‘Jesus and John Wayne’ and the Evangelical Reckoning

Calvin University history professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez delivers the 2022 Meador Lecture on her latest book, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” Dean Risa Goluboff introduced Du Mez. (University of Virginia School of Law, April 19, 2022)

[@susankirkpatrick316]

I am a grateful, former evangelical. I was born and raised in this. It’s taken me years to make sense of it all.

[@RobertWGreaves]

Born in 1951 as a young man I went to see the John Wayne movie, The Green Berets. I went to see the movie only because it was popular but had no preconceived idea what it was going to be like. I was appalled at the movie. It confirmed me in the direction of becoming a conscientious objector and I thereafter became a war protester. My later trek into Christian Fundamentalism was from an entirely different angle. But eventually the two angles converged and caused me to abandon the fundamentalist concept of biblical authority and biblical Christianity.

[@laviebohemia93]

The funniest, most ironic aspect of the idea that John Wayne was some kind of conservative, militaristic icon is that he was a total draft dodger.

[@frankptarney3861]

Kristin Kobes Du Mez has stimulated my thinking about the 2016 presidential election. Did evangelicals support Trump because of his perceived "qualities", or was it more of an aversion to Hillary as a FEMALE progressive? Had a moderate MALE Democrat run against Trump, would the results of that election been different? Just asking...

[@SadisticSenpai61]

In the 1990s, it was almost universally accepted in just about every mainstream church denomination that Dominionism (AKA Christian Nationalism) was a heresy and they absolutely wouldn't tolerate anyone pushing that kind of narrative - you'd literally get kicked out of the church if you pushed that ideology. This includes a lot of evangelical churches as well as fundamentalist churches (I grew up in an evangelical-adjacent fundamentalist Baptist denomination, the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches). But between 2005 to 2010, Dominionism managed to creep into a lot of mainstream churches and especially into evangelical churches. I think a lot of it had to do with the blowback from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and then came the election of Barack Obama. Nvm that Obama was himself a pretty centrist president who mostly maintained the status quo, he was a Black man in the White House. There was a lot of white panic at the fact that we now had a Black president. It didn't matter that his policies didn't depart from Bush Jr's in any significant way; it didn't matter that he was possibly the most mild-mannered guy in existence. To even the most mildly racist white evangelical and fundamentalist, it was a sign that they were "losing control of the nation." And that white panic is what really created the perfect paradigm for Dominionism to finally gain a foothold in the churches, especially as it became more and more closely tied with White Nationalism by a lot of far-right spokespeople and it started snowballing from there. And then in 2015, Trump comes down his stupid gilded escalator and announces he's running for president in an extremely racist speech and he immediately became the star of the show for saying what no one else would say that all these right-wing evangelicals had been primed for over the past decade. Even then, I highly suspect Trump couldn't have beaten anyone other than Hillary Clinton. Yes, the evangelicals would have always nominated him and would have always eagerly and cheerfully voted for him in the General, but they're only 23% of the eligible voting population and they always consistently vote for the GOP candidate anyway - they're not marginal voters that determine general election results, no matter how influential they are in the primaries. Hillary Clinton is intensely and deeply disliked by an astonishing number of ppl across many many different demographics, not just evangelicals (although they're probably the most viciously opposed to her). That depressed turnout overall and even managed to flip reliable third party voters like my Dad to vote for Trump - and my Dad hasn't voted for a Republican for president since he turned 18, despite voting in every single election. Ironically, my mother hates Trump so much that I was able to get her to vote for a 3rd party candidate for the first time in her life - and she's never voted for anyone who isn't a Republican (she believes Hillary's some kind of satanic monster, so she was never going to vote for Hillary). Yes, Hillary has a very fanatic and vocal fanbase (nearly as fanatic as Trump's in some ways), but they're also reliable Dem voters. Voters on the margins determine the elections, not the base - unless the base literally doesn't turn out at all. And most notably, Hillary's fanbase wasn't big enough to win her the primary anywhere near as decisively as Trump won the GOP primary. So they were never going to be big enough to determine the General Election results.

