There’s an entire ecosystem supporting this group, ranging from publishing houses to homeschooling, entertainment to think tanks and universities. In fact, the Bush presidency perfectly set the stage for Trump, who would shed his predecessor’s gentler approach in favor of a brutality and an aggression that was everything that his White evangelical supporters could have wanted.Īgain and again, Du Mez reminds us that the White evangelical world is as much about culture as it is about politics. Throughout the 2000s, the already-existing ties between patriarchy, gun fanaticism, and Islamophobia created a heady mix, one that still characterizes some corners of the White evangelical world to this day. Bush, who was everything that they could have wanted, both a born-again Christian and a “man’s man,” willing to take the battle abroad, which he did, with spectacularly disastrous results, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arguably their apotheosis was the election of George W. Each time they seemed to be down for the count, they came back swinging, often with electoral results. Indeed, as Du Mez illustrates time and again, evangelicals never did better than when they felt as if they were on the offensive against an increasingly secular culture. What mattered to evangelicals, however, was that Reagan, like Bush and Trump after him, presented as a “real” man, someone who would take the battle to enemies abroad and within. Seizing on the opportunity this presented, they went on the offensive and, thanks to the efforts of people like Phyllis Schlafly, they managed to get Ronald Reagan elected, despite the fact that he was, like Trump, a seemingly strange fit (especially since his opponent Jimmy Carter was himself an evangelical).
The challenge to patriarchy generated by the 1960s and the 1970s-particularly the American fiasco in Vietnam, the explosion of the feminist movement, and the rise of LGBTQ rights-caused, in Du Mez’s telling, both a crisis and an opportunity for evangelicals. What mattered was that he was the archetypal American male, willing to defend the weak (read: women) and vanquish the savage and the oppressor (read: Native Americans and various unsavory racial others). Though his private life might not have been what many evangelicals would have liked to see from one of their own, that didn’t really matter. For this generation, no figure more powerfully conveyed the male ideal than John Wayne.
However, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez documents in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, this backing of Trump was actually the apotheosis of decades of an evangelical culture war mentality.ĭu Mez contends that White evangelicals have had an obsession with masculinity-and, more generally, with gender-since at least the Cold War, when evangelists such as Billy Graham wedded together a fierce message of anti-communism with a fiery zeal for muscular Christianity. Here was a boorish businessman infamous for his extramarital affairs and his disregard for women, someone who seemed to have almost no religious understanding or belief at all. One of the most enduring mysteries of 2016 was the support that White evangelicals gave Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who seemed to be the exact opposite of everything they would want to see in a candidate.