Book Review: Jesus and John Wayne

To say that Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted Their Faith and Fractured a Nation hit a nerve is an understatement. This New York Times bestseller, written by Dr. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin College, is proving to be one of the most talked-about pieces of Christian commentary in recent history. The Englewood Review of Books named Du Mez's work its 2020 Book of the Year, writing, "Jesus and John Wayne is an absolute must-read, a stunning work, and one that deserves serious attention and further conversation." Karen Swallow Prior was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, "Among my own group of friends and peers, this is the book that they have been talking about more than any other in recent years … I can't think of the last one that people talked about this much." On Reading Religion, Darrius D. Hills offer similar praise, saying, "Jesus and John Wayne is an excellent resource to help make sense of the racial, cultural, and religious ideological fronts that currently shape evangelical Christianity and political alignments." In a book review published in the academic journal Church History, Jon Butler wrote, "But whether screed or academic tome, Du Mez's portrait of American evangelicalism makes Jesus and John Wayne not only one of the most important books on religion and the 2016 elections but one of the most important books on post-1945 American evangelicalism published in the past four decades."

Although I had not read Butler's review until I completed the book, I now realize that he identifies the key struggle I felt as I read it, even as he praises it. I struggled to place my finger on Du Mez's actual purpose, which impacted how I engaged with her work. Did she intend to write a work of academic history, or did she intend to write cultural commentary? One might look at this heavily cited (Jamie Carlson at Mere Orthodoxy does make a fair point that despite all the citations, direct citations are lacking in some places in favor of references to other secondary sources) and heavily researched book and assume it is intended to be academic in nature. However, in terms of tone, it clearly has surrendered any trappings of objectivity and draws much closer to Butler's screed. We, therefore, have a book with an identity crisis that has some valid critiques of the evangelical church, but I fear those critiques are going to get lost because of many unjustified mischaracterizations that will cause readers to question its credibility.

Du Mez's central thesis hinges on the widely reported 81 percent of white evangelical supporters supporting Donald Trump in the 2016 election (2). Although Joel Wentz argues in his YouTube review that Du Mez is not seeking to make a causal argument, these early passages in the introduction do seem to suggest that she wants to know why white evangelicals were so likely to vote for Donald Trump. She goes on to write, without citation, "Pundits scrambled to explain. Evangelicals were holding their noses, choosing the lesser of two evils—and Hillary Clinton was the greatest evil. Evangelicals were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments that would protect the unborn and secure their own 'religious liberty.' Or maybe the polls were misleading. By confusing 'evangelicals-in-name-only' with good, church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap" (3). As one who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020, I often used these reasons to explain why some of my best friends voted for a candidate that many of my other best friends could not tolerate. However, these reasons are quickly dismissed as Du Mez sees Donald Trump as an almost inevitable symptom of evangelicalism rather than an outlier.

Because this statement is in the introduction, the reader expects that the book will engage with these different reasons that many similarly qualified people gave to explain the evangelical support of Donald Trump, but these alternative claims are never dealt with. Instead, they are brushed aside in favor of Du Mez's thesis. She writes, "It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals' embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad" (3). In an interview with the All That to Say Podcast, Du Mez goes deeper and says, "What we see happening is rather than the biblical example of Jesus in the gospels actively shaping visions of what it is to be a Christian man, we see this kind of secular model of heroic warrior masculinity end up shaping conceptions of who Jesus was, so that Jesus Christ becomes a warrior with tattoos down his leg, wielding a bloody sword charging into battle to slay his enemies, and that is the Jesus that evangelicals are called to follow."  A few pages later, she rejects evangelicalism as a set of theological convictions (a claim also noticed by the odd duo of Al Stewart for The Gospel Coalition: Australia as well as Dalaina May of Christian Feminism Today) and defines it as "a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity" (6-7). These four themes bring the reader through the remainder of the book; when she discusses evangelicals, she is not using the term as I or many self-professed evangelicals would use it. Rather than a descriptor of a set of theological tenets, she is using evangelical to describe a culture that possesses these traits, regardless of its members’ theological convictions. The first step to understanding someone's argument is understanding the terms that person uses. In this case, readers need to make sure they understand what Du Mez means when she talks about evangelicals.

