‘Jesus and John Wayne’ author Kristin Du Mez on how white evangelicals came to embrace Donald Trump

// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Brian Mackey: Today on The 21st Show, how did evangelical Christians come to not only vote for Donald Trump, but embrace him as a heroic figure meant to deliver America from evil? Historian Kristin Du Mez says the cultural forces behind that were a long time in coming, and that Trump does not represent a betrayal of evangelical values, but their fulfillment.

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Kristin Du Mez: He's actually ideally suited for this task precisely because he is not constrained by traditional Christian virtue.

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Brian Mackey: Du Mez's most recent book came out in 2020 and is called "Jesus and John Wayne." I'm Brian Mackey. That's coming up today on The 21st Show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. But first, news.

From Illinois Public Media, this is The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Ten years and one month ago, January 23, 2016, Donald Trump appeared at a rally in Iowa ahead of the caucuses that year. He was boasting to the crowd about his popularity and in so doing made one of the most memorable, outrageous comments of his political career.

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Donald Trump: The people, my people are so smart and you know what else they say about my people? The polls. They say I have the most loyal people. Did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters. OK, it's like incredible.

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Brian Mackey: My guest today was watching that event online and says she knew the setting well. Kristen Kobes Du Mez had grown up in Sioux Center, Iowa, and attended Dordt College, the small Christian school where Trump was speaking. Later that year, more than 80% of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump — a man who'd been married three times, bragged about grabbing women, and when asked to name his favorite Bible verse, didn't come up with one. How did this happen?

My guest today argues it wasn't a betrayal of evangelical values. It was their fulfillment, the culmination of decades spent cultivating what she calls militant masculinity in evangelical culture. Kristen Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan and a senior democracy fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her 2020 book "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation" became a New York Times bestseller. Her next book, "Live Laugh Love," focuses on white Christian women and comes out in September.

I spoke with Du Mez back in February, ahead of her giving the annual Thulin lecture at the University of Illinois. Because of that, no calls today, but you can let us know what you think. Our email address is talk@21stshow.org.

Kristen Kobes Du Mez, welcome to The 21st Show. Thank you for being with us.

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Kristin Du Mez: It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.

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Brian Mackey: I just want to start with a baseline. How you doing? It's been a long year slash decade.

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Kristin Du Mez: You know, that's a hard, hard question to answer day by day. It's exhausting. But you just take it as it comes, I guess.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. All right, let's start with some definitions maybe. What does it mean to be an evangelical Christian?

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Kristin Du Mez: Oh, you're asking the easy questions up front.

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Brian Mackey: Start with the sort of theological definition.

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Kristin Du Mez: This is a good, this is an important question, and it's a great question, a simple question, and scholars debate the answer endlessly. So I'll just give a bit of an overview. If you ask an evangelical themselves, especially an evangelical leader, they will give you a theological definition. So evangelicals, they like to say we're Bible believing Christians, which, you know, that's great self-identification, but you know what does that suggest about other Christians? There's a bit of judgment in there. But also they'll turn to like a kind of formal definition that they believe in the centrality of the cross of Christ, the importance of conversion, and a high view of the Bible's authority, and really invested in activism or evangelism, so acting on their beliefs. That's this kind of four-part belief of what it is to be an evangelical.

Now, as a cultural historian, I take that into account, but I interpret evangelicalism a little bit differently. I see evangelicalism more as a cultural movement, something defined not necessarily by theological beliefs, because the evangelicals themselves, when they do surveys, discover to their horror that a lot of self-identified evangelicals don't actually know much theology. And a lot of them kind of count as heretics. So, you know, if that's the case, what does it mean to be an evangelical?

And I look at the importance of affiliation — so sure if you attend an evangelical church, but also kind of cultural identity and the importance of consumer culture. So if you shop at Christian bookstores, if you listen to Christian radio, if you buy books from Christian publishers, or if you attend an evangelical church, all of these things will immerse you in the teachings of evangelicalism. And so I look at evangelicalism as a cultural movement as well as a theological position.

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Brian Mackey: You don't even have to step foot into an evangelical church to identify as evangelical, right?

