TOKENS PODCAST: S3E11
An interview with Kristin Du Mez, Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University and author of a provocative new book entitled Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. In light of the fact that 81% of white evangelicals supposedly voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, many have tried to make sense of how “family values voters” could have supported Trump. Du Mez, in contrast, claims that this support of Trump was not in contradiction to, but consistent with, the deeper values of American evangelical Christianity. Regardless of your politics, you will not find this an episode that leaves you without some emotion.
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ABOUT THE GUEST
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and Christian Century, and has been interviewed by NPR, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the AP, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee Camp: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Kristin Du Mez: How could family values of evangelicals support a man like Trump?
Lee Camp: That's Kristin Du Mez, Professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University. This is the very serious question that drives her recent book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Kristin Du Mez: If we take a closer look at what those values actually are,
Lee Camp: That is, if we look closely at what the wide-spread "evangelical values" actually turn out to be, then:
Kristin Du Mez: What I pieced together is we're really talking about a rugged and aggressive assertion of white patriarchal authority.
Lee Camp: Her thesis? That evangelical Christian values do -not-, in fact, stand in tension with the person and presidency of Donald Trump. Instead, she says: if we understand the ways in which white, patriarchal masculinity is,
Kristin Du Mez: At the center of evangelical politics, then again, we see a lot of continuity here.
Lee Camp: In other words, evangelical support of Donald Trump,
Kristin Du Mez: Is not a betrayal, it's a fulfillment.
Lee Camp: Agree or disagree, this episode will likely leave all of us with some sort of strong emotional response.
The interview with Professor Du Mez is coming right up.
Part 1
Lee Camp: Kristin Du Mez is Professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Today we're discussing her most recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Welcome Professor Du Mez.
Kristin Du Mez: Thank you. It's good to be here.
Lee Camp: That's great to have you. Your you're there in Grand Rapids, Michigan, right?
Kristin Du Mez: Yes.
Lee Camp: Yeah. And you've been teaching at Calvin College how long?
Kristin Du Mez: I think we're at 16 years now.
Lee Camp: Are you from Michigan originally?
Kristin Du Mez: No. I'm from Iowa. I'm from Iowa originally. And so I just ended up transplanted here in West Michigan.
Lee Camp: I guess you were at least prepared for the cold winters.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. Although Iowa gets a bit more sun. So here it's cold and cloudy, but.
Lee Camp: Ah, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah you get those long, long stretches of little sun coming off of Lake Michigan, I suppose.
Kristin Du Mez: Weeks. Weeks of it, actually.
Lee Camp: It makes it at least good for studying, studying and writing.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah, there aren't a lot of distractions. So it works for that. Not bad for a writer. Yeah.
Lee Camp: Yes. Yeah. Well thanks so much for your new book, Jesus and John Wayne. I must say I love the book and I think it's a terribly helpful book. And I'll also say that it's a really hard book to read in the sense of distressing.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. Yeah. I get that from a lot of readers. A lot of people talk about throwing it across the room, taking it in chapters at a time, processing it with other friends who are reading it. So I think for some people, especially if they find that they lived parts of the story it can be hard to kind of confront that reality.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I think even some of the figures, even though the world of American evangelicalism was not necessarily my world growing up, there were still nonetheless intersections with some of the major characters.
And I think seeing, then, in your book the breadth and the depth of context and background, all of a sudden it's like, oh my goodness. I didn't see, then, exactly what was going on, but then when you lay it out, it's very eye opening and very challenging. But I think where I would like to start, if it's okay with you, is near the end of your book with your discussion of the election of Donald Trump.
And I was wondering if you would just give us a reminder of why would it be on the face of it that the election of Donald Trump supported by white American evangelicals would be so problematic?
Kristin Du Mez: So these were the moral majority. These were our family values voters and Donald Trump on the surface seemed to stand against all of those values. So he was, you know, thrice, married, twice divorced. He was not an exemplar of moral virtue. He was crass.
He swore he was not one of them. At least he did not seem to be. Added to that he had until somewhat recently been a Democrat. He was iffy on pro-life and you know, it really across the board, he seemed to contradict what evangelicals said they stood for. And so their support, which started actually quite early on, already in late summer of 2015, some of the polls started to show white evangelical support lining up behind Donald Trump.
This was not kind of top-down support, not from the leaders at first. It was grassroots support. So it seemed baffling to many observers that they would support this particular Republican candidate.
Lee Camp: And then they go on to become. What, 80, 81% in the first election of white evangelical males voted for Trump. Is that right?
Kristin Du Mez: Well, that's according to the earliest exit, Paul's revised slightly down but approximately. And of course that was in November of 2016, just weeks after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. And that really, I think, brought this question to the surface, of, how could family values of evangelicals support a man like Trump? A man who confessed. Right?
We had video evidence confessed to assaulting women. Uh, how could evangelicals possibly support a man like Trump?
Lee Camp: So following election night, you have pundits, various social commentators trying to figure out how could the apparent contradiction between American evangelicals and Donald Trump be explained? And you worked through a number of theories or hypotheses that are set forward. One being well, the pollsters simply weren't using good definitions.
