be the alpha man or else, you know, supporting the alpha men in their midst. And so it's been really fascinating to hear the personal reflections on how so many lives kind of map onto this broader story. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of

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It's Mayvery. So you do this really wonderful job tracing sort of the history of evangelical culture, but, and you note this, John Wayne, Barry Goldwater, Phyllis Schlafly, Rush Limbaub, Bill O'Reilly, all of these people with really outsized influence over evangelical culture, none of whom identify as evangelical, but all of whom identify as Republican. And later in the book, you mention that 75% of evangelicals approved of Donald Trump in office. I think it was roughly 2017

that that poll was taken. I think this was a Pew poll that I really dove into as well. That 75% was twice as high as the average American. But that includes Democrats. And in fact, 75% wasn't very high compared to identifying as a Republican.

And when we look at the largest predictor, the biggest predictor of support for Donald Trump, It's not religion. It's not church attendance. It's not income. It's not education. It's, at least in one poll, it was an answer to a question about authoritarianism. And so two questions for you. One, is this conversation really more about republicanism than it is about evangelicalism? Like, if that's the better predictor. And two, if not republicanism, or maybe tied to republicanism. I mean, we have the term religious right, right? Like that that, that, that, term has existed sitting above maybe the evangelical conversation even, maybe more than masculinity.

Is this an affinity within the religious right to authoritarianism? Yes, and yes and yes, I would say about, but as a historian, what I would want to suggest is what is republicanism that, you know, and what is the role of evangelicalism in shaping republicanism and vice versa, right? These categories don't really exist in, you know, distinct one from the other. That doesn't mean that they overlap entirely, but, you know, history is going to show us how much evangelicalism helped shape the current Republican Party that we have, even as we can see how other Republicans, you know, we can talk Barry Goldwater, and we can, and certainly Phyllis Schlafly, how much they ended up influencing evangelicalism itself. I mean, so even take

somebody like Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative Catholic, but she really helped articulate this whole framework of connecting gender and authority and foreign policy together in the 60s and becomes incredibly influential, kind of generally at the upper levels of, you know, the religious right? But then she also influences Beverly Le Hay in profound ways. And Beverly Le Hay, here, right here we have a story of an evangelical woman who ends up, you know, writing all kinds of evangelical literature, this popular literature, you know, organization, Concern Women for America, and ends up just, you know, deeply shaping evangelical ideals of biblical womanhood, of Christian womanhood. And so the politics and the faith are

so intertwined. And that's what I try to really pull through those threads and see how, how the influence really does go back and forth. So it's about Republican politics. It's about evangelicalism. And again, the overlap is not 100%. We can talk about the 19%, if you will. We can talk about the evangelical left. We can talk about moderates.

We can talk about degrees to which people buy into this. But then you bring up authoritarianism. And I do want to talk about that because one of the most surprising things in my research for this book was the question of, of the prominence of authority and the extent to which evangelicals seem to be almost obsessed with this question of authority going back to the 1960s and 70s. And so when I was reading Bill Gothard, for example, is a very key proponent of this. Now, Bill Gothard, I will say, when I initially sketched out this book proposal and when I initially started writing,

I had no plans to include Bill Gothard, right? He's so extreme, so far, right? He's one of those guys that you just, you know, kind of roll your eyes out and say, well, thank goodness, that wasn't, you know, that wasn't my experience. And then as I was, as I was interviewing people and talking with other scholars, I heard so many say to me on a personal level, you are going to talk about Bill Gothard, right? And then they'll tell their own stories of how his teachings influence their own families. So I thought, okay, maybe I have to look at Bill Gothard. And when I did, I was, you know, kind of horrified, this very, very hierarchical, you know, gendered order of authority, deeply problematic, in my opinion. And then I went over and I looked at James Dobson,

you know, undeniably mainstream. And, and I saw how they were asking the same questions, right? In this, like, this time of unrest, of social unrest, coming out of the 1960s, the anti-war movement, civil rights movement, like, where is authority? located. And the answers they provided were remarkably similar. And the more I looked at it, the more I came to see that there are some strong anti-democratic impulses running through evangelicalism itself, not just this kind of external, you know, this is what Republicans do, this is what, you know, secular conservatives say, but deep within evangelical culture itself. And that finds expression in terms of gender because gender is kind of the most basic relationship of social hierarchy for