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Kristin Du Mez: Not at all. Not at all. And that's why you, you can also be an evangelical and attend a mainline church. Certainly a lot of people sitting in the pews of mainline churches are deeply influenced by evangelicalism. And this is also why evangelicalism just kind of spreads. It spreads through churches, through denominations, and across borders. And so American evangelicalism and the popular culture that evangelicals produce in terms of TV and radio and publishing really has gone global. And so what we're looking at is an American religious movement and also, you know, a global religious movement as well.

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Brian Mackey: And I guess that gets into like there are Catholics nowadays who seem more politically like evangelicals to me, and I don't know if you've thought much about that Venn diagram.

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Kristin Du Mez: Yes, definitely. So I got my Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. So I certainly think about Catholicism a lot. I spent the last year at Notre Dame actually. And so if you're looking at the history of Catholicism and its relationship to evangelicalism, it really does change over time. So if you go back to the 1960s, 1970s, a lot of evangelicals were very anti-Catholic. A lot of evangelicals didn't consider Catholics Christian at all. And you'll still run into that, you know — no, no, I'm a Christian, not a Catholic, you know.

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Brian Mackey: I definitely got that the first time I really met evangelicals was in college. I mean, I went to Catholic school for the most part, and yeah, that's where I learned I was not going to the good place.

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Kristin Du Mez: No, no, no, yeah, so you have personal experience there. But what we see historically is that kind of a top-down alliance formed before a bottom-up alliance. So you could see a political alliance by the 1970s really starting to coalesce, certainly by the late 1970s between conservative Catholic leaders and conservative evangelical leaders, even while their popular culture, so again I'm a cultural historian, remained largely distinct. But that too has started to change in the last decade or two. I was just looking into some figures of how, for example, Christian music, contemporary Christian music, CCM, Christian radio, like the evangelical type, are becoming much more common now in Catholic spaces than they were 20 years ago. So again, that kind of spillover of — it's not just the music, but it's the kind of what evangelicals would call worldview that comes along with it and political worldview, certainly.

So you start to see a little bit more of this crossover. And another interesting space where you see it is actually in influencer space and tradwife culture and things like that where you see some overlap between conservative evangelical and conservative Catholic influencers and their audiences.

But no, for the most part, what I was looking at was within the evangelical world, and there wasn't a whole lot of overlap between the kind of cultural products that Catholics and evangelicals consumed, although again change over time.

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Brian Mackey: What does it mean to be a cultural historian as opposed to other types of historians?

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Kristin Du Mez: That's a really great question. So traditionally, religious historians tended to focus on theology. And so they would, when they wanted to study religious history or actually, you know, church history as the field was often called, they would look at what famous theologians wrote and what they thought. And they would look at, you know, who's leading seminaries, what were the important theological treatises that were written, and look at denominational histories. So you know, let's look at the history of the Southern Baptist Convention when it was founded and who were the presidents and this kind of top-down approach.

Cultural historians don't ignore those things, but those are not, that's not the center of our research. We're interested in popular religious experience. What do ordinary people do? What sources shape their religious convictions, their understanding of who God is, their understanding of who they are and what it means to be a faithful Christian. And traditionally, a lot of scholars had sort of written that off. That's, you know, you don't take that stuff seriously. Televangelists, you know, we'll get an eye roll maybe. You know, I look at things like popular books on masculinity, what does it mean to be a Christian man? They are not scholarly treatises whatsoever. You know, I look at Amy Grant and Sandi Patty, contemporary Christian music, right? Things that popular or kind of intellectual historians or religious scholars traditionally have not paid any attention to.

But if you think about, you know, what does it mean to be religious and how do people live out their faith on a daily basis, these less distinguished, less respectable sources are actually incredibly influential in shaping people's religious values and what scholars call kind of lived experience. What does your faith mean to you? And how does it shape your day-to-day life? And those are the things that fascinate me. So I spend a lot of time reading things like Christian romance novels, and, you know, looking at multi-level marketing and looking at things like, um, yeah, just the books that are selling millions of copies in Christian bookstores that, you know, formal kind of religious scholars tended not to pay any attention to.