When they're talking about evangelicals they are talking about fake evangelicals. People who really don't know anything about evangelicalism. So what happened? What about that hypothesis?
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. So that's one of the theories, especially by evangelicals themselves and particularly by, you know, quote unquote, never Trump evangelicals. But evangelical leaders who wanted to say this is not who we are. Folks like Russell Moore and historians like Thomas Kidd would say, you know, I don't know of any evangelicals in my circles who are supporting this man.
So clearly the real evangelicals, the faithful church attending evangelicals. The evangelicals who know their Bibles, right? These are not the evangelicals who are supporting Trump. These are evangelicals in name only, and it's because of sloppy pollsters who are just throwing people into this category.
People who, you know, haven't attended church in months, if not years who really aren't active evangelicals. This must be the demographic who is supporting Trump. Early on one survey suggested that church attendance was negatively correlated to support for Trump. Now every survey that came out after that disproved that, but that survey, I think for a while, at least gave some, kind of, ammunition, if you will, to never Trump evangelicals who wanted to maintain that the real Bible believing Christians weren't those who are supporting Trump.
Lee Camp: Hmm. So then the second sort of possibility: some suggested that it was economic motivations, economic factors?
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. Yeah. And that just didn't hold true. That in fact if you look at those who were lower on the economic scale they were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton and even if you factor in race. And so the economic motivation, although you heard a lot of that talk that Trump connected with those who felt that they had no other choice and that he offered them hope that the survey data in the end did not actually upholds that thesis.
Lee Camp: And then a third. And this is one I think I heard most commonly, it suggested that many evangelicals were kind of holding their noses. They didn't want to be voting for Donald Trump, but they’d vote for him due to issues like abortion, Supreme Court appointees, and so forth.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. And I think this one does have some truth to it certainly on an individual level. Right? I think that for many evangelicals, it's hard to know exactly how many, what proportion. It was difficult to vote for somebody like Trump, at least that first time.
And there were many evangelicals for whom Trump was not their first choice. So even though we did see that early support in the primary season, there were many other candidates and many evangelicals favored other candidates early on and some maintained that position throughout. So, the holding their noses theory does actually hold some water.
But what was important to me as I observed this was to watch what happened after the election, right? To watch if a lot of evangelicals really were holding their noses, I was expecting to see either some buyer's remorse down the line, or some critical voices really emerging from among that faction who were holding their noses.
And there was very little of that in the initial months. And in fact, over the course of four years. The most prominent evangelical voices against Trump during the Trump presidency were almost without exception. Those who had voiced their concerns, their opposition to Trump, before the election.
And so holding their noses didn't make a lot of sense to me when I looked at what came next. And also when I took a careful look at the rhetoric that evangelicals were using to defend their vote for Trump. Rhetoric that pointed to, you know, he was kind of God's anointed. He was going to be evangelicals ultimate fighting champion. He was going to protect them. And this rhetoric I recognized as similar rhetoric that they were using actually for more than a generation to kind of prop up this strong militant, masculine ideal. And that's really where I found the continuity that this model of aggressive leadership, of rugged masculine leadership, was something that had a much longer history.
And that's where I think we can see some continuity and this wasn't just holding their noses. It was kind of active support on the part of more evangelicals than we might like to think.
Lee Camp: Yeah. In the same section where you worked through those different hypotheses for explaining the apparent discrepancy between evangelical values and the support of Trump you come to this culminating point and you say evangelicals had not betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half century long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity.
Your whole thesis, and I guess might summarize in saying no, actually Donald Trump was consistent with the values of American evangelicalism. Is that fair to say?
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. If we take a closer look at what those values actually are, if we take a closer look at what constitutes family values politics, what's ultimately at the core and go back to history. And what I pieced together is we're really talking about white patriarchal authority and a rugged and aggressive assertion of white patriarchal authority.
And if we do place that at the center of evangelicalism and certainly evangelical politics, then again, we see a lot of continuity here. This is not a betrayal, it's the fulfillment.
Lee Camp: Yeah, and so John Wayne then becomes this sort of surprising embodiment of this sort of set of values. And you say that he himself, though he’s not a Christian, he's thrice, married twice divorced, several high profile affairs, a chain smoker, a hard drinker. And then you say yet he would capture the hearts and imaginations of American evangelicals.
I think if I was suspicious about your book at the start, it was the notion that I thought you were probably gonna use John Wayne at the beginning. That you would have one anecdote. And that then you could kind of set that up and then you could talk about what you're going to talk about.
But I was amazed at how often he shows up in these very different stories and very different settings. It was just, I just, from, from what, 50 years prior, even up until the campaign of Donald Trump.
Kristin Du Mez: Up until the campaign, right. I was surprised as you were, honestly, I did not set out to write a book about John Wayne. You know, very early on when I started reading popular evangelical literature on Christian masculinity in the early 2000s, is when I first started paying attention to this. I noticed that to my surprise, these, you know, quote unquote, Bible-believing evangelicals, weren't actually drawing on the Bible very much to craft their vision of Christian manhood. Instead, they were looking to Hollywood heroes: to Mel Gibson's William Wallace from the movie Braveheart to mythical warriors.
