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This may sound crazy, but I think it is possible for a person with complementarian views about the role of women in church and society to write a gender history similar to what Du Mez has done in Jesus and John Wayne. In this sense, the work of gender historians will always be disruptive in nature. Historians of gender have made major contributions to our understanding of American history by reading documents closely, and pointing out how they reveal longstanding power relations between men and women. (I am guessing he didn’t read much gender history during his Ph.D studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary). Anyone who has read Du Mez’s book knows that it is based on solid historical evidence and research.īut it seems Wilsey’s beef extends beyond Jesus and John Wayne to the field of gender history as a whole. I am guessing that many of Wilsey’s fellow conservative evangelicals will love this line from the review: “If we place Worthen, Turek, and Conroy-Krutz alongside Du Mez, we can see the difference between evidence-based history and history as social and political posturing, the firing of salvoes in the culture wars.” Frankly, this is a cheap shot and it seems to undermine Wilsey’s focus throughout the piece on historical empathy. Many of the complementarian critics of Du Mez’s work have already ignored Wilsey’s attempts at civility and have seized on the points in the review that serve their agendas.
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Jesus and john wayne by kristin kobes du mez free#
Though Wilsey shows much more empathy than some of his Southern Baptist theobros who have allowed Du Mez to live inside their heads rent free for the last year, he is still quite critical. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.Southern Baptist Theological Seminary church historian John Wilsey recently took a shot at Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne in a review published at a conservative website called Ad Fontes. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes-mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of "Christian America." Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.Ĭhallenging the commonly held assumption that the "moral majority" backed Donald Trump in 20 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals' most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. Many of today's evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they've read John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex-and they have a silver ring to prove it. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism-or in the words of one modern chaplain, with "a spiritual badass."Īs acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism.
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The "paradigm-influencing" book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America.