Kristin Du Mez on her sensational book, Jesus and John Wayne

Kristin Du Mez reminds us that she is a historian first, even though her sensational book, Jesus and John Wayne, has invoked fierce theological backlash from evangelicals. Hear her response to the pushback, plus a breakdown of the patriarchy that is so persistent in evangelical churches.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason and I'm delighted to welcome to the program today, Dr. Kristin Du Mez. She is a professor of history at Calvin College. She is the author of the sensational book actually that has really captured the attention of many Christians in America, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Welcome to Good God, Kristin.

Kristin Du Mez:
Thank you for having me.

George Mason:
Well, I'm looking at myself right now on this camera and realize that inadvertently I put on my Mr. Rogers sweater.

Kristin Du Mez:
I see that. Nice choice.

George Mason:
I actually didn't think about that, but I think there must be something subliminal about that I'm atoning for something. Thank you so much for joining us. I think I'm sure that this is as I mentioned to you before, probably your 147th podcast.

George Mason:
You've been everywhere in the last months since the 2020 publication of this book. I'm sure it's caught you somewhat off guard. You're a historian, you write books, you study things, and this has been sensational I'm sure. I mean that both in a qualitative way and also in a public fanfare sort of way, right?

Kristin Du Mez:
Yeah, definitely not expected. As an academic, we're used to spending years working on projects. We're thrilled if a few hundred people read them and appreciate them.

George Mason:
Well, more than a few hundred people have read this book and many of us have appreciated tremendously. I think we should just establish the context of it a little bit. It was written in the age of Donald Trump, of course. Obviously, started earlier than that. What was it that prompted your interest in the subject matter to begin with?

Kristin Du Mez:
If you have a paperback edition, I tell a little bit of this story in the new preface. My interest in questions of evangelical masculinity go way back to the early 2000s. What sparked it was a combination of my academic training. I'm a historian of gender and religion.

Kristin Du Mez:
Also, what I was observing around me as a new professor at Calvin University, actually it was Calvin College. We've just upgraded recently. It was my own students who introduced me to the literature on Christian manhood that was incredibly popular back in the early 2000s. Including the book by John Eldredge, Wild at Heart.

Kristin Du Mez:
They told me I had to read it, I read it. It was really fascinating to me first that it didn't really draw on the scriptures very much for building a model of Christian masculinity instead drew from Hollywood heroes and kind of mythical warriors. It was setting up an image of Christian manhood that was very militaristic.

Kristin Du Mez:
To my mind, really went against some of the core teachings of the gospels and of Jesus Christ. That was a long time ago and more than 15 years ago. For a variety of reasons, I set the project aside, one of which was I was trying to tease out how mainstream all of this was and how fringe.

Kristin Du Mez:
What I was reading and observing the evangelical world back then seemed really fairly extremist. I just wasn't sure how to parse that out. Then it was in the fall of 2016 when I noticed how similar the words were that evangelicals were using to defend their support for then candidate Donald Trump.

Kristin Du Mez:
Were to the words that I had read all those years ago in these books on Christian manhood that Donald Trump was our ultimate fighting champion and he was ruthless, but he would protect Christianity.

George Mason:
You grew up in the reform tradition and teach at the reform college. In a sense, because of your evangelical roots, I suppose you shouldn't have been terribly surprised by all of these developments because I grew up in evangelicalism as well in New York and the evangelical free church tradition. I very much was a part of that world.

George Mason:
I have my red binder from Bill Gothard and all of those sorts of things. I went to college and played football and eventually worked for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I have my bonafides for this world. Ironically, I went to seminary in 1979, the year that the moral majority started and the conservative resurgence took over the Southern Baptist Convention, and yet I didn't follow that path, I came away from it.

George Mason:
I know that in a sense, the goal of a historian is not necessarily to change people's minds or to write a constructive theology. You have described through your historical work something that presents a picture to some of us about what we have experienced. I know you've been criticized a lot of times on grounds other than the work of a historian.

George Mason:
It seems terribly unfair to read you on Twitter and realize, "Oh my goodness, this is not what she does." At the same time, it shouldn't surprise you I suppose, that everybody that reads this book and has a sense of awareness of what you've done is saying, "Yes, and what should my response be to this now?"