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Brian Mackey: And this is how you end up with people who think they understand what it means to be an evangelical Christian, surprised by the outcome and certainly the percentages, the vote share of the 2016 elections.

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Kristin Du Mez: Exactly, exactly. You're getting a kind of not just the professed values or religious convictions from the top down, the kind of formal theology, but you're really looking at that lived experience and you're looking at the ideals that really shape people, motivate people. So in "Jesus and John Wayne," I spent a lot of time looking at, you know, who were being held up as heroes for Christian men. What figures were held up as role models for Christian men, and how did those role models, those heroes then shape the kind of Christianity they embraced, who they understood Jesus Christ to be, what they understood their own role to be as a Christian man, as a Christian father, as a leader, who they thought they should vote for, what leadership even looked like to them.

These are the kinds of things that you can really get a feel for that you might miss if you're just looking at the kind of approved formal theological treatises.

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Brian Mackey: So I came up in an era of sort of a hippie Jesus, I guess you might say. That was the sort of the tradition I was in. I was not in this media bubble. So talk, walk me through this. Where does militant masculinity come into this story? How does that develop in this strain of Christianity?

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Kristin Du Mez: Yeah. So I first actually kind of encountered this strand of militant Christian manhood in the early 2000s. And it wasn't brand new then, but that's when it really started to have a moment. And it was actually my students. I teach at Calvin University, at a Christian university in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and it was my students in an American history course who first introduced me to this kind of genre. And it was after I had lectured in a U.S. history class on Teddy Roosevelt and I wanted to show my students just standard, you know, U.S. history course — how gender worked in history, how ideas of masculinity in particular change over time and how they're related to things like religion, yes, but also to economics and to racial identity and to war, to the military, you know, all sorts of things. And I thought that would be a fascinating thing to show my students. And after class a couple of guys from the class were waiting afterwards to talk to me and they said, Professor Du Mez, there is a book that you have got to read. And they pointed me to John Eldredge's book "Wild at Heart."

This was the early 2000s and I had heard all about that book. It was selling millions of copies. All the guys in the dorms were reading it. My own church was hosting a men's group to discuss it. And it was a book on discovering the kind of secret to the masculine soul and, you know, I had avoided that. I thought that's not really my thing, but I took their advice and I headed down to Family Christian bookstore back when we had, you know, actual bookstores, and I bought a copy and I opened it up and I saw exactly what they were talking about because right at the beginning of the book was a quote from Teddy Roosevelt. And it went on to depict Christian manhood in a very militaristic way based not on scripture, right, not on biblical interpretation, but on these kind of secular heroes to conclude that God is a warrior God and men are made in his image. Every man has a battle to fight.

So the heroes were cowboys and various warriors and these kind of Hollywood heroes and soldiers, and then the faith itself that was depicted was a very aggressive militant faith. And I thought, wow, this is, this is kind of wild. And I knew it was selling millions of copies, and that's when I started to really pay attention. And this was in the early 2000s again. At the same time as we were in the early years of the Iraq War, and I was seeing all this data come out from social scientists at the time of how evangelicals, white evangelicals in particular, far more than any demographic were pro-war, pro-preemptive war, condone the use of torture, you know, all of these things. And I thought, wow, what might one of these things have to do with the other? Because if you're just looking at those kind of formal theological teachings, you're not going to be able to answer that question. Why are so many white evangelicals, people in the pews, right, the just the popular evangelicalism, why are so many believers embracing this kind of militancy with respect to foreign policy and also it turns out with respect to domestic politics.

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Brian Mackey: We need to take a break. We'll have more with Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation." We first broadcast this conversation back in February, so no calls today. We'll be back in a moment. I'm Brian Mackey. This is The 21st Show.

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It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Let's get back to my conversation with Kristen Kobes Du Mez. She is a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of the book "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation." It was a New York Times bestseller that came out in 2020, still in print. She has a new book coming out later this year focusing on white women evangelicals and their part in this story. That comes out in September. I spoke with Du Mez earlier this year when she was coming to central Illinois to give the annual Thulin lecture at the University of Illinois. Because of that, no calls today, but you can let us know what you thought. Our email address is talk@21stshow.org.