It may be easy to minimize the definitional question outlined in the previous paragraph. After all, does it really matter if she uses the word evangelical in the traditionally accepted sense? As she is clear about what she means when she uses evangelical, the reader should be able to understand the specific group of people she is talking about for the remainder of the book. The practical absurdity of that position is not difficult to expose, though. For example, what if Du Mez decided that people who had "a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity" were Satanists? She has defined her term, so the reader could understand that, in the context of her book, when she says that someone is a Satanist, this is the kind of person she means.

Words have historical context, and it is not wise to discard the entire past of a word. Perhaps it should not be surprising that in an interview on Calvin University's YouTube channel, Du Mez speaks about her book as a "work of deconstruction." Her purpose is to create a new definition and to disregard that historical context. It must be torn down or deconstructed in favor of a new conception. In his work Who Is an Evangelical?, Thomas Kidd writes, "Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit."[1] His book traces this usage of evangelical back to the early 1800s, with the word being used by Robert Southey to describe the followers of John Wesley and George Whitefield.[2] Even in the well-known travelogue, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, written by Randall Balmer, "Evangelicals generally believe that a spiritual rebirth, a  ‘born again’ experience (which they derive from John 3) during which one acknowledges personal sinfulness and Christ's atonement, is necessary for salvation."[3] He provides an entire forward to define evangelical, and it remains consistent with the historical tradition of what an evangelical is. Du Mez may reject Balmer's characterization as his book is now a few decades old. However, I offer it here along with Kidd’s as bits of evidence that other highly-qualified academics have utilized a very similar definition of evangelical. Historian David Bebbington also famously defined the term evangelical in his book, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1930s, using four crucial elements: conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism.

What is telling about Du Mez's definition of evangelicalism is that Bebbington is mentioned in one footnote in one paragraph. To her credit, she does accurately summarize his four elements and explains that this is how many evangelicals would identify themselves. This is accurate. However, she follows that up with a much more debatable claim. "When defined in this way, 'evangelicalism' manifests as a racially diverse and global movement. Yet when it comes to delineating the contours of modern American evangelicalism, the primacy of these four distinctives is arguable" (5). She asks which of the over 31,000 Bible verses evangelicals actually prioritize and what sort of Jesus they imagine when they think about the one that died for their sins. She continues, "In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith … Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many 'evangelicals’ hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally” (5-6) (it is worth noting that in an otherwise critical review posted by Denver Seminary, Scott Wenig sees this recognition of evangelicalism as a cultural movement rather than simply a set of theological truths as a strength of the book. He rejects many of her characterizations of evangelicalism, but he appreciates viewing it as a cultural movement broadly).

Notice the slippery nature of this definition that she acknowledges but pushes aside. In short, evangelicals believe a certain set of things. There are many people who call themselves evangelicals who are theologically illiterate and therefore do not believe those things. Logically, it should be straightforward that these people are, therefore, not evangelicals. Philip Christman, in a review at Christian Century, tellingly writes, "Some readers will feel that the texture and diversity of American evangelical experience aren’t represented in the story Du Mez is telling, and they aren’t wrong. But writing about the many ways of being evangelical simply isn’t her project." I believe he is correct, but this emphasizes the massive linguistic issue at the foundation of this work. She uses the word evangelical to refer to a subset of evangelicals (and reaffirms this in a video on her YouTube channel), many of whom would not even be considered evangelicals by the traditional definition used in the field. Just because someone labels themselves as something does not mean they are that thing. Just because I label myself as an NBA player does not mean that I actually am. If I show up at Madison Square Garden with the uniform on, they will not let me on the court because I am not actually the thing that I identify as. I may believe I am part of that group, but by a set of standards beyond my own mind, I am not a member of that group. Therefore, no one should judge the talent of the New York Knicks based on my individual talent. That would be a poor representation of their basketball team. This is essentially what Du Mez is attempting to slip through, and it challenges the foundation of her argument as she uses an illegitimate definition.