Kristin Du Mez:
That's a really good point. I'm a historian, this is a work of history. I published with a secular trade press. My audience for this book really was just ordinary Americans. Anybody who cares about the religious and political landscape. Frankly, who cares about American democracy. I thought this was an important story to tell.

Kristin Du Mez:
As an academic, we are rooted in our own academic cultures. We have the American Historical Association, American Society of Church History and so on, and so those are our peers. We do peer review and I was really writing this book first and foremost to make sure I got things right.

Kristin Du Mez:
I was always writing it with my historian peers in mind. I think that's one of the things that's been a little unexpected. It shouldn't have been unexpected. Certainly, if the book did what I maybe hoped it could do that so much of the response in recent months has been not at all about the historical scholarship.

Kristin Du Mez:
In fact, there's been very little engagement with the historical scholarship in academic spaces. I can say the book is holding up extremely well among historians, among philosophers of religion, religious studies folks. The scholarship is very solid, but in evangelical spaces the attacks have been quite personal.

Kristin Du Mez:
They've questioned my own faith, which to me, it's always a little bit difficult to know how to respond to that. On the one hand, I am a confessional Christian, Nicene Creed, I teach at Calvin University. I went to Christian grade school and in college. I can hold my own. My kids go to Christian schools.

Kristin Du Mez:
I can play that game and as much as it's a game, but the scholar in me is reluctant to do so as well, because as a work of scholarship, it really shouldn't matter what my faith commitments are to judge whether or not I got this story right. It's an interesting thing to talk about and I'm all for saying where are you coming from religiously?

Kristin Du Mez:
How did that maybe shape the questions that you're asking the approach that you took, but in terms of deciding whether this is a book that should be given real consideration, I don't think that my personal religious commitments necessarily should come into play for that.

Kristin Du Mez:
That's been a little frustrating because I think of all of the books that I've read by so many scholars who do not share my personal faith commitments. In fact, usually when I'm reading a history book, I have no clue about the religious beliefs. It's been a bit of a strange space to be in, I will say that.

George Mason:
Let's talk about your methodology a little bit. As I was reading it, of course there's a certain historical chronology that you're following that you're tracking this in a sense. For a while, as I was reading it, I was thinking, "This is a great man rendering of history." They were almost all men, but there's Phyllis Schlafly and there are people like that as well.

George Mason:
Maybe we need to say great persons, even if it's mostly male. Then the more I read, the more I thought it's going to be that way, partly because that's also part of the evangelical culture to have these significant figures. There's also of course, as historians you wrestle with, is it the great men that make culture?

George Mason:
Is it the culture that makes the great men? I'm not sure how after reading your book, which influences which the most? Do you have a sense about that?

Kristin Du Mez:
This is so much fun to get to talk about methodology. I rarely have the opportunity. I'm fairly traditionally trained as a historian. My advisor was George Morrison, a prominent historian of evangelicalism, Christian scholar, and he's an intellectual historian.

Kristin Du Mez:
Very much he's going to look at the theology, the national leaders, and there's plenty of that in Jesus and John Wayne. I've also been trained in cultural history and in gender studies. I'm always interested in how ideas of masculinity and femininity are changing over time. How they're connected, not just to religion, but to economic shifts and to race and to power, and that's obvious here.

Kristin Du Mez:
Then, as a cultural historian, I'm also really intrigued by a popular culture. Both in training, I love to read books on popular culture and to see when you really think about it, what ends up shaping evangelical faith formation? Evangelicals have crafted this elaborate subculture over the last more than half a century now.

Kristin Du Mez:
Going back to Billy Graham and radio and television and magazines, and Christian publishing. Dobson's focus on the family and televangelism. There is so much.

George Mason:
Campus ministries.

Kristin Du Mez:
Yes. The parachurch organizations that is evangelicalism really far more than what theologians may be discussing in this or that seminary, which is not entirely irrelevant because it does filter down, but there's so much more to evangelicalism than what's going on in the seminaries.

Kristin Du Mez:
To understand what evangelicalism is to ordinary folks, you have to look at this popular culture, then see how markets shape. What is distributed and how gatekeepers are really controlling, which ideas are acceptable and which ideas are not. Who gets platformed and who gets shunned.