Who is driving the train here, right? Is this coming from leaders? Is it coming from the ground up? Does that make sense?

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Kristin Du Mez: Oh, it makes perfect sense. It's a very, very smart question. Because it's, uh, I think it's, there are different ways of answering it. I mean, publishers, yes, denominational publishers, powerful pastors, people with big platforms are writing these things. But then what happens is it kind of takes on a life of its own. So I mentioned this book "Wild at Heart" by John Eldredge, published in 2001 and sold more than 4 million copies. So as soon as something like that happens, right, there's all kinds of copycat books. And so within, you know, three, four years, that's when I actually started paying attention. And that book was mild in comparison to what came after. And just dozens of books, and I read them all, and they're essentially just plagiarizing each other, the same casts of characters, right? The same heroes, the same lessons. It was really quite stunning, very real lack of creativity there. But it was a tried and true formula.

And so you kind of have this then generate this popular appeal. And then, so I look a lot at kind of market forces. Yes, somebody comes up with this. And yes, then powerful people platform this and, you know, so it wasn't just people like John Eldredge in the early 2000s. We also had somebody like Mark Driscoll come on the kind of national stage, a very militaristic, misogynistic pastor from Seattle, Washington, very controversial. But also platformed by the quote unquote respectable evangelicals, right, you know, people like John Piper and if you know evangelicalism, right, this will make sense and in groups like the Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today, right? So you can see the kind of powerful centers of respectable evangelicalism propping up, giving cover to some of these more radical versions.

And then you have, you know, thousands of churches around the country where the pastors and men's groups say, Hey, let's study this. Let's assign this book. And so there's a built-in market, a built-in distribution system, and you have hundreds of thousands of men buying these books and then studying them together essentially as God's word. And then these ideas really take hold. So then there's a kind of popular movement that, you know, it becomes kind of difficult to redirect, right? And so I think that it goes back and forth. You certainly have the top-down, powerful people with platforms, pastors, church leaders as part of this story. But I think over time too, you see the kind of growth of a populist movement that takes on a life of its own and that's very much kind of the reality that we are living in today so that if a pastor wants to kind of get out in front of this and say, hey, we need to change direction here, you know, it will not go well for them, let's put it that way, like they will be out of a job. They will be a leader with no followers. And so it's really interesting to watch these dynamics and to see how that has really changed over time.

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Brian Mackey: The story we've been talking about so far has a lot to do with men, right? John Wayne, militant masculinity, patriarchy. Where have the women been during this time?

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Kristin Du Mez: Yes, so in "Jesus and John Wayne," I do have one chapter that focuses on women, and it was very hard for me to. I am a, I mean, by training a historian of gender, but primarily of women, but when I came across this topic, thanks to my students, I, you know, I just had to figure it out. I had to make sense of this. Like, where did this come from and what is it doing? So I ended up writing a whole book on masculinity, but it kind of killed me to leave the femininity as kind of just in one chapter. So I made up for that. I just finished another book, which is kind of the female side to all of this, but I'll give a little preview of what I include in "Jesus and John Wayne," which is that women have a very important role to play, but it is opposite.

So gender difference emerges in the 1970s as really critical to the whole evangelical worldview, the understanding of how God ordered society, the foundation for the social order. Is that men and women were created to be opposite, right? So whatever a man is, a woman is the opposite, which, so men are strong, women are weak, you know, men are aggressive, women need to be protected. And it really is this extreme — like James Dobson is one of the figures who really advanced this gender difference in the 1970s and ever since. And as he put it, you know, men and women are different in every cell of their bodies. Which, you know, biologically, sure, but where he'll take that is, you know, so men like sports, women like to stand on the sidelines and cheer, you know, like these really ridiculous kind of extrapolations. But that gender difference was absolutely key.

What that happens then, you know, if you are interested in kind of Christian theology, is this whole idea of virtue and Christian virtue. That too gets divided. And so, you know, if you think about, I'm often asked actually by Christians who read "Jesus and John Wayne," which is, you know, a critique of this kind of aggressive militant Christian manhood and Christianity, well, what does a Christian man look like? What should, what are the attributes? If not this whole warrior masculinity, you know, essentially based on John Wayne and secular, you know, warrior heroes. OK, we get that's bad. Well, what should a godly man actually look like? And I don't actually get into that. I'm a historian, but, you know, when pressed, I'll say, well, I don't know, what does the Bible say that, you know, the fruit of the spirit would look like, right? The fruit of the evidence of the spirit, the Holy Spirit in your life, it is not a gendered list. And it is things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.

