While Du Mez does repeatedly return to Wayne in terms of his image and political activism, there’s a lot more going on in the book to which the title fails to hint.įor the theologically conservative reader, Jesus and John Wayne starts off as a real drag. In the second chapter, titled “John Wayne Will Save Your ,” Du Mez cites Wayne as an archetype of the ideal masculine role model within a white evangelical culture that overlooks his three marriages, multiple affairs, racist views, use of profanity on-screen, and avoidance of serving in war himself. I’m somewhere between Jesus and John Wayne I try to be more like You, Lord but most days I know I ain’t So goes the refrain:Ī cowboy and a saint, crossing the open range
However, its ideological slant and snide tone get in the way of having a more positive impact, instead choosing to conjure the cheers of a choir which seeks to have its own left-leaning biases confirmed.ĭu Mez takes the title from a Gaither Vocal Band song called “Jesus and John Wayne,” a song that contrasts a tender image of Jesus and a rough-around-the-edges image of John Wayne.
Jesus and John Wayne does a decent job of historically documenting actual problems in American evangelicalism. So let’s start off by naming the topic more accurately than the publisher wanted to allow: “white evangelical masculinity and militarism.” Since the book was published in June of 2020, they naturally had the impending general election in mind. For me, this was a problem because I’d always considered this my book on white evangelical masculinity and militarism, and so to have to come up with a description of the book not using those two key words was a challenge. It was made especially difficult by the fact that my publisher ended up dictating that I was not allowed to use the words ‘masculinity’ or ‘militarism’ anywhere in the subtitle or the title of the book, and this was simply because they were big words, and this is a trade book - it’s made for popular audiences - and they wanted a book that people would pick off the shelf. In a video where she discusses the tone of the book, she notes how the main title of the book was easy to determine but the subtitle was not: Trump, the body of the work doesn’t mention him until page 251. Although the introduction makes plentiful mention of Mr. That is at least how the jacket describes the book, but I believe this to be a poor description. In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, she lays out a seventy-five-year history of evangelical culture with an aim towards explaining the cultural rise of Donald Trump among white evangelicals. Kristin Kobes Du Mez (pronounced “doo may”) is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.