The end of that same paragraph even challenges the generalizations she just made. She writes, "This is the case especially when it comes to Christians of color: just 25 percent of African Americans who subscribe to all four distinctives identify as evangelical" (6). Is it true that this group of African-American Christians who actually identify as evangelical are somehow committed to a belief system intertwined with white racial identity? That is a very bold claim, and it is evidence that this argument seems to be too broad for the case she is trying to make.

Michael Young wrote a scathing critique of the methodology behind Jesus and John Wayne in the American Reformer. He points out that Du Mez “simply ignores the Evangelical’s own claims about what drives him, and decides to analyze Evangelicalism through the lens of cynicism she has constructed.” She devotes one paragraph to this book's introduction to dismiss the most influential historical definition of evangelical. It does not matter what evangelical means or why people might choose to label themselves as evangelical; the label that she has applied to these individuals means that they must be complicit in this terrible system that the subtitle claims is corrupting faith and fracturing a nation. Even in a highly favorable review at Divergence on Patheos, Darrell Lackey also seems to agree that the only thing that is the same between the group that Du Mez identified and evangelicalism, as historically understood, is the same word. He writes, "The current amalgam of right-wing political ideology, white nationalism, gun-rights, militant, patriarchal, conspiracy laden, anti-science, prone-to-violent make up of much of white male evangelicalism, is really more a new religion, rather than anything related to Christianity other than a cursory and surface sharing of language." He rightly recognizes that this definition of evangelical is fundamentally different from what has been understood historically, even from his much more progressive vantage point than mine. May, whose review from Christian Feminism Today has already been referenced, affirms a similar characterization of how evangelicalism is defined by this work, "As she showed so clearly in this masterful work, evangelicalism was founded on fear, sexism, racial prejudice, and a thirst for power." This is contrary to the historical definition but is a fair presentation of Du Mez's contention. Stephen J. Matlock, in his review, summarizes the picture of evangelicals that he took away from this book, "That’s the summation after reading this masterful, wonderfully researched book about the peculiarities of white Evangelicalism and the Americanized Jesus who was once Brown and poor and despised, the victim of the oppressive empire, but who has been transformed into the muscular, gun-toting, migrant-hating, welfare-despising, violence-loving, manly man-centered white male gonzo who seeks to rule everyone by force for their own good and for the pleasure and power of white men." Notice that we have two distinctively different definitions of what it means to be an evangelical, and they are clearly talking about different things even though they are using the same term. One is the historically accepted definition, and one is the definition used for this book's purposes.

Even though this review has only approached the first approximately 2% of Jesus and John Wayne, the foundation for Du Mez’s argument has been shakily laid. Evangelical culture, the entire thing, is a culture of patriarchy, Christian nationalism, and white racial identity. Even David French, who wrote a blurb for the book, wrote in his largely positive review at The Dispatch, “I think Du Mez paints with too broad a brush. She aims at almost all of white Evangelicalism. I fear that she’s taken aim at individuals—including people I know—who differ from her theologically but do their best to keep their eyes focused on Jesus, not John Wayne. One does not have to agree entirely with John Piper, for example, to know that he has paid a steep price for opposing some of the very trends that Du Mez identifies in her book.”

Similarly, in an interview with NPR, Du Mez admits, in response to a question about evangelicals voting for Donald Trump as a John Wayne kind of figure, “Not all evangelicals will say that. But there is this strong kind of justification for their vote for Donald Trump in terms of, he is a strongman.” She admits that there are exceptions to her own rule while simultaneously saying that her characterization is true. A characterization like this may have caused Chrissy Stroop to write in a review for the Boston Globe, “One of the key points the book stresses is that as Christian nationalists, the vast majority of white evangelicals believe that our country’s flourishing depends on aggressive male leadership.” There is an equivocation between Christian nationalists and white evangelicals as if the terms are interchangeable. That is patently false. This is an equivocation that is clearly perceived by even those who are predisposed to review Du Mez’s work favorably. If a book’s thesis is called into question, the entire project rests on a shaky foundation.