Now let me tell you, these are not the masculine virtues that are celebrated in this militant Christian manhood. It is aggression. It is righteous violence, right? It's the good guy with the gun. It is power. It is seizing power and holding that power and asserting power in the name of God, and God is always on your side, right? So you can see how this can be dangerous. And then what is, all of these attributes of things like gentleness? No, no, no, no, no, not for this moment. Those are great feminine virtues, right? So they literally like feminize virtue and then Christianize these attributes of aggression and violence, and and then those are what men are called to be.

So they'll say things like, God filled men with testosterone, made men dangerous so that they can be heroes, so they can be protectors, violent protectors if need be. And they need to act preemptively, right? Using that violence to protect the vulnerable. Who are the vulnerable? Women, children — if women and children obey. Those are the women and children who ought to be protected, must be protected. But there's this kind of deal that if you are not an obedient woman, if you are not a submissive woman, if you do not accept your God-ordained role, which is to submit to masculine authority and to have your primary vocation as a wife and mother and to obey God's commands as they interpret it, well, then you are not owed protection. You have removed yourself from the cover of protection. And so you kind of, you know, get what is coming to you. And so there's a real kind of violence even underneath this language of masculine protection.

And that's something that I bring out and kind of come back to your original question, the chapter in the book on femininity kind of lays that out and shows how there's a bargain here, but women must submit to masculine authority and defer to that. And if they don't, right, they don't get, they aren't owed protection. But it's also really tricky because men are owed deference and you submit to them whether or not they behave morally. And so I talk in the book about abuse and what happens when women are abused inside these spaces. Women who are taught to submit to masculine authority. What happens when it's the pastor who is abuser, the husband, right? The head of the household is the abuser. What happens then? Well, the woman is still supposed to submit, and she is supposed to forgive, and she is supposed to restore her husband to authority.

And, um, my goodness, the stories then that that I came upon, and I started researching the book, I should say, before the Me Too movement, before the Church Too movement, the kind of Christian arm of the Me Too movement. And one of the first questions I asked when I decided to write this book, which was in the fall of 2016, I actually consulted a lawyer because at that point, many of the stories that I had come across of abuse inside Christian spaces hadn't really been made public, or they were public on blogs, on survivor blogs. And then Me Too happened. And what happened then is journalists found those stories and journalists started covering them and now they're kind of in the national conversation. But Christian women were testifying to what was happening into these power dynamics for a very long time and were largely just ignored.

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Brian Mackey: This is the culture that mainstreamed the idea of WWJD, right? What would Jesus do? Is there a scriptural basis for the idea that the answer to that question, WWJD is pick up a rifle and take a fight to the libs?

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Kristin Du Mez: Oh, you know, the question is pointed, you know, and I'm a person of faith myself, so I would answer it in a particular way, which is, you know, I would contest that there's scriptural validation for that. Evangelicals wouldn't put it quite that way. And you know, I should also say that it's an interesting moment right now because we're seeing a couple of generations of evangelicals, people who grew up evangelical, people raised on the WWJD, what would Jesus do, grappling with exactly this question. You have a lot of a kind of growing evangelical movement.

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Brian Mackey: I've spoken with Sarah McCammon of NPR who wrote a book called "The Exvangelicals."

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Kristin Du Mez: Yes, exactly. She's one of them. Yeah. And, you know, so many others who were raised to genuinely seek to do what Jesus would do. And I do think that's worth emphasizing because, you know, I'm a historian who writes some fairly critical histories, and, uh, but there are very good people, well-intentioned people who are part of these stories and probably the majority of the people, right, in these stories, they aren't necessarily the ringleaders, they aren't necessarily the ones with all the power, but there are true believers, absolutely, who are participating in it. In fact, these systems wouldn't work if there weren't. And so they, you know, genuinely believe that to be a Christian wife is to do what all the Christian Bible studies that you're reading in your church small group and women's ministry tell you to do. You want to be obedient, you want to be a good wife, you want to be a good mother, so you should submit to your husband. You should prop up his authority. You should not question him. You should not be negative, right? All of these things.

