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I wasn’t sure that I wanted to live with that for the years that I knew it would take to write a book.
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For one, the things that I was uncovering were very depressing. KKD: Yes! Since about 2010, I had been giving talks on evangelicalism and masculinity and had been approached by publishers, but there were two things at that point that made me a little hesitant to dive into a book project. This was all happening at the same time as the Iraq War, so as I was having these conversations with my students, I was also paying attention to the surveys showing that white evangelical Christians supported the war at much higher rates than other Americans, supported torture at much higher rates, and I started drawing some connections.ĮCM: T his book grew out of a piece that you wrote for Religion & Politics, correct? I started paying attention to this popular literature, coming to it through the lens of gender analysis, and reading it against history. At that time it was hard to find a church anywhere that wasn’t holding a Wild at Heart study for men and a Captivating study for women.
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So I looked into it and found that it was practically ubiquitous. Some of my students brought in this book, Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, and told me that I had to read it because of the way it fashioned a manly Christianity. I was doing a unit on Teddy Roosevelt, focusing on the relationship between gender and foreign policy and things like that. It was my students who first brought this to my attention, back in about 2006. But in Jesus and John Wayne, I trace the history of a particularly militant strand of evangelical masculinity that has been a defining feature of conservative white evangelicalism. To be clear, there isn’t just one evangelical masculinity, and individual women and men respond to prescriptive advice in all sorts of ways. To understand American evangelicalism, we have to take gender seriously, to understand how gender connects to theology and politics, and how it is at the heart of the evangelical worldview.
#Kristin du mez jesus and john wayne how to
Evangelicals have bought and read millions of books about how to raise boys and girls, how to be a man, and how to be a woman. For over half a century, evangelicals have been “focusing on the family,” and distinct gender roles have been at the heart of this. KKD: Evangelicalism isn’t just about theological doctrines, and “family values” evangelicalism isn’t just a set of political commitments. In her new book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Du Mez documents about eighty years of white evangelical gender discourse, tracing the various ways that a strong emphasis on masculinity has shaped the beliefs, lifestyles, and politics coming out of white evangelical pulpits, publications, and practices.ĮCM: What is the relationship between evangelicalism and masculinity, and what prompted you to write about it? Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University.