Kristin Du Mez:
This is a popular culture of evangelicalism that takes into account the names like Falwell and Dobson, and so on. Then, it really looks at the cultural products as well, that are, are being distributed throughout the subculture. I think that's why the book connects so viscerally with so many readers.

Kristin Du Mez:
They may or may not have been aware of the debates going on within the conservative resurgence or takeover in the SBC, but they grew up watching VeggieTales or listening to Adventures in Odyssey, or their mom listened to Focus on the Family every single day.

Kristin Du Mez:
That is their evangelicalism. I simply take that seriously and really center that evangelicalism in my narrative.

George Mason:
I was talking with an older woman one time who was struggling with the question of the inclusion of LGBTQ folk in the church. She finally came out and said to me something along the lines of, "You're just being so influenced by the culture." I said, "Knowing you quite well, it seems to me that you have embodied deeply of the evangelical culture and you have a culture too."

George Mason:
It's not that there's the gospel and the church that is a true rendering of how everything is supposed to be, and there's this alien culture out there that is threatening. I think what you've done is in this book, demonstrate that this is not all about theology or biblical interpretation. This is about an enormous formation of a culture within a larger culture.

Kristin Du Mez:
Exactly. Evangelicals have created their own culture, but they have been deeply shaped by broader cultural influences as have, as you suggest progressives. The difference is that progressives openly acknowledge that. In fact, progressive Christians have really emphasized the goodness in the secular, have embraced the secular in many cases.

Kristin Du Mez:
Perhaps, to a fault in unexpected ways and it can be difficult to make a case for needing, for example, to produce distinctively progressive Christian cultural products, because they aren't afraid of what's on Netflix. They don't need their own version of everything. The market simply isn't there.

Kristin Du Mez:
Again, the way the market works then is there's a huge demand for conservative Christian products. That demand is sustained by leaders, warning their fellow evangelicals away from other cultural products. It's always important to keep in mind there's a lot of money changing hands in all of this, as well as different gate keeping mechanisms.

Kristin Du Mez:
That evangelical world is deeply influenced by a secular culture even as they deny it. Culture is always something that is out there happens to others and is bad. There is a real blindness to the deep ways in which their own values have been shaped by secular ideals. That's really the John Wayne part of the title of this book.

Kristin Du Mez:
John Wayne, not an evangelical, but a great example of how this iconic figure ends up holding this space in evangelical world when and all the values that go along with it, that some of which many of which actually run counter to scriptural teachings.

George Mason:
Well, I thought there was an interesting moment in the book too, where Oliver North heard someone referring to George W. Bush as gallivanting across the globe and acting like John Wayne. North thought that he must have misspoken because he meant Ronald Reagan not John Wayne.

Kristin Du Mez:
Yes, honest mistake.

George Mason:
There's this merger of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne in this [crosstalk 00:17:47]

Kristin Du Mez:
What is real, and I got a little obsessed with Oli North in this book. I kept waiting for my editor to say, "Too much, Kristin, too much." Each time it came back, I was like, "I got to keep it."

George Mason:
Let's go to this question of culture a little more. I think it raises an important distinction between progressives and evangelicals. That is that we use the language of culture, but really what we're talking about is the other. That there is a sense in which baked into the way of looking at faith in the world, there has to be an other, there has to be an enemy.

George Mason:
There has to be someone over against us so that we know ourselves. I was talking the other day with Mitri Raheb from Bethlehem who's a Lutheran pastor there. He's a Palestinian Christian. He was making the point that it was right at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall that Lausanne II met.

George Mason:
Right in that meeting, they had to find another enemy for the church to persecute us because communism was no longer going to be the persecutor of church and it became Islam. In that meeting, they identified the 10/40 quarter where 85% of Muslims in the world live.

George Mason:
There's a sense in which as you say, in the book, 9/11 makes Islam to be our enemy, but he was even going back to the fall of the wall. I don't know that anybody has a real explanation for this. I wonder if you do after reading the book, what is it about the nature of evangelical faith that it seems to need an enemy in order to know itself?

Kristin Du Mez:
That getting underneath to the deeper why questions is tricky. I'll say a number of times in writing the book there I felt like I was up against the limits of historical scholarship, and really needed to hand off the baton to psychologists to say, "What's really going on here?" I can describe what I've seen.

