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.
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.
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