In approximately 300 pages, Du Mez takes the reader on an intellectual history of evangelicalism. She rightly chronicles many awful chapters in the church's history, from the distant past to the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements. There is no denying that plenty of terrible things have taken place in churches that were denied or discounted. No one can deny that there have been numerous instances of racism, sexism, and abuse in the history of Christianity at large, some even professing to be done in the name of Jesus Christ. Reviewing Jesus and John Wayne for Mere Orthodoxy, this is part of what Sean Michael Lucas hopes readers take away from Du Mez's work. He writes, "The real question is not whether evangelicals experience an interplay between theology and culture (we all do); rather, it is whether evangelicals are willing to be self-critical enough to recognize that there may be significant cultural blind-spots that are hindering the advancement of the Gospel itself." The church should undoubtedly examine itself continually to make sure that we align with God's word and are not blinded by our own culture, desire for power, or biases. In a largely critical review on RENEW.org, Guy Layfield acknowledges that this book had some valid critiques, but it ultimately "was a missed opportunity for an intriguing historical examination because it failed to call people to positive change and instead served to further escalate existing political tensions." He acknowledges several points that particularly complementarian Christians could learn from this book despite being unconvinced by its overall argument. This is just one example, but many of the critical reviews I have linked to in this post acknowledge important issues brought out by this book that evangelical churches legitimately need to wrestle with. Again, the many scandals poignantly portrayed by Du Mez are terrible, and the church ought to do better. Critiquing Jesus and John Wayne does not mean automatically denying everything that she chronicles.

However, in his review at Ad Fontes, John D. Wilsey asks a critical question, “Are the failures of white conservative evangelicals normative? In other words, is evangelicalism inherently racist, sexist, nationalistically chauvinistic, and bloodthirsty?” Returning to Young's review, he writes, "Rarely does Du Mez argue that the theology of Evangelicals is wrong on the merits. She does not show that they have made an interpretive mistake, nor does she argue, prove, demonstrate, or otherwise show that the tenets of American Evangelicalism are not warranted. Instead, she asserts that they are defined by cultural and political commitments and then draws negative inferences on that basis alone."

Interestingly, Neil Shenvi reviewed the book on his own website and also questions normativity, but he focuses on the author’s position. He writes, “While J&JW is frequently presented as a ‘history of evangelicalism’ (see the back cover), it’s important to recognize that it is inescapably normative. In other words, it is not merely describing what happened, it is also making value judgments about what happened.” Wilsey and Young ask if evangelicalism, as an ideology, prescribes terrible behaviors, while Shenvi asks if Du Mez’s position prescribes a specific view of evangelicalism. These perspectives seem to share the confusion that I mentioned earlier as I read this book. On the one hand, I was supposed to believe that evangelicalism, a cultural movement, not the actual theological tenets I hold, inherently possessed many terrible traits. On the other hand, I was supposed to believe that this book itself was a work of history, presenting me with the facts objectively. My conclusion was being prescribed by a book claiming to be in a genre that claims not to prescribe.

One of the more widely referenced passages in this book comes in the section regarding some of the "men's ministries" that Du Mez cites to reference the hold of militant masculinity on evangelicalism. She writes, "To be sure, singing about one’s testicles and landing blows to the head for Christ represent the more radical expressions of militant Christian masculinity, but GodMen and Xtreme Ministries only amplified trends that were becoming increasingly common in the post-9/11 era. As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream" (188). Both Alan Bean, in a favorable review for Baptist News Global, and Kristin Sanders, in a more critical review from Mere Orthodoxy, highlight this passage as a key concept on which Du Mez's argument rests. Bean writes, "Du Mez admits that men like Rushdoony and Gothard were initially viewed as fringe actors within the American evangelicalism. But evangelical opinion leaders almost never got into trouble for pushing the envelope on patriarchy. Only for those deemed too inclusive did danger lurk." On the other hand, Sanders asks, "It is claims like this that strain credulity. Is it truly difficult to distinguish songs about testicles from youth group Bible studies? Are they really motivated by the same thing?"