[@nimeshpatel6006]

Why did you end this video when Professor Du Mez opened it up for questions?

[@headlessspaceman5681]

It's really interesting that Wild At Heart was the catalyst for this book. That was the last book my dad ever gave me, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, when it was still new and popular, but I didn't understand exactly why I hated it at the time. I found it silly and shallow, at the time. I was a white conservative Christian and I was going off to a Christian college, at the time. I was raised in the Bible Belt going to church 2x a week, reading the Bible every day, raised and homeschooled by white fundamentalist Christians. I couldn't understand why my dad gave me this book. I couldn't even tell if he had read it first. But he loved listening to Dobson, and Limbaugh, et al. Good on you, as a Christian, for shining a light on this toxic Christian movement. Nowadays I see this toxic Christian movement as little less than the 4th rise of the KKK. Du Mez stops well short of that conclusion. The Venn Diagram of modern white Christian American evangelical beliefs overlap with KKK beliefs is just a circle.

[@remcoeijking9596]

Here in Europe many people ask themselves, why a Christian citizen of the US would oppose things like universal healthcare. They would benefit of it as any other fellow citizen. I often heard, that fanatic people do not aim to have any advantage out of political or societal progress, but instead see as many of their opponents being harmed, remain unsuccessful or at least block humanist timelines in the name of God. That would mean, that evangelical Christianity is no community of love and faith but rather of hate, without noticing the included selfhate in effect. Another more hilarious notion lays in the appearance of their masculine leaders, who very often do not look healthy, but are in many cases overweighted people, needing a lot of money to stay alive under permanent medical care. We all live in contradiction to what would be better for ourselves. But why should we evangalize it?

[@cybergrail]

Thank you for posting this important talk

[@correctchristian4255]

Without doubt we need these kinds of voices a place in the public sphere. The diseased agenda that people like Du Mez wants to spread is usually hidden in the dark. Having it spoken openly and therefor something that can be exposed for its sick and twisted narcissism is probably better than keeping it spreading in the dark recesses of secular elitism.

[@jasonguard9879]

Would love to hear her thoughts on Jan. 6th, Trump’s delusional denial of the election results and evangelicals’ willingness to embrace Q and the big lie, etc.

[@kriskd1239]

Excellent lecture. My close friend has been urging me to read Jesus and John Wayne. Just confirms what I have seen, known and felt all these decades I have been in America.

[@karentkelleher6119]

This is Awesome... had to save it and listen to this over and over again. I hope you have a podcast! Excellent!!!

[@angtxsun4460]

What a timely topic when this book was written, and a warning in the current 2024 election! Evangelicals better find critical thought quickly… our democracy is at stake! I would only add that a topic missing- the disbelief in modern science and how it intertwined with other issues played out in the Covid pandemic.

[@trishakoury-stoops2372]

I believe evangelicalism is a cult.. I love this book and it confirmed my belief and I’m no longer attending an evangelical church and so much happier and now really walking with Jesus for the first time!

[@tboned1]

How do you define what it means to be a Christian?

[@hardwoodthought1213]

In her books she states to make things easier she defines it using the Bebbington Quadrilateral, which is; Biblicism (emphasis on the authority of Scripture); Crucicentricism (centrality of the atonement); Conversionism; and activism (e.g. in evangelism; on issues of social justice).

[@Humorless_Wokescold]

This lecture is really helping me understand why the Atheist community fell in behind the Evangelical right. Despite any previous hostilities, it was sort of inevitable that movements built on hating the same things and revering the same imagined past would join forces. It probably doesn't hurt that the Christian right has walked away from arguments about evolution and intillegent design (for now at least)

[@RobsSG13]

I’m an atheist and have zero clue what you’re talking about. Most of us are left leaning and despise trump.