Kristin Du Mez:
I think that it's particularly to evangelical leaders. This, having an enemy, first, maybe I can go back a little bit more theological. If you get into some of the teachings and for my own reformed tradition in particular that have been warped into the teachings of somebody like [inaudible 00:20:36]. This idea of truth is from God.

Kristin Du Mez:
Those who are Christians have access to God's truth, and those who are not, or not the right kind of Christians don't have access to God's truth, this prepositionalism. The other is literally they're outside of God's truth, so why would you want to empower them? You want to separate yourself.

Kristin Du Mez:
In terms of Christian America, would you really want those people voting honestly? There is this kind of Christian worldview that is in the background here. Also, it's an extremely practical set of teachings for evangelical leaders. Somebody like Driscoll makes this very clear. You can see it in Jerry Falwell Sr.

Kristin Du Mez:
You can see it in a number of these really militant pastors today. If you can present kind of this great threat that is right outside your door even. That's church right down the road, or Driscoll was known for being flanked with body guards when he preached because it was so dangerous, and it was war.

Kristin Du Mez:
It was spiritual warfare, but the threat was very real. What happens in time of war, absolute loyalty is demanded. Anything short of that is betrayal, treason, even. Absolute sacrifice is demanded. That's exactly how Driscoll operated and this kind of language of threat and embattlement is really, really good to get people, to be loyal and to give lot of money.

Kristin Du Mez:
It's just very effective. I think that what you can see then is ordinary folks who are being told over and over again, "It's so dangerous. They are out to get you the case of the total fraudulent ex-Muslim terrorists, that caused real fear in the hearts of evangelical. It still does today, but it was entirely manufactured for the purposes of consolidating power.

George Mason:
We've talked a little bit about this generally in evangelicalism and the militancy and the idea of an enemy, and protection and those sorts of things. The heart of your book is about masculinity and that dimension of evangelicalism and underneath that is the whole structure of patriarchy.

George Mason:
Having read Harari's book Species, it's interesting that he has theories, but says, "Nobody really knows why patriarchy exists. It's everywhere. It's not just in Christianity. It's not just in evangelicalism. It's not just in the Christian Bible, it's everywhere." There are a couple of theories about that. In your book, I mean obviously, you can't start it creation. You've got to take a slice of time here.

George Mason:
But I wonder if you have wrestled with that question yourself. Has evangelicalism just picked up on something that exists there? Or is it part of the myth making that creates the system? How do you think about that the presence and persistence of patriarchy?

Kristin Du Mez:
As a historian, we tend to emphasize, we look at both continuity and change over time, but we're really emphasizing particularities. The change over time is really critical to us. We tend to shy away from any phrases such as throughout all of time. I literally like scratch those out on all my student papers all the time.

Kristin Du Mez:
I literally have a writing guide. Literally, nothing is true throughout all of time that is interesting enough to write about. This is just how historians think. It's about the particularity not just, "You're always going to find patriarchy." Then we zero in and say, "What patriarchy look like in this particular moment? Then how did it shift?"

Kristin Du Mez:
I have to confess that in writing this book I didn't entertain those big questions, but I did write a book before this one on history of Christian feminism. It's called A New Gospel for Women. It's about this remarkable Christian woman, Methodist, social reformer in the late 19th, early 20th century named Katharine Bushnell.

Kristin Du Mez:
She was a global anti-trafficking activist. Then, ended up retranslating and reinterpreting the scriptures. She dealt with this question all the time, because she was now [crosstalk 00:25:48]

George Mason:
Another book to read.

Kristin Du Mez:
She had to confront the fact that, it's going to sound familiar, but she was an anti-trafficking activist and kept coming up against respectable Christian men who were abusing women, who were covering up the abuse of women in the United States and also globally. She finally had to confront, "What is it about Christian teachings that support this?"

Kristin Du Mez:
She went to the scriptures and she went to Genesis 3. She looked at throughout all the way through the Book of Revelation. In her reading, patriarchy is a result of the fall. Now, I'm a Calvinist we're really comfortable talking about sin and total depravity. We're comfortable with and it's a sin of pride and of greed, and of grasping at power.