many evangelicals, but more broadly the way they understand society as well. So that was very much a theme that I wasn't expecting to find, but I ended up tracing it throughout the book. So strong connections between evangelicalism, conservative evangelicalism, and tendencies toward authoritarianism. You know, one of the things, one of the things about the Trump era, I think, is that it really, just speaking sort of frankly from where I am at this moment, it really exposed to the extent to which, as Ryan Burge says, he's sort of this fabulous statistician of American religion, follow him on Twitter, seriously, and you'll be deluge with probably five fascinating charts per day. but he says this really interesting thing and when you it's another one of these insights that once you see it you can't unsee it and that is white evangelicalism is republicanism republicanism is white evangelicalism and when he's saying that he's talking about self-identified evangelicals in other words not necessarily somebody who's going to agree with all four parts of the evangelical

quadrilateral or the seven or nine part barn a test but people who say i'm an evangelical And that this is a very distinct community that is growing up that is completely intertwined with the Republican Party and now beginning to adopt outlier political positions that one would not say flow from the Bible naturally. So, for example, somebody would say, well, wait a minute, if I'm an evangelical in politics, it's because I'm pro-life, okay? fair. That's one of the reasons why I spent most of my life as a Republican. I'm pro-life. But what is a greater predictor of evangelical support for Donald Trump? Immigration. Immigration was a greater predictor. Evangelicals are outliers on, for example, police brutality issues. They're outliers on expressing less concern for racial division in this country. None of those things are natural and inevitable products of reading the Bible. Now, they're contestable issues that people in good faith

can disagree on, but to have an overwhelming conclusion that drives, there's an overwhelming conclusion that one distinct Christian community has, that at the one, it is simultaneously deeply partisan and believing it is deeply separate from the culture, that's, you know, again, this isn't a question, this is a rant. That is, and in fact, you know, if you read my Sunday newsletter, that's a constant theme of my newsletter, which is this wrapping of secular partisanship into religion has had a real consequence. And on the masculinity front, and it's been a few weeks since I finished the book, and I can't remember if you, I don't think you put this in there, and correct me if I'm wrong, but an American sniper, the Chris Kai, yeah, the Chris Kyle character, is offered a choice. Are you a sheep?

And the dad says, I ain't raising no sheep. Are you a wolf, in other words, that devours the sheep? Are you a sheep dog, the protector, the protector? And I always grew up in, I'd heard that for decades, that sort of Trinity of three types of manhood. And I had always identified that a Christian man, if you're going to reduce it to that simple thing is the sheepdog. That's the person who's protective. And the best of evangelical Cold War cold waring was protective of this culture against an aggressor communism that was

Soviet communism was evil. And then along comes Donald Trump and he's a wolf. Like he's the paradigm of the wolf. And the evangelical community fell in with him. at a level exceeding the way they fell in with Romney, with Bush, with McCain, with Bush, with Reagan. And to me, that's when I was thinking, that's when everyone began searching for answers, why, why, why. And to me, that's why, it seems to me, you know, that's when your book met the moment. Yeah. Yeah. And that language of protector can be a little slippery, too, right? Like you said, you know, in its best sense, it can mean one thing. And in the Cold War context, it was, you know, a man is protector and provider.

But then protector, you know, in the context of the Cold War, really kind of steps up in significance. But because it's in the context of the Cold War, that's not just kind of metaphorical. It is, it's a protector. It's quite explicit. You need to protect the United States from this military threat. And so we need to raise our little boys to be strong men so that they can go fight on the battlefields of Vietnam effectively, right? And so it does, it's more than just kind of sheepdog. And you can see in the rhetoric how over time this notion of protector shifts from a defensive mode primarily into offensive.