And then John Wayne just kept popping up in ways that surprised me. And so as a historian, you have to go back in time and to pay a little bit more attention to John Wayne as an icon, you know, onscreen, but also his political activism, offscreen things started to make an awful lot of sense.
And yes, he just kept popping up throughout the narrative.
Lee Camp: You quote Baptist scholar, Alan Bean, who said “The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your ass.”
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. So John Wayne starts to represent certainly by the 1960s and 1970s, this kind of image of conservative American manhood, conservative white American manhood, this masculinity from a time gone by. Before feminists and liberals and hippies, you know, got a hold of things. This kind of iconic masculinity of, you know, the hero on the old West. And the man who had set things right, who could use violence as necessary to achieve order, right?
To pursue righteousness. And this kind of heroic masculinity was exactly what he embodied on screen and what he came to kind of symbolize as this cultural ideal around which religious and secular conservatives could unite.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I appreciate that you, you go all the way back to the early 20th century and starting to do your historical archeological dig if you will. And surprising to, I think, a lot of folks would be that actually it's kind of Protestant liberals in some ways in early 20th century who embody what looks more like American evangelicals from today in the sense of the American civic religion.
So given that that might be a surprise, could you describe that a bit?
Kristin Du Mez: Sure. Yeah. I wanted to kind of set up in the beginning of the book that things have not always been the way they are now and it just disrupts some of our categories. So both in terms of this embrace of a militant Christian masculinity, liberal Protestants were as likely to embrace that as conservatives in the early 20th century, this earlier era of a muscular Christianity, right?
The Teddy Roosevelt era. But also in terms of Christian nationalism, the idea of Christian America and in terms of American militarism in the first World War. There you do have some conservative Protestants like Billy Sunday, who are very pro military and very Christian nationalists. But you also have liberal Protestants who again are as likely if not more likely to embrace American militarism. This idea of, you know, America had a divine role to make the world safe for democracy. And in liberal Protestants, again, we're kind of gung ho militarists in the first World War. But they emerged from that war chastened in a way that conservative Protestants don't and that kind of sets up the trajectories that we'll go on to shape 20th century American religious history.
Lee Camp: So then, as you kind of roll on through the century, you kind of give a fairly prominent role to Billy Graham. So how does he fit into all of this?
Kristin Du Mez: Billy Graham really does play a central role in the rise of modern evangelicalism. In the 1940s in 1942, the national association of evangelicals is formed. And it's formed to unite these kind of disparate groups of conservative Protestants, most of whom had failed to kind of maintain control of mainline denominations and the fundamentalist modernist controversies of the 1920s.
And they didn't disappear after Scopes Trial, right. They didn't go away and shame. Instead they founded their own institutions. They founded their own colleges and Churches and in the 1940s, that's when they came together and said, you know, we're doing a lot of really good work, but think about what we could do if we banded together, think about what we could achieve. And they saw themselves as this faithful remnant, but they really wanted to influence American culture more broadly. And so they had a plan and they write about it. They talk about it. And their plan is to take to the airwaves. Radio is going to be a. It already was, and they were going to use that effectively.
They were going to have organizations for their institutions, for their colleges, their Bible schools and stuff. They're going to have Christian magazines so that they could reach tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Christian bookstores, Christian publishing. What's amazing is that they accomplished this all in like 15 years.
And Billy Graham was very much at the center of that. He was at the center of kind of starting these organizations. He was at the center of connecting these evangelicals who had been scattered. And he did that primarily through his own celebrity. Right? He became the symbol. He became this symbol of American evangelicalism.
That was not something to be ashamed of, not something that was, you know, slinking in the shadows that he was dashingly handsome. He was beloved. He was a genuine celebrity figure. And before long he was mingling with American presidents. And so he came to symbolize this new evangelicalism in the post-war era.
One that was not afraid to kind of take its place at the center of American politics at the center of American society.
Lee Camp: So he then at least becomes one of the major characters in maybe picking up the thread, going back to American Protestant liberalism with its sort of moral exceptionalism or nationalism. Then this then makes its way into American evangelicalism. Right? So it's fascinating the way in which nationalism, imperialism, and that moral exceptionalism, becomes another kind of thread throughout your book, or really it's more like a really heavy three stranded rope, I guess that goes throughout the whole narrative.
Kristin Du Mez: Yes. That’s exactly how it felt writing it. Holding these strands together, yes. And Billy Graham there too was at the center, right? He rose to prominence as an evangelist for youth for Christ during the second World War. So Christian nationalism and his ministry was kind of steeped in Christian nationalism, Christian America.
It made sense. This is the second World War kind of good guys versus bad guys. But then that blends seamlessly into the early Cold War. And he becomes this cold warrior, right? As the Christian America now needed to be defended against communism and communists were anti-God, anti-family, and anti American.
And he just embraced that crusade and understood it as really inseparable from his evangelism, from his understanding of the Christian gospel.