[@jonerzinger9873]

I left evangelicalism as a result of the Iraq invasion, the unqualified support for the invasion by the evangelical right in the US appalled me.

[@Hisloyalservantslistenlove613c]

Do you have permission from Mr Wayne’s family to talk about him and make money off his name?

[@jaymcgann6637]

This is a very intelligent person.

[@darthbigred22]

HA! If you only knew which side the reckoning was coming.

[@johnrichardson7280]

John Wayne blows, pass it on

[@musicappreciate]

Historians are like insurance adjusters- notice everything, write it all up but can’t solve anything

[@Calphool222]

Right there with you. I just finished Du Mez's book. It's a good book overall. It offers us no direction or alternatives though. You don't defeat a bad idea by describing how bad it is or where it came from. You defeat a bad idea by proposing better alternatives and selling them. We *have* to have a sensible response to Christian Nationalism and its embedded toxic masculinity. Young men are spending their 20s in their parents' basements buried in video games. Why? They don't have an alternative script. They've got a really bad script (Christian Nationalism/toxic masculinity), that many have figured out is bad (and from which women are rightly repelled), and *nothing else*. We already see the beginnings of the problems this creates (the incel phenomena).

[@Calphool222]

@24:29 - This gets to why, while I want to agree with Kobes Du Mez on a number of fronts, there's just some sloppy handling of Billy Graham in her book. She describes him as "pro war." Sorry, that's just flat out wrong. He was not *pro war* , but he was very concerned about communism, as was the entire nation. Even though she was born in the 1970s, as I was, it *feels* like she's forgotten how big of a deal the communist scare was. It permeated *everything* . You can't watch a movie like "War Games" and even make sense of it without understanding how the entire nation was *framed* around the "evil Russians Communists." "The Day After" was a huge cultural event, and there were big discussions with parents about how to watch it with your children. To describe Graham as pro-war borders on ridiculous given that backdrop, and I think it does him a great disservice. Grahams views on war shifted over time. She seems to miss the fact that Graham was a human being with shifting ideas and values, and he wasn't perfectly consistent, *because he was human*. By the Vietnam era he was sympathetic to the peace protestors, even though he didn't personally join the movement. By the late 70s and early 80s he was an advocate for nuclear disarmament, which put him at odds with some of the more maverick elements of evangelicalism. By the end of his life he was almost a pacifist. In addition, Graham strived to be an ecumenist, whereas most of the Christian Nationalist devotees are not. So I have very mixed feelings about Kobes Du Mez's scholarship in "Jesus and John Wayne." If she can do this much of a disservice to Graham, how truthful is she being with everything else? It's unfortunate, because I wanted to like the book, but I just have really mixed feelings about it. And what does she mean that communists were seen as "anti-American, anti-God, and anti-Family" *according to evangelicals* . HUH? Not just according to evangelicals. You can literally support each and every one of those assertions with words *from multiple Soviet Premiers' mouths* . Sloppy at best. Revisionist at worst.

[@marwar819]

Impressive lecture and material but, I am not convinced she is correct about religion not being hijacked by politics.

[@jamesklein1278]

Billy Graham... I love how you twisted the history of conservative Christianity. Billy Graham's life was all about Jesus call to love your neighbor as yourself. You lost all credibility not knowing the true heart of men. I read all the books you mentioned. There is only one link. The great commandment. This so called Professor is out of touch with todays Christian men. We are not afraid. We are in love with Jesus and spreading his gospel.

[@jordantsak7683]

Both Evangelicalism and the critic against Evangelicalism of this lady are awful. Evangelicalism is wrong and Political Correctness, Critical Race Theory and Woke culture are also wrong. America has brought to life both of these phenomena. So, America is wrong. I despise myself saying it, as I was always America friendly, but, yes, it is true, America is wrong and in decline. Let's hope she will find herself in the confrontation against Russia, one country which is also very very wrong.

[@dand6520]

John Wayne wast even Evangelical, this book is awful