Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation

Book Review (Kristin Kobes Du Mez)

CW: This review discusses sexual abuse and sexual assault.

With its by-line, this book makes clear that its going to be a blistering critique of white evangelicalism in the US, and it is. It's an historical explanation of evangelicalism through the 20th and 21st centuries looking at the intertwining of militancy, masculinity, politics, sex, power, and religion. And it's sobering reading.

I'm going to start at the end, with the most difficult chapter (16), which deals with a whole slew of high-profile cases of evangelical male leaders exposed, and generally deposed, for immoral and illegal conduct. This includes the bullying and domineering abusive behaviour of Driscoll, Darrin Patrick, James MacDonald, and C.J. Mahaney. And then it goes on to the stuff that I find gut-wrenching, the sexual abuse cases involving both republican political appointees (Roy Moore, Brett Kavanaugh), and church leaders: Ted Haggard, Joe White & Pete Newman, Mahaney's handling of abuse, Bill Gothard, Doug Phillips, Doug Wilson's whole cult-like enterprise, the Duggar family, Jack Hyles, Doug Hyles, and so on and so on.

What's even more troubling is

"History, however, makes plain that evangelicals’ tendency to dismiss or deny cases of sexual misconduct and abuse, too, was nothing new." p277

Evangelical leaders regularly, steadfastly, almost uniformly closed ranks, supported perpetrators, re-instated fallen leaders, refused to listen to victims, silenced women, and opposed justice. Even those who themselves who themselves were seen as luminaries, supported and platformed others. To this day I find it deeply disturbing that John Piper platform(s) and associated with Doug Wilson.

How did we get here? How is that a movement ostensibly devoted to biblical values, to protecting women and the vulnerable, to high standards of sexual purity, is the very place where women are degraded, the most vulnerable are exploited, and the wicked are protected and kept in power? Standard evangelical answers of "well, sin" are insufficient. Not because they it isn't true, but because it is too simplistic.

Du Mez's answer sprawls backwards in the book. The previous chapter examines Trump, and why a man who was so obviously immoral, both by evangelicals' own purported standards, and by a huge raft of biblical ones, let alone secular ones, reached and maintained around 80% approval among white evangelicals? Du Mez's answer here is that Trump's popularity wasn't despite evangelicalism, it is because within white American evangelicalism Trump "was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity." (271).

That's Du Mez's thesis, and through the whole preceding book she makes her historical case, going right back to the early 20th century and the emergence of John Wayne and Teddy Roosevelt as ideals of American manhood and muscular Christianity. Over the subsequent chapters she explores the developments of evangelicalism as a movement, with close attention to its ideals of masculinity, the emergence of complementarianism, and its involvement in politics. It's a damning assessment and makes me want to run from anything like this a million-miles. Here's some of her conclusion:

Weaving together intimate family matters, domestic politics, and a foreign policy agenda, militant masculinity came to reside at the heart of a larger evangelical identity. p295

FROM THE START, evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself. p296

And yet, when I think of the evangelicalism and complementarianism of my own context, it shares (at least my own personal slice of it) very few of these features. I would disagree with American evangelicals on guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation. (Even, I dare say, the way we think about sex is importantly different). That's not true of everyone in my context, but Australian evangelicals find US evangelicals very, very strange on many fronts.

Nevertheless, I (we?) have to wonder - are there things in the DNA of complementarianism that promote a toxic masculinity, a militant mindset, an abusive framework? Are the critiques that come out of American egalitarianism which find all complementarianism to be dangerous and abuse-enabling, correct?

I find these critiques very compelling and I think they need to be taken with due seriousness. I do think there are elements of various forms of complementarianism that are deeply unhealthy, and some that are innately wrong. However, I don't think this means complementarianism by definition everywhere and always is bad. Or, at least, the way we discuss and talk about these issues within churches needs to go beyond the labels complementarianism and egalitarianism, because those labels are short-circuiting genuine discussion of complex issues around sex and gender, difference, hierarchy, and power.

One thing I’ve become convinced of is that most constructions of masculinity and femininity are driven by culture, not nature nor the Scriptures. Honestly, I've yet to see an account of 'what it means to be a man' that has convinced me. What strikes me as so dysfunctional about the history of American evangelicalism that Du Mez lays out, is that the ideology of masculinity there is bound up in aggression and militancy and domination. To pick out the idea of men as warriors, in particular - if you place the idea of violence at the heart of what it means to be a man, then ultimately killing other people is godly and manly, and your god must be into murder, and so it's sin, not godliness, that is masculine.

Similarly, if your image of Jesus has to be macho-Jesus, if you have to contort the Christ of the Scriptures to love guns, hunting, war, and being a tough guy, you have remade Jesus in your own cultural image. This is idolatry. And if your vision of masculinity can't accommodate Jesus, you've got a problem with both.

At the end of the day, I am skeptical of most accounts of biblical versions of gender roles, because most of them seem more indebted to Anglophone cultures of the 1950s than anything else. That, however, doesn't convince me that sex differences don't exist. I’m just far more reticent about what those differences are. For the most part, though, we'd be far better off helping men to think a lot more about "what does it mean to be a godly human being" than and worrying a lot less about "am I a manly enough man?"

Let's return to Du Mez's conclusion, with this line:

Despite evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined chiefly by its theology. p298

And here is the crunch. All the hand-wringing after Trump got into power about definitions of evangelicalism and these were not "real" theological evangelicals, but in fact plenty of them were/are. Plenty of Bible-believing, born-again, theologically astute and orthodox evangelicals were willing to back Trump. Why? Because there's a sickness at the heart of their theology which is a hypocritical mismatch between their profession of Scripture and the source of their social and political commitments. It's why slavery existed, and persisted; and why systemic injustice exists and persists in places with ostensibly Christian majorities. It's why we're so often blind to our own 'glaring' faults. It's pervasive, endemic, systematic, corrupting sin that silences the prophetic witness of the Bible that is the very thing that is meant to put these things to death, and instead allows the church to promulgate the most heinous sins, in the name of the Lord.

There has to be a better way.

post-script

I was going to leave it at that, but there is a better way, at least in terms of churches dealing with abuse. To draw on a recent but horrific example. The L'Arche movement is a series of communities in which disabled and non-disabled people live and work together, founded out of the Catholic church. Very recently a report came out that was independent, thorough, transparent, and heart-breaking. Jean Vanier, the founder, and his mentor Fr. Thomas Philippe, with a small cadre, founded the entire movement to sustain a small cult-like group that enabled sexual abuse. The organisation at large has expressed repentance, a willingness to do reparations, restoration, cooperate fully with civil and criminal justice, and a repudiation of their very own founder. I could bring up other examples of this kind, but wrestling with sin when it's at the heart of institutions and cultures requires a reckoning, repentance, lament, and expiation that goes to the very depths of who we are.

post-post-script
I tend not to write out of response to contemporary events, and I also schedule most of my posts in advance and then blissfully forget about them; but between writing this and posting it there has been yet another high-profile story break in which a conservative, right-wing, complementarian leader and their church leadership who have been shown to have been enablers of abuse within their church, silencing and victimising the victims themselves. This, sadly, no longer surprises me. Nor the reaction of church leaders and elders to slander all critics as woke, liberal, anti-gospel, etc., and defending their own, instead of pursuing truth, transparency, accountability, repentance, justice, forgiveness, and reparation for their own actions. It is no wonder to me that under such betrayals of God, people leave evangelicalism, or the church, or abandon faith altogether. Let us end then with Jesus’ words:

it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Matt 18:6b.