Lee Camp: So I'm going to ask, I'm kind of moving from a historical question into a theological one and obviously you're not doing theology in this book, but just let me ask you from maybe from a historical perspective to reflect upon this theological question.
From my perspective, theologically. And I keep asking, how is it possible that all these categories could arise as they have arisen in the history? And going back for a moment to the quote cited from Alan Bean that you cited in your book, you know, the unspoken mantra, Jesus can save your soul. John Wayne will save your ass. There's a sort of dualism there, right? Between the spiritual and the bodily. We might say between religion and politics and the notion of Christians giving a sort of messianic role to the nation state seems to me that that could only happen with that sort of dualism, right?
That we've forgotten that theologically biblically Christianity was never separated from bodies and it was never separated from a corporate identity. The Christian identity was not national. The Christian identity was transnational. And yet here you meant evangelicals have been adopted a sort of thing that stands at, at, at its very heart in direct contradiction to Christianity. So how does that happen? I mean, how do you think that they pick up that sort of nationalism and not see that as explicitly rejecting some of the basic tenets of Christianity?
Kristin Du Mez: In the end to me, it seems to come down to a question of power, right? And what is the relationship between Christianity and power and what happens? And perhaps this is just human nature here, too, of wanting to seize power, wanting to grasp power. But when you blend that with Christianity, it can very quickly become a kind of twisted or corrupted form where you know, when you identify righteousness on your side, God, on your side, you can justify all kinds of actions.
Because it seems like you are doing this. You can convince yourself and others that you are doing this for the gospel witness for the sake of the nation. And so it does come down to a theological question, ultimately, I think, which is, you know, what is at the heart of the gospel? What does it mean to follow the Christ of the gospels?
And how does that connect to worldly power to the assertion of worldly power? And certainly in 20th century American history for conservative evangelicals, they understood that you know, it was their God-given duty to seize power in order to do good. You know, they were at this faithful remnant, they perceive themselves to be the only truly faithful Christians in the nation.
They lived in this kind of declension narrative that things had been good. This Christian America. And that God had blessed America, specially, and that America had been founded as a Christian nation. And then Americans had rebelled and they had abandoned their true faith.
And as a result, God's special nation God's chosen nation even was unfaithful. And so it was their role to redeem America, to exert their own power religiously, and also to defend quote unquote Christian America against enemies, external and internal. So ultimately, yeah, I think it is a theological dilemma at the heart.
Lee Camp: You pointed, as I recollect you don't discuss it at length, but I was struck by your noting that one of the reasons perhaps that American evangelicals have had such a hard time accepting the pervasive nature of racism is precisely because what you just noted. That if you embrace this myth of a Christian America, that there was this more primordial, innocent time, then it's hard for you to accept that no, there's been this sort of systemic pervasive sin, if you will, of racism.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. I mean, first, if you just go with this kind of origin story that Christian America, there was a time when all was well, and then at some point things started to fall apart. And usually the era to which they point is the 1960s. That's when we have feminists and anti-war activists disrupting their value system, but we also have the Civil Rights Movement.
Right? And so just think about that narrative. Things were great up until somewhere around the 1960s. That only makes sense if you are a white Christian, really. So just deeply embedded within Christian nationalism is this white racial identity and white religious identity. And so for black Christians who want to, you know, critique a longer history of racism that absolutely contradicts this notion of things were once good. Just these two narratives are absolutely contradictory.
Lee Camp: And I suppose that seeing the 60s as the moment of decline is true not for white Christians generally, because you pointed, for example, to McGovern and Nixon. And I didn't know if I remember correctly in the book, you said that McGovern perhaps was a seminary student or had, yeah. So here McGovern was a seminary student, and yet he's articulating a political platform that's obviously grounded in doing things like reading the sermon on the mount or reading the gospels. And he's depicted as a great threat to at least this subset of Christian culture. So how does that work?
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. You know, I try to point throughout the book at these paths not taken right, that there were alternative Christian voices that there were progressive Christian voices. There was an evangelical left. There were folks like McGovern who were reading the scriptures and applying those biblical values in very different ways, politically and socially, applying them in the direction of Civil Rights, critique of American militarism, a critique of the Vietnam War.
And that there was a coherent tradition, but it was always the minority tradition within American Protestantism. And so you have these voices like McGovern and then later like Jimmy Carter, even. Right? Who are deeply Christian politicians who read the scriptures and interpret them in very different ways when it comes to social and political values.
Lee Camp: You spend a significant amount of time discussing the ways in which there are key women who also play a significant role in this narrative.
Kristin Du Mez: Yes. It's a misperception that just because we're talking about patriarchal authority, that we're just talking about men that, in fact, women play a very important role in propping up and sustaining patriarchal authority. And so some of the women who enjoy a prominent role in this story are women like Phyllis Schlafly, first of all, and she was not evangelical herself, but I kind of consider her an honorary evangelical for these purposes.
