| readinglist | |
|---|---|
| author | Kristin Kobes Du Mez |
| title | Jesus and John Wayne |
| summary |
Discusses the long-running campaign of American evangelicals to masculinize Jesus and the ripple effects that campaign has had on the nation's political discourse. |
| status | read |
| subjects | politics, history, evangelicalism |
Much of my reading, particularly that with a political bent, has been in the service of an admittedly vague goal: to understand how we got here. I want to know why people still argue about the teaching of evolution in public schools nearly two centuries after On the Origin of Species; why some elements continue to fearmonger about Marxist plots to destroy the US; why we still cling to antiquated systems that are demonstrably broken; why authoritarian sentiment is increasingly common. In short, I want to understand why the loudest discourse today is mired in the same decades-old conflicts and what we can do to escape that pattern.
It's an ambitious and likely unattainable goal, I know, but that won't ever stop me from trying.
Countless people throughout America's history have dedicated their lives to keeping yesterday's boogeymen alive enough to haunt us perpetually. A staggering number of them have employed religion—or more precisely, American evangelical Christianity—in that pursuit. Jesus and John Wayne chronicles many such people and the complex networks they formed. More than that, however, it is an in-depth examination of evangelicalism's longstanding project to infuse Christianity with an aggressively militant masculine edge.
About halfway through the book, the Religious Right's emphasis on culture war nonsense finally clicked for me: they simply cannot exist without it. Its members are not united by a shared vision for the future but rather by a collective distaste for the marginalized voices who are increasingly granted seats at the table. American evangelical Christianity is notoriously fractured, but the common struggle of a culture war provides a layer of abstraction to cover otherwise unbridgeable sectarian divides.
Consider the following quote from Al Mohler in the wake of the SBC takeover:
Mr. and Mrs. Baptist may not be able to understand or adjudicate the issue of biblical inerrancy when it comes down to nuances, and language, and terminology…But if you believe abortion should be legal, that's all they need to know.
With that in mind, what would happen if they were granted the “Christian nation” they claim to crave? Deep discussions of theology have never been particularly popular in American churches (as Hofstadter demonstrates), but those churches still hold a great diversity of beliefs. Could they remain as cohesive as they are today without the culture wars? The closest we've come to such a scenario was the vindication of the anticommunist evangelicals with the end of the Cold War. The defeat of a major military rival did not sate their militarism. How could it have when their identity had so long been built on a false sense of marginalization? Their only option was to find a new enemy, no matter the logical or moral leaps required to justify it.
It's easy to see how well Christian nationalism aligns with fascism: “Our nation was once great, prosperous, and (most importantly) Christian, but then the secularists and the humanists and the communists came along. And once they stripped the God out of America, they took the prosperity, too. Only by purging the nation of their influence can we catalyze a national rebirth and reclaim our rightful place atop the world stage.”
It is immediately clear from the early pages that this book was written largely in response to the Trump presidency. Untold quantities of ink, paper, and bytes have been consumed trying to make sense of it all. It's all too easy to open such a piece with one's jaw firmly on the floor and close without ever picking it up, let alone making a coherent point beyond the self-evident “Trump bad”. Perhaps that failure stems from clinging too tightly to the belief that his presidency was somehow an anomaly or that it was without precedent. “Why does two plus two equal four? Because it does, of course—now let's discuss something else.”
Du Mez, however, demonstrates that not only was such a presidency very much precedented, it was in fact the culmination of decades worth of cultural crusades. Evangelical leaders have long stoked fears of existential threats to the nation and their religion—which they view as one and the same—in order to mobilize their followers into political action. Their surprise was realizing how little control they had over the shape of that mobilization in the end. It would almost be amusing if not for the cruelty that ensued.
Having read Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, I felt a gap of sorts in Du Mez's analysis. While she frequently points out that apparent ideological contradictions are often not, she never directly invokes authoritarianism as a key factor. That understanding is a missing piece; trained by their leaders to fear attacks from evil actors in an unambiguous binary spiritual struggle, it is no surprise that evangelicals lined up behind a strong man who confirmed those vaporous fears and offered protection. Indeed, I now wonder how much of the correlation between authoritarianism and religion noted by Altemeyer is coincidental and how much was cultivated by the groups outlined in this book. Are the two meaningfully separable?
Given that the most powerful players in the text are from the same generation or two, it is tempting to believe that the Religious Right's power will wane as its figureheads and loudest followers die off. But that hope has proven false before.