So the best defense is an aggressive offense. And you can see this also in rhetoric around just war or just war, that, you know, preemptive war. Talk about evangelicals being outliers in terms of survey data, right, evangelical support for the Iraq war, for preemptive war in general, for condoning the use of torture, right? We see all of this. And you can see in their popular literature and in their justifications for aggressive foreign policy, this notion of, look, enemies. abound, you got to get out in front of them. I mean, use examples like, you don't want to wait for the rapist to be attacking your wife. Do you? No, of course not. You've got to go beat him up before he comes into your house. Right. And so this notion of protector ends up kind of morphing

into aggressor, but the language still has this kind of moral veneer to it. I want to talk about also how feminism has evolved within the evangelical movement and which, within the history that you trace in your book. Because when I think about, you know, mega churches, et cetera, a lot of that is driven by the women in the church. Attendance, I mean, it's a joke, right? That, like, these women are dragging their boyfriends or their husbands to church. It's not the men driving attendance at these places.

The women, therefore, if they're driving it, are also the main consumers of this brand of what they're, the feminine ideal is. And so it seems to me a little too simplistic to say, like, well, it's this abusive masculinity that's forcing these women to stay home and bake cookies and raise kids and wear aprons or whatever. The women are the consumers of it. And you mentioned some of the books that were incredibly popular at the time. My favorite, of course, is the, you know, dressing up in, you know, a cheetah leotard with bangles and makeup when he comes home. And, like, you should have a different costume every day to come inside.

And that that is how you keep a man interested. But at the same time, that's absurd, but there's something to it. You know, if you're like doughty and unpleasant, yeah, that is going to cause some marital discord for sure. And so I wondered if you would talk a little bit about how you traced the femininity within the evangelical movement as well. No, you're right. Women are primary consumers of evangelical popular culture and evangelical literature on gender roles. And it's a massive industry. And I have a chapter on that, focused on the 60s and 70s, is kind of setting the foundation for this, this evangelical literature on Christian womanhood, on proper evangelical femininity. So you need to be beautiful. You need to be sexy. And that's really important because the evangelical notion of sexuality. that men are filled with testosterone and God made men and women just so distinct opposites, right? And so men are filled with lust. This is just kind of how God made them. And they have very high sexual needs. But we need a moral society. And that's where heterosexual marriage comes in. And that's

where women's restraint comes in. So it's really on women to protect purity and social morality. And they do that by being very modest if they're not married and not tempting men. And again, who tend towards lust, but then you get married, and then that solves this problem, but it only works if women, if wives are able to meet their husband's sexual needs, right? And that's where beauty is really important. You have to keep up your curb appeal. You need to seduce your husband, and you need to prop up his ego by meeting his sexual needs and letting him know that he is also desired. And what was really striking, first of all, evangelicals talk a lot about sex, right? Don't find any of this prudish kind of stereotype.

They write a lot and read a lot about sex. In very graphic terms, it turns out. But this relationship of power is as very present and the notion that wives' duties to meet their husband's needs, which can produce some rather alarming results, which is certainly something that I, I, trace through this story as well of a wife's obligation to meet her husband's demands. So sexuality is kind of a side topic, but one that is relevant. But this ideal of femininity, what I try to show is that it did meet women's needs to a certain extent, right, that many women, this is in the 60s and 70s, were deeply unhappy, dissatisfied. And Betty Friedan offered one pathway towards liberation. Go, achieve, you know, claim your equality. Go out into the workforce. For many women, that was

useless. It was insulting, right? They had already kind of made their choices. Many didn't have a college education. Many didn't have any employment prospects. Many were at home with three or four kids. And they were miserable. And so, you know, somebody like Maribel Morgan comes along and says, yes, I get it. We're all miserable. Here's what you can do to change things, right? You know, be sweet. Meet your husband's needs. Just do it. give it a try and he'll be nicer to you. And for many, they found that was a better path out of their misery. And then many, like Elizabeth Elliott is another example, very popular writer for Christian women at the time. They packaged and sold this as biblical womanhood, right? And so many

women, too, just really do want to be faithful Christian women. And this was the blueprint that was handed to them. Now that said, the evangelical ideals of womanhood, that foundation of femininity and sexual attractiveness and submission does stretch and continue into the present, but it evolves in really interesting ways. And I did not have space to tell that story in this book. I kind of, you know, let that go as I move into the 2000s and get to Trump and so on. But there is a whole other story there, which is actually the topic of my next book. So I do hope to tell the rest of that story. It's called Live, Laugh, Love, and it's a cultural history of white Christian womanhood over roughly the same period. Oh, that I am very here for. And because you mentioned, for instance,