In a very positive review at Christianity Today, Daniel Harrell does offer a slight critique that may be helpful in light of this passage. He writes, "Du Mez seems guilty of a bit of confirmation bias. If you’re hunting for white privilege and fragility, it’s not hard to find. Having announced her thesis about militant Christian-nationalist, male-patriarchal supremacy, she mines American history for classic deplorables, most all of whom went on to be exposed for the scandalous sins their pride and prejudice invariably caused." As I noted earlier in this review, plenty of scandals and terrible things have happened in churches. That is undeniable. However, there is a serious conversation to be had about cherry-picking evidence. My personal experience listening to Christianity Today's podcast, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” is an example of this dynamic on a very micro level. Terrible things happened under the leadership of Mark Driscoll. That is true. I have not experienced those things in my church. That is also true. My experience does not invalidate the experience of those at Mars Hill. However, their experiences do not invalidate my very positive experiences in the church. They must be viewed in balance, which is another critical issue present in this book. Just as it is wrong for me to say that I have had a good experience in a church and, therefore, nothing bad could ever happen in every church, it is just as wrong only point to only bad experiences and say that they characterize all experiences. As Sanders implies, do we really have to broad-brush everything and literally argue that very different things absolutely, always stem from the same cause?

Notice that this question returns to the fundamental question of definitions of what it actually means to be an evangelical. Even if we accept the veracity of every scandal that she has outlined in this book (Sean McDowell calls into question the characterization of Explo '72, John Inazu challenges her characterization of the alleged link between religion and abuse at the United States Air Force Academy in an otherwise very positive review, Scott Culpepper, in a very positive review linked to on Du Mez's own website, mentioned that Dordt College Republicans invited all Presidential candidates to campus in 2016; something that is not mentioned in her introduction which makes the small college feel like a bastion of Donald Trump support when it was not necessarily, Hunter Baker provides balancing comments to her less than flattering portraits of James Dobson and Charles Colson), would that disprove the central tenets of evangelicalism? In a predictably harsh review from The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood given that it is critiqued directly by Du Mez, Anne Kennedy writes, "By taking sincerely held theological and ethical beliefs off the table as possible motives for voting habits and replacing them with supposedly toxic masculine consumerism, Du Mez doesn’t have to deal with what many Christians in America actually believe." In his favorable review posted at In All Things mentioned above, Culpepper writes, "David Bebbington’s Quadrilateral, long accepted as a standard for scholarly definitions of evangelicalism, identified evangelicals according to particular behavioral characteristics and theological assumptions that recur throughout the movement’s long history. Du Mez insists that the most significant force shaping the identity of contemporary evangelicals is the network of informal neo-evangelical popular cultural influencers forged throughout the late twentieth century." Notice that both favorable and critical reviewers seem to agree on this point; Du Mez has decided to define evangelicalism in a way that is different from the scholarly consensus up until this point.

Perhaps one of the most unbelievable lines I have ever read in a book endorsement comes from Kirkus Reviews, and I think that it serves as a bridge to the final comments I would like to make about this book (Du Mez interestingly does not highlight this line on the endorsement portion of her website). They write, "While the author often paints with a broad brush, characterizing white evangelicals throughout as racist, hypernationalistic, and utterly patriarchal, readers not on the fringe right will find it difficult to take issue with her arguments." This is a remarkable statement. The reader is not supposed to be troubled by the fact that she paints with a broad brush. As a matter of fact, that is the key issue that I have tried to outline throughout this entire review. The fact that she is painting with a broad brush and overgeneralizing based on her own definition of evangelical that is different from the historical usage of the word is, in fact, a huge problem. That is precisely why this reviewer is taking issue with her argument. However, because I am taking issue with her argument on its merits, I am, therefore, part of the problem, the evangelical menace. Only someone on the fringe would say these arguments are problematic, and no one on the fringe can actually be called a reasonable critic.

I believe this book should be read because, as I said in the introduction, it is highly influential and will come up in any conversation about any of the issues it discusses. However, we must acknowledge that this book is not above critique by reasonable people, not just fringe radicals. Not only that, but this book needs to be critiqued because it does have some severe foundational problems and lacks historical context. It does tell part of the story of elements of evangelicalism in the United States, but it claims to do much more than that in a way that undermines its credibility, especially among those who really ought to hear some of the things she says that need to be reckoned with.

[1] Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 4, Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xvi, Kindle Edition.