What does it mean to be, you know, a good Christian man? It's not just this kind of aggressive militant version. There's also a lot of literature, and I write about this in the book too, about being a good father, right? Being a good father to your children. So there's this goodness mixed up in this, like running through this. And then there is also the teaching of, you know, and power. And one of the things I kind of grappled with is as I was reading these bestselling books that honestly shocked me when I first started reading them, I thought, wow, these are really extreme ideas, even extremists, right? Like, what do I even do with this? Is this mainstream? Is this fringe? How do I even wrap my head around this?

And then at the same time, so, so yes, extremist ideas, and I very much stand by that and, and these extremist ideas that, you know, back in the early 2000s seemed fringe have very much moved into the mainstream today, you know, we just saw Doug Wilson, who's a character in the book, who [was] preaching at the Pentagon under the direction of Pete Hegseth, or rather it was maybe Pete Hegseth under Doug Wilson's direction because Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, attends a church in Wilson's little denomination, right? So this is mainstream, this kind of very militant Christian nationalism, militant masculinity.

But you know, all the way through, it's this mix of mainstream, well-intentioned folks. I'd like to imagine, you know, a lot of the men reading this very militant and aggressive teaching were sitting around in khakis and polo shirts, right, a men's Bible study doing this. So, you know, the majority of these guys, they were not out storming the Capitol on January 6th, right? And so kind of keeping that in mind, while at the same time acknowledging that they were participating in this kind of religious ecosystem that defined leadership in a particular way, that defined kind of the alpha male, the man who has the authority to lead, the man who is really, you know, empowered by God to lead and being taught that this aggressive vision of masculine leadership was in fact God ordained. So even if these are really nice guys, you know, in their own churches in their own homes, still embrace this vision of what was good and noble and appropriate on the national stage.

And the politics were always a part of this. Even if you know men were reading these for more of a kind of personal devotional purpose and thinking about how to be good dads and responsible Christian men, there was always a political kind of undertow, and that was that we need strong Christian men, aggressive men, even ruthless men to fight the culture wars. America is at war. Christianity is under attack.

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Brian Mackey: All right, we need to take another break. We'll have more with Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of "Jesus and John Wayne." This is The 21st Show.

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It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. Let's get back to my interview with Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation." I spoke with her earlier this year ahead of a lecture at the University of Illinois.

I asked Du Mez how it was that so many evangelical Christians came to embrace a man who had been divorced three times, bragged about grabbing women, had been documented assaulting other women, and they nevertheless came to not only vote for Donald Trump but really embrace him as a cultural phenomenon to the extent where 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016.

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Kristin Du Mez: Exactly. So I mentioned that I decided to write "Jesus and John Wayne" in the fall of 2016. And it was in the weeks after the Access Hollywood tape released because at that moment, and so I had started researching this book in 2004, 2005, 2006, right, so long ago, and then precisely because of that question of, is this mainstream or is this fringe, I kind of set it aside. I just, I was working on another book. I, you know, had my plate full. So there are other reasons, but I was really kind of troubled. Like, is this mainstream or is this fringe? And if it is fringe, like, you know, do I need to shine this bright light on what may well be the, you know, kind of dark underbelly of American Christianity? I'm a Christian myself. Is that really something I should be, you know, investing myself in? And so I just kind of set it aside for a decade actually, but I didn't stop paying attention. I still, you know, just kind of kept an eye on these preachers, these guys, and what I did see is one after another became embroiled in scandal, in sexual abuse scandal, abuse of power, personally, or they were defending their friends who were the perpetrators, right? And so I just kind of, I just watch.