Rachel Held Evans and some of these very evangelical, very prominent women within the movement who become countercultural in terms of their own brand of feminism and are pretty much kicked out of the movement to the extent one can be kicked out of something that doesn't really have borders. And it's over LGBTQ rights. It's over immigration. It's over these things that, as David said, there's some biblical things on both sides, let's say. But there's not like one true orthodoxy necessarily. And yet within the evangelical movement right now or culturally there is. And where women in particular, I think, it's fascinating because I think you can see that in a lot of different movements. I've pointed this out that in the White House press

corps, when women first started asking questions to the press secretary at the podium, they were the ones most likely to ask the obvious question that nobody had bothered to ask because women were sort of in but not of that culture. And so to have women within the evangelical movement be the wants to raise their hands and say, well, actually, like, I'm reading the Bible, too, and this is weird because it seems like kind of the opposite on immigration. It doesn't surprise me at all that that comes from women. Yeah. Yeah. So you can find those voices of dissent, certainly. So you mentioned Rachel Held Evans. You know, Jen Hatmaker also very prominently kind of came out in favor of LGBTQ rights. Somebody like Beth Moore is, of course, fascinating to watch too in her role over the

last five years as a voice of dissent within evangelicalism. But then you also have a lot of evangelical women who are propping up this ideology, right? Who are, you know, either politically or often just on, you know, religiously and personally. And here, too, if you look at evangelical femininity, you can see really fascinating connections between secular ideals of femininity, particularly kind of post-feminist ideals. So in terms of beauty, in terms of a very, at least feminist would say, a very shallow sense of empowerment, right? And you're talking about kind of mommy blogs and HDTV and Hallmark movies and all of that. There are Christian roots to this, but it also has now has morphed into this broadly kind of white generic Christian slash secular ideals of womanhood.

And it's really fascinating, which also has a lot of political influence if you look for it. So in the closing minutes, I want to get at the one area I hinted at it a little bit in my Sunday review, the point where I think we disagree. And here's where it is. So here's the point where I think we disagree. So I'm very, as I said earlier, and this will be, this will mean something to, I don't know, 4% of our listeners. but I'm a all five-point Calvinist. You know, I'm reformed theology, tulip all the way. I wouldn't call myself part of young, restless, and reformed just because I don't, never, I was never part of that scene, you know, the beard with the craft beer and the talking

about theology until three in the morning. Never was part of what, I do have a beard, but that was not when I was becoming reformed. I always saw, in my, the way I've interpreted this last five, six years, especially with the drift towards Trumpism and authoritarianism and then head lurching into stop the steel and all of that, is that the theology that I have should have functioned as a guardrail against this total nonsense. And so when I look at a lot of my fellow believers and especially the way they have behaved since the onset of the pandemic and then the election and then stop the steal, I literally

look at them as turning to their own sort of theology and giving it the middle finger, just to be blunt, that it's, they have completely defied what they have said that they have believed for years. So I see what has happened, I think, as a defiance in many ways for a lot of these folks. And here's the difference. I think you see the theology that they had is laying the table for this. Does that make sense? And I feel like if I had to lay down the disagreement, I would say, I think the theology,

that sort of Reformation theology that so many people sort of came into in this young, restless, and reform movement still and should still serve. as a guardrail against what we've seen. But I think you see it as having laid the table theologically for what we've seen. I see the cultural table laid. I think where we disagree is on the theological table. So that's, so tell me if I'm wrong. No, this is, this is really interesting. As you know, I'm a Calvinist too. I teach at Calvin University. I grew up in a, you know, strongly a Calvinist household. My dad's a theology professor and pastor. And, And, you know, my favorite class in college was Calvin's Institute. So we could talk.

