Sometimes it’s exactly what we need to hear. No telling of history can be truly neutral and polemic is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is important to be clear at this stage that neither point here is intended as criticism, just observation.
It is clear throughout the book that she considers white American Evangelicalism to have consistently made the wrong choices. Jesus and John Wayne is also not neutral because Du Mez sees these things as negative. This has also been the model followed by political leaders including Ronald Reagan, George W Bush and Donald Trump in order to appeal to the white evangelical base. The idealised American Christian hero is represented by the actor John Wayne in his Westerns. That’s the basis for Du Mez’s book title. This also means that the culture is shaped by threat whether from Soviet Communism, Islam or a socially liberal authoritarian state leading to culture wars. Her thesis is that there has been a particular desire amongst evangelicals, a hankering for a culture that is muscular and manly that centres around a type of American Dream nationalism and looks for warrior heroes. It’s an attempt to understand and analyse contemporary evangelicalism in the American context, particularly in the light of trying to understand how evangelicals ended up supporting Donald Trump. The book isn’t simply a neutral retelling of events.
I’ve been working through the list and have just completed Du Mez’s book.ĭu Mez is a historian and so her book offers a potted history of 20 th and early 21 st Century American Evangelicalism. It’s also one of the books mentioned by Jonathan Leeman in article about deconstruction.
One of the big hitter books of the last year has been Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
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