And so it was in the days after the Access Hollywood tapes release that I suddenly thought back to that research because if you remember, at that point, it was already clear — this was just weeks before the 2016 election. It was already clear that evangelicals surprisingly to many people were, you know, in the Trump camp. And as you say, he didn't really strike people as your family values candidate. He didn't talk like a Christian, didn't act like a Christian, and yet we were seeing, you know, really strong numbers of evangelicals backing Trump and not just in October. If you go back during the primaries, you see the plurality of white evangelical voters backing Trump back when they had a lot of other choices and it wasn't just Trump versus Hillary Clinton, right? And so if you're watching closely, you were seeing this, but it didn't make sense to so many people, right? How could family values Christians support a man like Donald Trump was the question of the hour, especially after the Access Hollywood tape released.

And then, you know, the national media was just focused on this and evangelicals themselves were too. What is going to happen? And we saw that very week a couple of evangelical leaders pull back from supporting Trump and then by the end of the week they were right back at it. And what we saw in, you know, about four weeks later, that infamous 80, 81% of white evangelicals still voted for him despite what they had seen on that tape. And so the question was, how could they, how could white evangelicals, the moral majority, family values voters, betray those values and vote for a man like Donald Trump.

And that's when I thought, no, that's not the correct question. This is not a betrayal of values. We need a better understanding of what those values actually are. And I had seen for a decade family values evangelicals support abusers in their own churches, malign victims and take the side of the perpetrator time and time again and doing so to defend, quote unquote, the man's witness, to defend the church and to protect that patriarchal authority. And so I paid attention and you could hear the language of, you know, this is God's anointed. This is the man who God has chosen to lead us, and he's actually ideally suited for this task precisely because he is not constrained by traditional Christian virtue. He is ruthless. He will not be cowed by political correctness or political conventions or, you know, possibly by the Constitution, but that is precisely why he is the man for this hour, because the threat is just so great. And that reminded me so much of what I had read, you know, 15 years earlier.

[00:40:03]
Brian Mackey: You mentioned how difficult it was for you to decide whether to even take on this work and you spent a decade thinking about it. What reaction have you heard from people from "Jesus and John Wayne" up to, you know, the ideas that you've been exploring for your forthcoming book, "Live Laugh Love"?

[00:40:22]
Kristin Du Mez: Oh, you know, I will say that I, you know, it, in October 2016 when it clicked for me, like it really clicked for me. I thought, wait a minute, right? I literally like found those old files stuck in, you know, some space in my computer, pulled them back up. And what I did is I wrote a little piece on evangelical masculinity and militarism. And I published it in an online journal, Religion and Politics, and they published it timed to Trump's inauguration in January 2017, and that piece went viral. And there were all kinds of comments at the time, and I know you're not supposed to read the comments on things, but I did. But I, it was actually the comments that convinced me to, to turn, it was just like going to be in the article, right, to turn it into a book because so many evangelical men themselves were commenting on that piece saying, this is exactly right. And then [sharing] their stories and saying, yes, this is true. This is what happened. And so it was their comments. I thought, OK, there is something more here. And that's when I decided to turn it into a book.

And so when the book came out, it came out in 2020. And it, you know, initially made a bit of a splash kind of in the traditional, you know, kind of NPR space, New York Times kind of space, you know, just the national politics. And then about three months out, it started getting picked up in evangelical spaces and evangelicals started reading it. And the same thing started happening. So many evangelicals started posting about the book. You know, Russell Moore is actually in the book. He was at the time one of the most powerful men in the Southern Baptist Convention. He's since been kicked out, but he mentioned that first year, how many women, Southern Baptist women would come up to him wherever he went and just pull him aside and say, Have you read this book? You need to read this book, right? And he, you know, so it started to spread like that.

Beth Moore, another figure in the book, you know, one time, one of the most, hands down the most powerful woman in the SBC, Bible study leader, women's ministry leader, lovely person. She posted on Twitter about reading the book and being stunned by what she read and having it resonate with her. And you know, that also really, people started picking it up and it really went viral in evangelical spaces. So it was evangelicals themselves who made this book a bestseller. Which is not to say it did not and does not have its critics inside white evangelical spaces. It certainly does. And you know I think one of the critiques has been certainly from kind of establishment evangelicals and those kind of happy with a more Christian nationalist approach to the faith, and not all evangelicals embrace Christian nationalism, but you know, many of them do. So there's always kind of diversity within those spaces, but one of the critiques was I don't say enough nice things about evangelicals too, so any critique should be tempered with lots of nice things, and that's, you know that's just kind of not how historians tend to practice their craft is balancing if you know, any negativity with nice things as well.