We can have a long, Sarah, are you ready for this? Right, right. So, no, she is not. So, you know, I'd want to unpack the theology that, you know, does it set the table? Or, you know, what is the operative theology? And you probably picked up a couple of places in the book where I point to this saying, wait a minute, you know, for all their talk of, you know, totally. depravity and original sin, these guys seem remarkably comfortable with giving a whole lot of unchecked power to a small number of men, right? You know, so what is the operative theology here? Also, you know, so I grew up in the, in the 80s and 90s, and so I was kind of coming of age into this young, restless and reform, but I was coming out of this isolated, kind of Dutch

immigrant subculture and coming out into the wider world and getting my bearings. And when I first heard of John Piper, and when I first heard of young, restless, and reformed, I thought, go us. You know, it's, it's Calvinist moment to shine. You know, and I was, I thought Calvinists have the best answers. And, you know, I was deeply reformed and we're kind of the smartest Christians. You know, we don't have to say that publicly, but we know it. Oh, said it publicly all the time. Okay, yes, you know, some of us tried to be a little bit more discreet. But so, you know, and then, and then I realized, like, as I, as I began to kind of learn more and interact, I realized, I realized there was no place for me, this, you know, deeply Calvinist woman who was also an intellectual in those circles. I didn't even identify as a feminist back then, but I came to see early on that there was much more that was operative here than just appreciation of historical. historical reformed theology. There was much more that was that was kind of uniting these folks. And those things had to do with patriarchy. It had to do with this particular cultural ideal, not necessarily secular, but it kind of grew up within the religious culture as well. And I

started to pay attention to gatekeeping, right? Who is welcome within this fold? What will get you kicked out of this fold. And that's really where I spent a lot of time trying to parse this out. So let's talk about race. How racist can you be and still be welcome as a quote unquote brother in Christ? Actually, you can be pretty racist and still be part of the club. Now, if you go out against complementarianism, sorry, right? And so that was something that I, as a woman, who was questioning some of these, particularly some of these gender ideals, realized there was really no space for me, Calvinist though I am in those circles. So I'd really want to push out, on the one hand, you're right. You know, there are theological commitments that are being denied, set aside,

ignored, absolutely. But there are also that theology kind of morphs, right? And so there are other theological commitments that are driving this. And that's where I think we need to, we need to look carefully and in and get scratched beneath the surface of what are the motivating theological commitments within these different factions and how does that work with amex platinum access to exclusive amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side so being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime that's the powerful backing of amex pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca slash y anx All right. Last two questions. One, you just mentioned race. I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about why you think that racially it became such a divide. You know, in the book, one of the things I really enjoyed is, you know, every chapter or so you will remind us by putting white in parentheses, you know, like parentheses white men, parentheses white evangelicals. Because of course, there is a huge divide in evangelicals. And

evangelicals that are people of color. Why do you think that develops so prominently in the last 50, 70 years? Yeah. Yeah, this is a book about white evangelicalism. And it was important to me to try to make whiteness visible in this book. Because for many white evangelicals, whiteness is absolutely invisible. And it's kind of designed as such. So here's what I mean by that. Take something like Christian nationalism or just, you know, that we can even, you know, that's become a kind of divisive word right now. We can just talk, you know, Christian America, this ideal of, you know, and patriotism, the ideal that so many evangelicals hold to that America was founded as a Christian nation. And that things, you know, were great, blessed by God until at some point things got not so good.