She was very influential in kind of framing these issues early on. Particularly in connecting issues of foreign policy, American militarism, American power, to more domestic issues, to gender traditionalism, to what is a Christian man's role? What is a Christian woman's role? So a Christian man was to be a protector and a provider. But in the Cold War context that role of protector was really important. And this is exactly what Billy Graham was saying in the 1940s and the 1950s as well. But she's able to articulate that even more compellingly, I think. And for American women and for evangelical women in particular, as well as Catholic women. And to understand their identity and their anti-feminism as a part of faithful Christian womanhood and very much as part of what it meant to be a good American citizen, like all wrapped up together seamlessly. So Phyllis Schlafly, very important. But also within evangelicalism women like Marabel Morgan and Elisabeth Elliot, I give some attention to. Maribel Morgan is often kind of a punchline.
Most people don't know of her. If you do, I kind of laugh her off, but her book sold millions of copies and she is known for presenting a very anti-feminist vision of Christian womanhood. So the key to marital happiness for Marabel Morgan was for women to really set aside all of their ambitions; to set aside all of their desires even. And just please their husband. Treat him like a king. Cater to his every need, every desire. Make themselves sexually available to him in all sorts of creative ways. And, uh she had, she was an advocate of costumes in the bedroom, of all sorts of antics. So you have these ideas that, you know, Christians are prudes, or that they're anti-sex, that just has to get thrown out the window.
These Christians like Marabel Morgan and Phyllis Schlafly and Tim and Beverly LaHaye. So many cared a lot about sex. They were writing quite graphically about sex actually, and trying to make sex a good thing. And as long as it was contained within heterosexual marriage, and that was foundational for society.
And so you needed to have women kind of wrapped up in this and Marabel Morgan, Elizabeth Elliot really kind of were missionaries to other Christian women. Getting them to identify with this femininity, this evangelical femininity, to embrace female submission, and to understand that they had a critical role to play in propping up their husbands authority, in their egos, so that they could do their God ordained duty of leading their families and their churches and their country.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life.
You can always reach us, tell us where you're listening from, or let us know some of the things you'd like to hear more about by emailing us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at tokensshow.com.
You've been listening to our interview with Kristin Du Mez, Professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, and author of the provocative new book entitled Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Coming up, we'll hear from Kristin about the role James Dobson of Focus on the Family plays in her narrative. And on a separate note, we'll hear her take on the distressing and sex scandals among too many evangelical leaders.
Part two in just a moment.
Part 2
Lee Camp: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Kristin Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Another figure who is kind of a I don't know if shining star is the right metaphor we want to use for your narrative, but he's a key figure. Namely James Dobson.
Kristin Du Mez: Yes, James Dobson. Right. He, you know, emerges in the 1970s as kind of the next generation of angelical celebrity. Right? So Billy Graham up to, and through that time as a more traditional evangelist, right? And it makes sense that he would be an evangelical celebrity. He was a soul saver. And then somebody like James Dobson comes along and he's a child psychologist.
And that signifies this transition within evangelicalism. A transition away from kind of theological doctrines, away from kind of more rarefied religion, and into more of a Christian living emphasis. I trace that in the book connected to changes within Christian publishing. Where to reach a mass market it made no sense to talk about, you know, specific doctrines that would, you know. If you're a Methodist it’s going to alienate the Presbyterians or the Baptist. But if you stuck with Christian living topics, how to be a Christian wife, how to be Christian husband, how to raise Christian kids. You don't splinter the market, right?
You can reach the mass market. And so he comes along at just this right time when he's offering advice on raising children. This is in the 1970s. And, uh, a question that many Christians were asking and that Dobson certainly was prodding, was the question of, you know, authority. What has happened to societal authority? What is happening, that we see our kids out on the streets now, right? Anti-war activists. Hippies. What can we do as parents to raise good Christian citizens in this moment? And that's really where he comes in and he becomes enormously popular because he's giving very clear answers to parents who are asking these questions in the 1970s.
It's really hard to underestimate James Dobson's significance really over the last half century of American evangelicalism, because he's somebody who helps define what counts for family values but he does so in a way that seems apolitical. He's just giving advice. He's just nurturing and he becomes just this incredibly important force in mobilizing evangelicals as part of the religious, right? And really shaping their values for the next half century.
Lee Camp: And you give lots of examples of ways in which he weaves together family values with nationalism, masculinity, patriarchal authority. That, again, these are all different facets or different strands of the same chord, right?
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. And they come together, right? Because one of the problems is that America lacks strong men, strong protectors, strong defenders. Well, what went wrong? It's the feminists fault. It's the liberals' fault. We need to toughen up our men. So we need to start with our boys, right? Bringing up boys.
We need to raise boys into strong men. So we need to teach them how to use firearms, right? They need guns for toys when they're little, and then they need to be given BB guns and then they need to be, you know, taught to use real firearms. And this is critical for the wellbeing of the nation because so many Americans are emasculating their voice, right?
Again, liberals and feminists. And so it's up to conservatives and conservative Christians to raise boys properly so that they can become the men that God has ordained them to be. And they can properly defend their nation. So raising children is actually deeply political.
