Jesus and John Wayne

This book is one of the best all-encompassing explainers of how Christian Evangelicalism affects every facet of the United States Government and religious patriarchy's role in shaping modern America.

Evangelicalism is just as underhanded and sinister at silencing balanced discussions about equal rights as it is SA victims. People like Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Bill Gothard and Phyllis Sclafly started a cesspool of far right, anti-science, anti-woman rhetoric that's still poisoning the public consciousness today.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how the traditional, peace-loving, socialist Christian Jesus turned into the gun-toting figure many hyper-religious, meglomaniacal über-conservatives follow today.

This book is so helpful - to understand my own upbringing and how the political landscape has become what it is today. This was also hard to read as someone influenced and brought up in said movement and now sees it for what it was / is.

Powerful book that helps explain why and how Christianity is the way it is today.

Very slow and dry, packing in a lot of detail to lay the foundation for why Trump is a culmination of evangelical priorities, not an outlier. It reads like a standard history book. I think what bothered me about this book is that it felt so clinical in describing issues that have such an incredible, daily impact on people's daily lives. It felt like a 1000 ft view, mostly due to the writing style. Still an enlightening read, but purely informational.

Not much theology but a good historical book that lays out the path to where evangelicals are now.

I grew up in an evangelical environment so none of this information is really even new, and yet it still stings so hard. 

The introduction alone is a tour de force. The rest of the book a matter of fact laying out of the themes and actors already familiar to my tribe but never assembled to elicit this response. There is scant first person exposition, which I find remarkable. Ultimately “Layla” plays during the entire final chapter and recent events, post-publishing, continue on the theme and I predict the song will keep playing as we continue to learn the implications of this particular brand of masculinity.

As a recently former Evangelical, this explains a whole lot of things that have bothered me for a long time. I kept hoping I could make a difference and make people really listen to the words of Jesus. But every time my family and I tried, we became ‘dangerous' and were bullied out of the church. I thought it was just churches where we live, but I see it is much larger than that. This book was so hard to listen to. I couldn't have finished it if I was reading it. I feel really lucky that I have only been given the cold shoulder a few times by churches because as I see in this book, it could have been so much worse. Sad and scary, but also it affirms my decision to become an ex-evangelical Christian.

If you want to know how we got here (as in 81% of white evangelicals voting for Trump in 2016 and continuing to support him, all the way to what happened on January 6, 2021...) this is a good book to read.

Here are some quotes:

“For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity. Many Americans who now identify as evangelicals are identifying with this operational theology—one that is Republican in its politics and traditionalist in its values.”

“Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God's chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians.”

“Evangelicals hadn't betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn't afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn't let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson's William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.”

“The frequency of these instances, and the tendency of evangelicals to diminish or dismiss cases of abuse in their own communities, suggests that evangelicals' response to allegations of abuse in the era of Trump cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Rather, these tendencies appear to be endemic to the movement itself.”

“In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making.”

“evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals' embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.”