And we have to restore Christian America. This is a very prominent motif within conservative evangelicalism. It's kind of the air many people breathe. Now, take that narrative. It only makes sense if you are a white person. Oh, because when things really got bad, usually that's the 1960s, right? That's when things fell apart. So just that narrative. Now, you can talk about God bless America and patriotism and Christian America all day long and never mention race, right? And so when you try to confront white evangelicals about race, many are honestly baffled. Like, I'm not thinking in racist terms. I'm not even thinking about race. This is just,

Christianity. It's just Christian America. And then a lot flows from that. Now, take anybody from outside that white Christian America orbit. And it's immediately apparent to them, you know, as a black Christian, like, whoa, whoa, let's talk here, you know, about that narrative, about that declension, about what it means to restore Christian America. And race is instantly visible to those on the outside. So one of the things I really tried to do in this book is make the whiteness of white evangelicalism visible. And it's easy to do that historically. So you can look at resistance to desegregation, particularly in the South, right? And the importance, the important role that played in consolidating evangelical, political power. You know, you can, you can talk about one of the, one of the things I

did in reading all of these books on Christian manhood. They love their heroes, love their heroes. right, John Wayne is one, Teddy Roosevelt, William Wallace, long, long list. What I noticed when I paid attention is that all of these guys are white men, and they include Confederate generals too. And many of them, like Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, kind of, they proved their heroism as white men subduing non-white populations. And those are the kinds of things that if you have eyes to see, you can see that. And then one of the things I, again, tried to do is just make that visible. And I think that's really important because right now conversations are really hard to have about race with white evangelicals who genuinely do not believe they are racist or genuinely

do not believe their Christianity has anything to do with racial identity. But history can demonstrate that even though you don't think that, we can see that. And then that can open up the conversations that we really need to be having. You know, one way I've put it in discussions with people trying to sort of get readjust some of the paradigms is, is America really in market decline if there is more premarital sex but a lot less Jim Crow? And because essentially what has happened is that the narrative of American moral decline has been attached to largely a single issue, you know, around sex in the sexual revolution. Whereas in many other areas in which if you're going to look at biblical justice, you know, if you're going to look at sort of when the Old Testament prophets with thunder, you know, we have actually made a lot. We're not declining. You know, we're like we're progressing. And so I, that's one thing that I think is a really important. It's a very important to broaden the frame.

whenever you hear somebody talk about and in Christians in particular are almost like addicted to kind of almost like a decline porn that everything is getting horrible fast. Well, it really depends on who you are, doesn't it now? And is that from a biblical justice frame or is that from a partisan frame? I mean, these are different frames. So anyway, yeah, I think, and the other thing is to my friends, I'm a white evangelical who are so tired of hearing the phrase, white evangelical, well, here's, and here's a great way to not constantly hear it. Stop being an outlier from all other streams of Christianity. Okay. And if you are an outlier from all other streams of Christianity, well, you got a pretty, darn, make a pretty darn good

case that you figured out something that all other streams of Christianity haven't figured out. And when that case has not been made, anyway, I'm sorry. I have ranted like five times. I apologize. Amen. Kristen, I think you did a very good job in the book of highlighting that this is a book about white evangelicalism. I look forward to your second book on Christian femininity. But I hope you will consider a third book just focused on the racial issues because I think the history of that is fascinating. and how those movements really divide. And I think something I hear often is like, well, I wish we had more people of color in this church. Without a whole lot of introspection on how one could make that happen, why that isn't happening, et cetera.

Okay, last question. It's really for both of you. Obviously, the book is called Jesus and John Wayne, John Wayne being this hero figure from pop culture. for many evangelicals, but really Mel Gibson's William Wallace probably plays almost a bigger role as the hero. Absolutely. I mean, I watched Braveheart only several dozen times. That movie hits like at that peak moment where you're like going to the movies like the most in your teenage years. What would be your two pop culture ideals for Christian masculinity?

that we could see in movies, that you would say, ah, this is a portrayal of masculinity that I think Christianity can identify with, that a Jesus-esque person could identify with. Kristen, I'm going to start with you, because maybe you've thought about it more than most. Oh, my gosh, I really should have now. I'm panicking. It's, that's so funny.

