Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Those lamenting evangelical's apparent betrayal of "family values" fail to recognize that evangelical family values have always entailed assumptions about sex and power. The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire; its counterpoint is a submissive femininity. A man's sexual drive, like his testosterone, is God-given. He is the initiator, the piercer. His essential leadership capacity outside the home is bolstered by his leadership in the home, and in the bedroom. The responsibility of married women in this arrangement is clear, but implications for women extend beyond the marriage relationship. Women outside of the bonds of marriage must avoid tempting men through immodesty, or simply by being available to them, or perceived as such. Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuses of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of "seducing" their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity.

The evangelical church I grew up in prided itself on being "seeker friendly," which meant that, in practice, it avoided a lot of the topics that were otherwise important to the Southern Baptist Convention, of which it was a member, though it avoided having "Baptist" in its name--because that might scare away the seekers. We heard a lot about husbands and wives forgiving each other, and how to manage household finances, but sexual purity and the roles of men and women were not topics for the pulpit (which was really a Plexiglas lectern). But I got the message of complementarianism--that men and women are inherently different, and have different roles, usually with men at the "head" of the marriage--in other places, and at other times: at church camp, at retreats, in videos and books. It only took a couple of weeks of attending an evangelical church with me in college--a place I expected to be equally "seeker-friendly"--for my girlfriend at the time to hear that wives should submit to their husbands, and decide that she was done with this Christian stuff more or less for good. For my part, I didn't know what to do with these beliefs; they weren't important to me, nor did they make much sense, but I was never presented with any alternative.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne is a history of the evangelical movement in the United States, and how its commitment to complementarianism, and a network of associated ideas about race and gender, were developed. One thing that Du Mez makes clear is that it might have been otherwise; even back in the heyday of arch-evangelical Billy Graham, a more liberal strain of evangelical Christianity--anti-war, pro-abortion, anti-segregation--competed for dominance. Individual evangelical leaders, including Graham himself, even mixed these strains, but with the election of Ronald Reagan, a more militant and sexist version of evangelicalism crowded out its ideological competitors.

In a way, I knew the broad strokes of this history, because I lived inside of it. But there are few things that Du Mez's book made me appreciate, which I'll list here in no particular order. For one, the title isn't just a catchy bit of alliteration; Du Mez persuades that the swaggering machoism of John Wayne really has served as a symbolic lodestar for the evangelical movement. (Every fucked-up Christian bestseller Du Mez describes and analyzes seems to name check him as an antidote to a "feminized" culture, or feminized Christianity, that they see as ascendant.) For Du Mez, Wayne, a misogynist and racist, thoroughly enmeshed with Hollywood and not particularly religious, becomes a kind of avatar for later evangelical icons like Reagan and Donald Trump. None of these men was Christian in any real sense, but through their appeal to aggressive masculine values, they captured evangelical hearts. It's a mistake, Du Mez writes, to think of evangelicalism as a specifically, or even particularly, theological movement; as these men show, its accompanying cultural values or as important, if not more.

Secondly, I was struck by how much much of a business the evangelical movement is. Ideologically, Du Mez traces evangelical roots back to Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, a 100-year old bestseller that imagines Jesus as an executive. Practically, the evangelical movement is driven by a handful of enormous corporate entities, some of which are non-profits, like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, but also mega-corporation Hobby Lobby and the Christian bookstore Lifeway, without which there is no evangelical movement, and which has immense power to push evangelicals in ideological directions by what it chooses to sell and promote.

Thirdly, I was really shocked by the enmeshment between the evangelical movement and the American military. I've always been aware of the way that the evangelical movement pushes "military values," though seeing all the seminars and bestselling books collected in on place, with their language about being a "warrior for Christ," is stomach-turning. More than that, though, I don't know that I had considered how the evangelical movement has captured the military. Du Mez presents a picture of the U.S. military and evangelical Christianity as mutually supportive entities: military values of violence, self-sacrifice, and authoritarianism are transformed by churches into a form of Christianity that the military then promotes among its members. Put this way, the culpability of evangelical Christianity in the worldwide violence wrought by the U.S. military after 9-11 is especially troubling.

Unsurprisingly, Du Mez's book has made her a popular target for evangelicals on Twitter, and elsewhere. But I had actually been expecting, and hoping for, something a little more polemical: though Du Mez's sympathies are not hidden, Jesus and John Wayne is mostly a straightforward history of an ideological movement. It does a great job of examining the way that patriarchal values came to be so defining of the evangelical worldview; on the topic of race--the book's subtitle is How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation--it actually has far less to say. (Which is fine, I think--perhaps a topic for another book.) But in the end, the facts speak for themselves: Du Mez devotes the book's final chapters to the recent spate of sexual abuse scandals that have rocked evangelical churches and their governing bodies, like the SBC. These victims, Du Mez shows, are not the victims of Christians who have "betrayed" their values, but Christians who have lived out the very patriarchal and violent values which the churches have embraced.