Lee Camp: So let me imagine somebody listening to you and they're thinking, but wait a second, you know, we don't want our sons to be wimps and weenies. Right? So what I've wondered is that, I do a lot of thinking and teaching on virtue traditions. And so it strikes me that if Protestants, for example, had been better schooled in Aquinas and we knew about virtue traditions, then we would have the language that we need and wouldn't have to resort to something like masculinity to get our boys, to have the skills that we want them to have.
Kristin Du Mez: I really liked that.
Lee Camp: So in other words, teach our boys and our girls, central to being a human being is that you must be courageous.
Kristin Du Mez: Exactly. That is key, right? Because what happens within conservative evangelicalism, is there is such an emphasis on gender difference. Gender difference as foundational to humanity, as foundational to Christian orthodoxy, to scriptural inerrancy. All of this, it really does kind of get centered as non-negotiable in terms of Orthodox Christianity. And so what this emphasis on gender difference does then is it does separate the virtues into masculine virtues and feminine virtues. So take the fruit of the spirit for example: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. Those are great for the lady. So those are feminine virtues and then, you know, courage and strength. And these are things that we want in our men. And Dobson really stresses this, right? Men and women are different in every cell of their bodies. And that ends up, I think, ultimately distorting, not just Christian masculinity and Christian femininity, but Christianity itself.
Lee Camp: Yeah. I've wondered too. Obviously it's common for evangelicals who are in this sort of mode of fighting the cultural wars and fearful of certain given moral issues, say. That it's common in their rhetoric to say we're letting culture trump scripture. But it seems to me that precisely because they, we have whatever pronoun we need to use there, have so obsessed about the kind of categorization of the questions. That itself is yielding to this sort of traditional strand that's non-biblical right.
So in other words, I guess what I'm trying to ask, I'm either saying or asking. I'll say it, I'll get your perspective on it. So, I mean, it seems to me that by obsessing upon these given issues or obsessing say about masculine versus feminine, uh, obsessing about particular questions around sex.
And of course we have to have discussions about both gender and sex. we do have to talk about those things and, and make some discernments about those things. But in obsessing about them the way we've obsessed about them, that itself is, I guess how I'm putting this in air quotes, you know, the culture. We're yielding over to the culture by the way we have talked about these things.
Does that seem accurate to your perspective?
Kristin Du Mez: It does. Yeah. I think that, first of all, it's fair to say that evangelicals have often been oblivious to the ways in which their own values are deeply shaped by historical and cultural forces. Right? And, because their own rhetoric is, you know, the culture is out there. The culture is something that we oppose and we resist and, you know, we are just Christians.
We are just Bible believers. And so I think that's one of the things about Jesus and John Wayne that has been so startling to so many evangelicals who grew up in the tradition is just having the veil pulled back just a little bit on showing how much of what was packaged and sold as just, you know, biblical values was in fact deeply shaped by historical and cultural forces.
So that is certainly at play here, I think.
Lee Camp: I was surprised by your description. You say it was James Dobson who would play the most critical role in submitting ties between evangelicals and the military.
Kristin Du Mez: Yes, that was another thing I was surprised to discover, because this is a book that is about gender and it is also a book about militarism. And it was astonishing to me to see how many of these Christian writers on Godly masculinity we're also huge proponents of the U.S. military and of American militarism.
And James Dobson is one of those. And he plays a critical role actually in the 1980s. So in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In kind of revalorizing the military. You know, of telling his millions of followers over and over again, that the U.S. military, these are the good guys. And in the military, that is a place of virtue.
That's where you're gonna find American greatness and American goodness, and, you know, he uses his platform to do so. And he forges close relationships with Christians in the military. And so they use some of his curriculum. They use a video of his on how to be a good father.
And so it's this kind of mutually beneficial relationship. I'd love to see the numbers on how much money changed hands there too, because this is not just about ideology or affinities. It's also, these are financial interactions. And so the ties run deep in the 1980s between the U.S. military, between Dobson. And this relationship really continues up to the present day between conservative evangelicals, between folks like, you know, Ted Haggard at New Life Church.
Dobson's neighbor in Colorado Springs and the U.S. Air Force Academy. And, you know, even folks like Mark Driscoll later in terms of his interactions with the U.S. military, that this influence really runs both ways. And it's something that all Americans and American evangelicals should actually be a bit more attentive to.
Lee Camp: I want to point to something that you've said already, but I'd like for us to put a little bit more point on it. You discussed the ways in which in the late 70s and into the 80s. The Southern Baptists have this huge shift, right? Where there are certain conservatives who basically do a cleansing of moderate Baptists from their seminaries. Then all of a sudden, there's this big shift theologically. And it's centered around particular doctrines, like the inerrancy of scripture, a particular definition of the inerrancy of scripture or the authority of scripture. Or it's focused around issues like biblical complementarianism or harsher terms, biblical patriarchy.
And yeah, one of the things that you're doing in this book is you're suggesting that while those things are happening, that's not really necessarily the deeper current of what's going on. That a deeper current of what's going on historically is a cultural and social movement, as opposed to a theological movement. That it might be more helpful or accurate for us to describe what's going on culturally and politically and socially, as opposed to doctrinally. One is that, is that an accurate description of what you're doing? And two, would you talk to us a little bit more about that?
