A New Book Analysis Series: “Jesus and John Wayne” (Part 1)

A Bit of Background First
I grew up within the Evangelical world of the 70-80s. In fact, I lived pretty much at the center of it, in Wheaton, Illinois. I grew up in an Evangelical family, went to an Assemblies of God/Evangelical church, and attended Wheaton Christian High School. During the summer after my junior year in high school, I guess you could say I had an initial “crisis of faith,” and I proceeded to rethink what I really believed. It was then that I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis for the first time. The Christianity that Lewis discussed made sense to me—that Christianity was challenging and appealing. By the end of that summer, I decided to get baptized.

Something happened after that, though. Almost immediately, I had this distinct sense that I no longer really “fit in” anymore with Evangelicalism, either at the church in which I had grown up (particularly the youth group) or at Wheaton Christian High School. It wasn’t that I found either one bad or corrupt, or anything like that. I just found the Evangelical brand of Christianity I had known all my life to be rather shallow.

Although I would still be more or less in the orbit of Evangelical Christianity throughout my life, my spiritual journey from that point on took me more and more away from standard American Evangelicalism. During two graduate school programs in Vancouver, British Columbia, I found myself at home in the Compline services of the Anglican church in the city. During my four years teaching at an Evangelical Christian school in California, after trying a number of churches for a while, I simply didn’t go to church during most of that time. It was during my four years teaching at an Evangelical Christian school in Little Rock that I felt I had found a home in the local Greek Orthodox Church. I ended up joining the Orthodox Church, all still while teaching at the Evangelical Christian school.

As things turned out, I eventually ended up taking another teaching job at another Evangelical Christian school in Alabama and taught there for eight years. Since there was no Orthodox church anywhere near, though, I attended a Baptist church for a while, and now attend a Methodist church. I still consider myself Orthodox, but I am still very acquainted with American Protestantism/Evangelicalism. And the older I get, the more I can tell you that I think there are a number of real problems within Evangelicalism, and I know firsthand the damage that power-hungry Evangelical leaders can do. That being said, most of the Evangelical Christians I know, and have known for my entire life, are good, sensible, thoughtful, godly people who are trying to live out their faith on a daily basis.

I don’t hate Evangelicals and I don’t think Evangelicalism is some sort of boogeyman religious cult from The Handmaid’s Tale. Like any religious group, denomination, or branch, Evangelicalism has its fair share of really bad, abusive, power-hungry charlatans. But I’m never going to slander or broadbrush Evangelicals en masse because of that. Go to any big organization at all, be it religious, political, or in the business world—chances are that many of the big leaders who are atop of those organizations are going to be really corrupt, manipulative, and power-hungry. That’s just the reality of life. It would be wrong to slander and stereotype all the little people within those organizations based off of the manipulative behavior of those bad leaders.

Sadly, though, this is the very kind of thing I’ve been seeing, especially over the past five years or so, regarding many people’s take on—or better yet, sheer hatred of—Evangelicalism. Six years ago, I wrote my book, The Heresy of Ham, which was primarily about the dangers of the growing young earth creationist movement within the Evangelical world. The subtitle of my book was: “What Every Evangelical Needs to Know about the Creation/Evolution Controversy.” I made it quite clear that I wasn’t attacking Evangelicalism as a whole, but was rather warning really good, sincere, faithful Evangelical Christians about something that I felt was very dangerous within Evangelicalism.

Now for the Topic of This Series
That being said, over the past five years, though—no doubt due to the election of Donald Trump (lets just be honest)—there has been a veritable grievance industry that has exploded onto the scene that often involves self-described “Ex-Evangelicals” just savaging Evangelicalism as a whole. It come complete with inflammatory buzzwords and epitaphs that pepper virtually every article, book, tweet, or YouTube video: Evangelical, Trump, white supremacy, patriarchy, masculinity, racist, homophobic, transphobic, gender, greed, power, oppression, just to name a few.

As I recently told a friend of mine, it is eerily similar to the exact same kind of stuff that I had seen emanating from the blog posts, articles, and books of Ken Ham and his young earth creationist organization Answers in Genesis, only from the opposite end of the political spectrum. In both cases, I found it rather hateful and juvenile…and most of all, simply sad.