Kristin Du Mez:
Whereas, the gospel of Christ is undoing all of that. It was counter cultural. It goes against all of our instincts. Redemption, liberation is restoring this human flourishing and not grasping at power. I have to admit, I have been influenced by the teachings of Katharine Bushnell. I think again, as a Calvinist, a place that I can go.

George Mason:
Last question, well, maybe one more. You have a chapter on mulligans for Christian leaders who have fallen, who have succumbed to temptation, and the list is long. What I'm interested in knowing from your point of view, do you have any sense? We're all about redemption in the Christian faith.

George Mason:
It shouldn't surprise us that there are people who are eager to forgive and that who want to restore people who have great gifts and have done great things, even if there's a shadow side to it altogether. What I'm wondering is why is patriarchy in evangelicalism so durable in the face of all these failures of leaders who continually show us that they can't live up to the standards that they proclaim?

George Mason:
Shouldn't it make us examine the roots of the teaching itself, but it's incredibly durable, isn't it?

Kristin Du Mez:
We can talk about patriarchy as this overarching term, but then what I do in the book is I get into very specific teachings of how does this manifest in terms of male sexuality, in terms of female sexuality. In terms of how we understand restraint, culpability. Honestly, what I found was really quite shocking.

Kristin Du Mez:
When I first started look looking into questions of evangelical masculinity and I mentioned, I set it aside and then I came back to it a decade later. In that ensuing decade, I didn't stop paying attention. That's when I started to notice that one, after another, after another of these men that I had been reading became implicated in scandal, abusive power, sexual abuse, either directly as perpetrators or often indirectly giving cover to their friends who are perpetrators.

Kristin Du Mez:
I knew right when I decided to write this book in 2016, I knew this chapter had to be in there. It was incredibly difficult to write. This is only a fraction of the cases that I originally, I had to cut it down several times. It was just too long. How does this persist? It's this twisted logic of protecting the witness, or even the way that you framed the question of restoration and men who had done really great things.

Kristin Du Mez:
Don't we want to get them right back up there? I think we really have to think more critically about that framing, even. What kind of great things were they doing? Evangelicals have a real time to separate this ideal evangelicalism, "It's spreading this salvation message. Just pure evangelism then." Then there's some unfortunate things that happen, but that's not how things work.

Kristin Du Mez:
In some ways, any goodness does even more harm because it is wrapped up in this gray evil. The way it messes with victims is just shocking. Honestly, I've talked to so many survivors who even more traumatic for them than the actual abuse that they face is the response of their faith communities, which is just almost without exception.

Kristin Du Mez:
You can point to a few good cases in recent years, but almost without exception ends up protecting the abuser and blaming the victim. They're the ones kicked out. This pattern this is not one or two cases here. This is the norm.

George Mason:
This is church too. This is the Me Too Movement in the church. It's the story consistently of how clergy abuse is handled.

Kristin Du Mez:
I just love in the buckeye, I turn to Rachel Denhollander and she has such powerful words. She speaks to this instinct to give cover. To protect the witness of the man of the church. She says, 'The gospel of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ does not need your protection. Just asks for your obedience." What does that look like?

Kristin Du Mez:
Telling the truth and doing justice, that's all. I think those are words that we should live by. Certainly, I think that's the moral center actually, of Jesus and John Wayne.

George Mason:
That's a good place I think for us to stop at this point, and say that at the end of the book, I know your publisher wanted you to give some hope to people. You were hesitant as a historian to do something beyond the scope of your work. You did say this entire development was not inevitable because history is not. What once was done can be undone or redone.

George Mason:
I think as a pastor and a faith leader, what I want to say to you is first, thank you for your work. I accept the challenge of taking it from here in a sense that it's up to those of us who are doing this work in churches and on the front lines to have a different modeling of our Christian theology. Knowing what we have been is an important part in that. Thank you so much for your good work.

Kristin Du Mez:
Thank you so much.

George Mason:
We'll see you soon. I know you're coming to Dallas and to our church actually in just a few weeks. We'll look forward to that on April the third. Thank you very much for your willingness to go everywhere with this good news that comes out of a period of bad news too. God bless you in your work.

Kristin Du Mez:
Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3:
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