Kristin Du Mez: Sure. I think I would say that we shouldn't separate theology or doctrine from this larger cultural moment, and certainly for particular leaders. They understood their, you know, efforts as part of this conservative resurgence, conservative takeover, as the critics like to term it. They certainly framed what they were doing as a theological battle.
At the same time they also acknowledged that among many of the rank and file you talk about biblical inerrancy, just a little bit. And you know, their eyes start to glaze over. That these, you know, deeper doctrinal issues might make a lot of sense, you know, among seminary professors and among some leading pastors.
But what was actually mobilizing people in the pews or more easily could mobilize them, were issues of gender, and issues of power, and more of this cultural and political formulation. So, anti-feminism, right? Also I think we need to talk about race here and the assertion of kind of traditional conservative white evangelical power.
You know, how does race play into this as well? Particularly when many Southern evangelicals were feeling disorientation after as they put it the social disorder of the Civil Rights Movement, that's part of this context. So it's not that theology isn't operative, but theology really in this historical moment cannot be extricated from what that theology is being used to do.
And even when we look at discussions over biblical inerrancy, what were the issues over which these inerrant battles were fought? Well, they were often, you know, we're talking about gender. We're talking about, can women preach, because women were preaching in the Southern Baptist Convention.
You know, we weren't talking about inerrancy when it came to Jesus' advice to the rich young ruler, Jesus' advice to give away your possessions, right? And in terms of poverty, in terms of, you know, what does it mean when Jesus says turn the other cheek and love your enemies? Right? And so often when conservative evangelicals frame, you know, these issues around biblical inerrancy, that's kind of what is just accepted. Even by historians, as that's what was really at issue.
But I think what we really need to do is be a little bit more curious and then ask a few followup questions and see what were the issues around which these theological questions were debated. And that's where we end up that is very much about gender. And also at times about race.
Lee Camp: Moving forward to another distressing chapter in your book. You have a chapter in which you discussed the numerous sex scandals that have rocked evangelical communities in the 21st century. And again, you paint this as just like with evangelicals voting for Donald Trump, that they're voting for Donald Trump isn't a contradiction of their values, but it is consistent with these deeper sets of values that you're painting in the book. Similarly, you're suggesting that the ugliness of the sex candles seem somewhat endemic to a system that has lionized patriarchy, and that has pushed for decades now a particular vision of masculinity. And that's then somewhat kind of, we might put it in scare quotes, naturally gives rise to the sorts of abuses.
Kristin Du Mez: Yes. Yeah. I first actually started looking into white evangelical masculinity back in the early 2000s. And so back in 2005, 2006 is when I, I initially did some research into this topic. And I ended up setting the project aside for a time. But I didn't stop paying attention. And in the ensuing decade, what I noticed is many of the leading proponents of this kind of militant white Christian masculinity became implicated in scandals. And abuse of power, or often in sexual abuse, either directly or indirectly, kind of defending friends who were perpetrators. And so I just paid attention. I kept files kind of just kept my eye on this as it developed. So when I decided to turn this research into a book and the aftermath of both the Access Hollywood tape release and the election of 2016.
One of the first things I did actually was consult a lawyer to see if I could use this information, which up until then had primarily existed on blogs; survivor blogs, and victim advocates. And then while I was writing, Me Too happened, and Church Too. And what happened then is that many of these stories that had existed on blogs up until that time were picked up by the national media.
So this was something that I had been tracing for a long time. And then when I looked back to history, it was really startling to see how historical evangelical teachings on sexuality and gender absolutely did set evangelicals up for a long history of abuse and scandal.
Because ideals of masculinity really set up this “God filled men with testosterone so that they could be aggressive.” And men were to channel that, right, to be the strong protectors and defenders, but that applied to sex as well. And so men were aggressive. They were naturally lustful. That's just a side effect of testosterone.
That's just the way things worked. Women, that's where women came in. It was up to women to preserve morality. And so it was very important that they not tempt men who are not their husbands. And so we have this emphasis on modesty and on female purity and it evolves into purity culture by the 1990s, but there's also a duty of married women.
There's is perhaps the most important because it is their job to satisfy their husband's sexual needs, which again are many. This is where, you know, Marabel Morgan comes in and Tim and Beverly LaHaye. And what you can see is throughout the last half century of evangelicalism, again, they write on sex a lot, and the teachings are consistent across the decades that men are kind of naturally lustful.
They have aggressive sexual needs, and it is up to women to meet those needs, to channel that within heterosexual marriage and to preserve social virtue in that way. And that really does end up setting up abusive situations within relationships, but also it ends up making members of communities, of evangelical communities, really unable to identify and then to condemn sexual abuse that is happening right in front of them. And the stories that I tell in that chapter really are horrifying. And what is perhaps most horrifying are the consistent patterns from one scandal after another of how members of evangelical communities end up covering for perpetrators and blaming victims, even when victims are young children.