All that brings me to the topic of what I expect to be about a 3-4 post series on the recent book by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, entitled, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

I’ve been wrestling with how to actually go about doing this book analysis series. I hope it doesn’t come across as argumentative and hostile. That being said, though, I have to be honest and say I feel it is a really bad and divisive book, every bit as much as the number of books by Ken Ham that I’ve written about. In both cases, the “plan of attack” is basically the same: (1) Start with a very intolerant, closed-minded extreme political stance, (2) Claim that that stance is was true Christianity is really about, (3) Focus solely on the admittedly worst examples of immorality/corruption from “the other side,” (4) Claim that those bad examples from certain people on “the other side” are endemic of the entirety of the group one is attacking, and then (5) Broadbrush, stereotype, and pummel that point home for 250-300 pages, using every hot-button buzzword and epitaph one can muster, over and over again. In a nutshell, that is exactly what I’ve found Jesus and John Wayne to be like.

That being said, though, I want to make clear that most of the facts in this book are true. There certainly have been quite a few bad actors and charlatans in the history of American Evangelicalism, and Kobes Du Mez makes sure we know all the sordid details of those bad actors—fair enough. The problem, though, is that there have also been quite a lot of good and godly figures within American Evangelicalism which Kobes Du Mez either ignores, or, much to my disappointment, slights and disparages, then sweeps just enough into the “bad actor/charlatan” category, simply because that particular individual was human and made a bad choice or had (from the perspective of 2021 Woke culture) the wrong political opinion, and therefore must be treated with suspicion.

Simply put, Jesus and John Wayne is not attempting to give an honest overview of the very real shortcomings and charlatans within American Evangelicalism. It isn’t saying, “Hey Evangelical Christians, you need to be warned about some so-called Evangelical leaders are doing. There are some bad people you need to watch out for.” No, the message of Jesus and John Wayne is abundantly clear: Evangelicals—WHITE Evangelicals—are all bad, all racist, all obsessed with toxic masculinity, all worshippers of white male patriarchy, all obsessed with political power, all homophobic, transphobic, and any other phobic one can think of! ALL OF THEM!

Is that a direct quote from somewhere in the book? No. But that message will be clear to anyone who reads the book. Aside from the subtitle of the book, just skimming the individual chapter titles is quite telling: John Wayne Will Save Your Ass (Chapter 2), Discipline and Command (Chapter 4), Going for the Jugular (Chapter 6), No More Christian Nice Guy (Chapter 10), Holy Balls (Chapter 11), Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo (Chapter 12), Why We Want to Kill You (Chapter 13), Spiritual Bad Asses (Chapter 14), A New High Priest (Chapter 15) [Spoiler Alert—that’s a reference to Donald Trump]. What’s the clear gist of all of that? Evangelicalism is a militaristic, patriarchal death cult that worships Donald Trump and wants to kick your ass! I’m sorry, I’ll be kind and just say that is a wee bit over the top.

To be clear, in the course of my look at Jesus and John Wayne, I’m not going to be arguing that American Evangelicalism is awesome and that there is nothing wrong with it. There are plenty of things wrong with American Evangelicalism, and Kobes Du Mez highlights many of them. I’m also not going to be arguing that there is nothing wrong with the GOP—of course there is, it’s a political party, and there is always going to be a fair share of corruption in any political party.

What I am going to argue is that, despite presenting a whole lot of facts that are true about many bad actors within American Evangelicalism, the book itself is not truthful, and it certainly isn’t Christian. It is a left-wing political hit job that attempts to present left-wing politics as “true Christianity” by essentially demonizing Evangelicalism and its largely conservative-leaning stances on political issues as “antichrist.” In that respect, it isn’t a whole lot different from the material coming from Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum. We shouldn’t be fooled, though. Both really are doing nothing more than dressing up their particular political ideologies in Christian clothing in order to justify their particular political scorched earth policies.  

A Final Thought
I want to end this post by saying that maybe I am completely wrong in all of this. Maybe the Evangelicalism of my youth and the Evangelicalism I’ve been somewhat associated with throughout my life really has been a dystopian version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and I somehow have just been sheltered from it, like the child in Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie, Life is Beautiful, whose father kept him from realizing that he was actually living in a concentration camp. Maybe my parents were simply outliers in the Evangelical world. Maybe Evangelicals really were taking their marching orders from the likes of Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Mark Driscoll all along.

Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think I am, though. Although I certainly have come in contact over the years with the kind of bad actors Kobes Du Mez highlights in her book, even though I’ve most certainly been burned by a couple of them, I don’t want to become so bitter and angry that I justify trying to take a flamethrower to the entirety of Evangelicalism. We must always remember, like Paul says in Ephesians 4:15, that are to speak the truth in love so that we can all grow into maturity in Christ. Yes, sometimes the truth could be hard to take, but at no time can committing spiritual arson be an act done in love, and charred corpses certainly will not be able to grow to maturity in Christ.