n class="init-cap">In 2008, the Gaither Vocal Band released a song called “Jesus and John Wayne,” about a young man’s struggle to live a godly life. Though striving after the soft purity of Jesus as exemplified by his mother, the man often finds himself living like a rough and rugged John Wayne as modeled by his father. He resigns himself to a compromise lifestyle somewhere between “a cowboy and a saint.” When Kristin Kobes Du Mez set to work on her study of white evangelical masculinity in 2016, the Gaither song offered her a title. And yet, as readers of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation will quickly discover, Du Mez is not describing a movement in search of a happy medium. For the past 80 years, she argues, white evangelical speakers, writers, and media figures have been idealizing a form of manliness that is at once all Jesus and all John Wayne,calling their audiences to hyper-masculinity as an orienting center. Men are pushed to be extra-manly, wives to be sexy and supportive, and children to mind authority as they grow into their own designated gender tracks. Along the way, this model of Christian patriarchy seeks to govern the home, the school, the church, and ultimately, the nation.Read Full Article »