Lee Camp: Hmm. What are some other particulars of given communities that you've noted that these would be kind of yellow flags, at least of saying if this sort of rhetoric is happening, if these sorts of practices are happening that it would cause you some concern out of all that research.
Kristin Du Mez: One of the things that I have become very sensitive to is the way in which authority is established and deference demanded in evangelicalism organizations, evangelical communities. And so, you know, writers like James Dobson, like Bill Gothard, and many since, really worked to bolster patriarchal authority and bolster all, quote unquote, God ordained authorities, and then demand proper submission to those authorities. And what that ends up doing is creating within families, within churches, within organizations, this culture of deference that to be a faithful Christian is defined in such a way, as you do not challenge the pastor, you do not challenge the person in authority, no matter what is happening, you respect that authority.
You defend that authority. And in doing so you defend the witness of the church, you defend the ministry. And that is you are doing your God ordained role right, by being obedient, by being submissive, you can see this in so many situations. I think perhaps most blatantly in the case of Mark Driscoll and his teachings.
But what that ends up doing is setting up potentially very toxic cultures in which, essentially an authoritarian regime. But it's also the authoritarian leader that has the power of God. He represents God's authority and that definitely sets up for a lot of corruption.
And it makes many members of the community, well-meaning, well-intended members of the community, unable to speak out against injustice and to protect victims, even when they see what's happening right in front of them.
Lee Camp: And it strikes me too that once that sort of framing of authority or the presumptions about the differences between masculinity and femininity are in place, that those sorts of categories then can take all sorts of otherwise legitimate practices and turn those practices into mechanisms of oppression.
So I think, for example, about, you point to this very briefly and other people have pointed to this in other sorts of scandalous incidents. But the way in which Matthew 18, which calls for people to go to the person that they have believe have sinned against them one-on-one. That within those structures of difference that you just described and within structures of assumed difference between masculine and feminine, that all of a sudden then can become this mechanism of hiding and propagating further oppression.
Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. That, you know, biblical teachings against gossip and slander that is also used very effectively within these systems to suppress any dissent. Where otherwise, you know, what seems like a pretty decent biblical teaching can be, turned to dangerous ends within these power dynamics.
Lee Camp: Yeah. Let me ask this question, kind of nearing the end of our time. We talked a little bit about how you're, you're teaching at one of the finest evangelical schools in the country at Calvin and you're part of a heritage at Calvin. Which is, you know, one of the finest evangelical traditions in the country, as far as being very serious intellectually, very serious theologically.
And I presume that you're from an evangelical background. How has your experience been in writing this sort of book? What's it like for you personally and emotionally to write such a book?
Kristin Du Mez: So I should say that, you know, whether I locate myself or even Calvin University within evangelicalism, we'll come down to definitions of what counts for evangelicalism, or what makes somebody an evangelical? So for me, I grew up in the Christian reformed tradition in a Dutch immigrant community.
My mom was an immigrant from the Netherlands, and so I actually grew up defining myself against American evangelicalism, right? Because we came from such a distinctive community. My dad was a theology professor in a reformed college. And so again, I didn't really identify as an evangelical and I know that many evangelicals don't identify as evangelical.
They tend to just identify as plain old Christian, right? But Calvin too, it is a member of the Christian reformed denomination, is a member of the national association of evangelicals. So that's accurate to call Calvin an evangelical institution, but it's not evangelical in the same way as Wheaton College is, right?
It's not kind of at the center of cultural evangelicalism. So I think my own encounter with evangelicalism has always been somewhat on the margins. I never embraced the term, particularly as I came to define it as a cultural historian, more as a cultural tradition. Unless as a series of boxes that you check, you know, in terms of specific doctrines. I don't feel like this is my personal story that I'm telling, even though it was from my own students at Calvin that I first learned of John Eldredges as Wild at Heart, even though, you know, I had my own brushes with purity culture.
And even though I grew up only listening to contemporary Christian music, because that's what good Christians did. So I mean in, but not of. I'm familiar with it, but I never really identified wholly as an evangelical. And so I think that gave me a little bit of if not critical distance, certainly emotional distance from this topic. That, as I was critiquing elements of this tradition as it has manifested itself over the last half century or so, I didn't feel like I was deconstructing my own Christian faith. I really felt like I was defining this is not what I believe. But let me try to articulate this and articulate it well. And so in writing the book, it felt cathartic. It felt cathartic for me as a Christian to be able to hold this up for all to see. Alright? To hold up the influence of cultural ideals of political allegiances. To tell the story that I had kind of seen unfold over the last 20 or 30 years.
And to tell it as clearly as possible. And honestly, I didn't know what the result was going to be, especially within evangelical communities. But I've been really gratified to see that there is a lot of enthusiasm actually for having the story told in a way that they can both recognize their own experience, but also come to see the bigger picture that they mostly had remained oblivious to.
And so, yeah, personally for me, it felt empowering to write this and I'm gratified by the way that it's actually been received within evangelicalism itself.
Lee Camp: We've been talking to professor Kristin Du Mez of Calvin University on her recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. An outstanding book. And thank you so much for the conversation today.
Kristin Du Mez: Oh, thank you.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
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