Along the way, this model of Christian patriarchy seeks to govern the home, the school, the church, and ultimately, the nation.Ī professor of history at Calvin University and the author, previously, of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism, Du Mez’s new book pledges to explain the current state of white evangelicalism-from family dynamics to voting preferences-with help from gender analysis.Įric C. Men are pushed to be extra-manly, wives to be sexy and supportive, and children to mind authority as they grow into their own designated gender tracks. For the past 80 years, she argues, white evangelical speakers, writers, and media figures have been idealizing a form of manliness that is at once all Jesus and all John Wayne, calling their audiences to hyper-masculinity as an orienting center. And yet, as readers of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation will quickly discover, Du Mez is not describing a movement in search of a happy medium.
He resigns himself to a compromise lifestyle somewhere between “a cowboy and a saint.” When Kristin Kobes Du Mez set to work on her study of white evangelical masculinity in 2016, the Gaither song offered her a title. Though striving after the soft purity of Jesus as exemplified by his mother, the man often finds himself living like a rough and rugged John Wayne as modeled by his father. In 2008, the Gaither Vocal Band released a song called “Jesus and John Wayne,” about a young man’s struggle to live a godly life. Donald Trump stands near a statue of John Wayne during a news conference at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa.
0 kommentar(er)