And for the record, I tried really hard to fit Mel Gibson. William Wallace from the movie Braveheart in a title and I just couldn't make it work but that would have edged out you know John Wayne gets the nice historical grounding and you know we went with it but no I absolutely affirm your point there I tried so in fact

I have an op-ed coming out to that effect in a couple of weeks so let's see I I'm not I'm terrible at recalling like you know, any, any movies at all. I'm like, it's really a weakness of mine. But what I will say is the kind of alter ego of the John Wayne masculinity that evangelicals

despise is Mr. Rogers, which is really fascinating. And that's something I brought out multiple times in the book. Like, Mr. Rogers does not fare well in this literature on Christian masculinity. And if you watch the Mr. Rogers documentary that came out, or even the Tom Hanks fictionalized version, either way Mr. Rogers comes out whether it's documentary or fictional as a living saint. Absolutely, right? Right. And deeply religious, Presbyterian. And he is a hero to liberal Christians. That is the kind of masculine ideal. And he is not impressive to. conservative evangelicals, you know? So, so John Eldridge will literally say, Jesus is a lot more William Wallace than Mr. Rogers. And Mr. Rogers is an embarrassment. You don't want to be at Mr. Rogers. That's emasculated. So, so yes, I'll hold that up as, you know, maybe we can meet

somewhere in the middle, but Mr. Rogers is a, it's a pretty impressive example, I think. So I'll, I have one just as I thought of immediately, man for all seasons, Thomas Moore, Is that a little unfair, though, since it's like Thomas Moore, like, right? It's a movie, Sarah. Those were the paradigms. It was a movie. It's like saying Jesus. And Mr. Rogers is a real person.

It's Jesus. Oh, okay. Well, I guess. I mean, I hear your point that it is a portrayal of Thomas Moore. You're talking about the movie from, what I'm going to get the year wrong, but roughly 1952 or something, right? Well, in the movie and the play and the, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, you can't just say the script a man for all seasons.

It has to be a specific portrayal of Thomas Moore. Well, the movie. Yeah, the movie, the 50s, yeah. The 50s, whatever, yeah, yeah. No, so that one, and it's particularly, I think particularly appropriate now, because this is not just, you know, the sacrifice, you know, the refusal to yield on truth. It's also a defense, you know, of the rule of law itself. I mean, for a classical liberal, you know, who is seeing like, you know, authoritarianism rising to try to overcome the rule of law.

Sarah, we know from our Wednesday dispatch podcast, we were talking about spending time defending the Constitution itself from the new right. Like this is, I think this is, you know, I think that that portrayal is, I think, incredibly powerful. And the interesting thing, it's so funny, Kristen, you brought up Mr. Rogers. My son saw the movie with my wife. I haven't seen the movie yet. And it really spoke to him. It really impacted him. He absolutely loved that movie.

And I think the thing that is potent about Mr. Rogers is that, you know, if you're talking about the characteristics of Jesus, you know, love your enemies, bless those who persecute you, the fruits of the spirit, kindness, patience, joy, peace. when you're trying to figure out what does that look like in a world that maybe largely doesn't maybe agree with or understand your perspective, but you're tasked with living out your faith in a way that those fruits of the spirit become obvious, that's quite a model. That's quite a model. And when you're a young man like my son who completely understands the side of life, he was the defensive end on his football team, that side of life is instinctive. feels instinctive, and this other side of life feels countercultural. Seeing that model, I think is very, very powerful. Exactly. Well, just to fact check myself very quickly,

a man for all seasons is 1966. And it's Paul Schofield who plays Thomas Moore. I would ask listeners, I'm curious what folks think between the Paul Schofield Thomas Moore, the Jeremy Northam Thomas Moore in the Tudors and the Anton Lesser Thomas Moore in Wolf Hall, three of my favorite pieces of pop culture cinema, just overall. And it only occurred to me right now that, of course, because they're all Thomas Moore. I love Fictioner portrayals of Thomas Moore. Spoiler, I think mine is Jeremy Northam, but it's close. And if you haven't seen the Tudors, just incredible what they've done with actual history. and making it, I mean, totally modern day culturally relevant.

Thank you so much. Kristen Dumay for joining us again. The book is Jesus and John Wayne. You can get it now in hardback, or in June, the paperback is coming. And we'll look forward to your next book on Christian femininity and the book after that, which I just asked for one on race as well.

Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This is great. You know what I'm going to be. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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