Yeah, I would say that there, um, for about a year I, it was very lively on social media. I endured a lot of attacks. I've been called a lot of names, a child of the devil, that sort of thing, but, you know, my inbox is 99 to 1 letters of gratitude, deeply personal letters of gratitude from evangelicals themselves. It just never ceases to amaze me. And those comments almost always always follow kind of a similar pattern, saying this book is the story of my life. And they will often, anyway, I've had, I've had readers who reach out to me, post, they include pictures of their bookshelf. That's literally like all the books that I talk about in "Jesus and John Wayne." Like, no, really, this is the story of my life. More than once I've had people accuse me of breaking into their childhood home and stealing their diaries and using them to write the book. They're like, this is the story of my life. But they always then say, I never understood how all these pieces fit together, right? So there's this intimate like familiarity and then never understanding what it was that they participated in, what it was that they lived through, and how the things they thought they were participating in were actually something else entirely or became something else entirely.

And so it's actually incredibly gratifying to have so many readers from inside the world that I describe say this helped me understand my own life. Thank you. And so that's overwhelmingly the response that comes my way.

[00:45:38]
Brian Mackey: What does it take to interrupt these patterns you've described? Are there historical antecedents, right? There have been waxing and waning of the strength of Christianity in American politics, Christian nationalism in American politics. Should I be optimistic or pessimistic? Take it where you will.

[00:45:58]
Kristin Du Mez: History never offers us an exact kind of formula at all, right? Historians will talk about continuity and change and contingency, right? So, you know, we're kind of looking to the past for clues, trying to recognize patterns, but it's never a perfect fit. So it really kind of, you know, depends which — what present are we living? So I'll have to confess here that in my outside field in in graduate school was 20th century Germany with a focus on the German Christian movement. So German Christians under Nazism. So that's a pretty kind of dark lens with which to kind of view present reality, but there are some similarities, certainly not a perfect overlap. So, you know, disclaimer right there. But scholars who have looked at that era and the kind of German Christian movement, the German church under Hitler, you know, that's not a very encouraging story because what it took was kind of societal collapse, right, a devastating war, and loss of, of the...

[00:47:14]
Brian Mackey: Defeat. They came for the communists, right.

[00:47:17]
Kristin Du Mez: Exactly, exactly right. So, so that's a negative kind of historical lesson, but it is one that is in the minds of a lot of scholars familiar with 20th century history and the history of authoritarianism. I'll just, I'll just put it that way. Again, there are always differences. This is not a simple formula whatsoever, but people are looking to that time for some lessons.

What else could shake this? Um, you know, a more idealistic model perhaps would be, you know, some theologians are saying what we need is a theological revolution. We need to combat this kind of bad theology, this theology that dehumanizes others, this theology that separates out what is holy and righteous, which happens to be, you know, like whoever has the most power from, you know, what is like unclean, unholy, the other. This is actually the theme of, or one of the themes of the book that I have just finished is exploring more this us versus them and understandings of holiness and righteousness as either separation requiring violence and protection or a different kind of model.

And this is where Christian theologians actually have some really rich resources on which they draw, which is a different understanding of holiness, which is not holiness as separation, but holiness as reaching out to the other. Look at Jesus' model of touching the unclean, of ministering to those on the margins, of reaching out to precisely those, not to those, you know, not aligning himself with those who held the cultural and political power, the exact opposite, right? And so, you know, within Christian spaces, there's a question of can that kind of Christianity take hold more widely? It'd be going against the grain, and I, so again, I teach at Calvin University. I'm a Calvinist myself. We have a very robust understanding of sinfulness and human pride and selfishness, right? So this kind of embracing of faith that says, no, don't put yourself first, always put the other first and reach out to the downcast, to those on the margins and lift them up. And that's the essence of Christianity. So you could say that there is a theological solution out there as well.

[00:49:50]
Brian Mackey: Kristen Kobes Du Mez, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us on The 21st Show. I really appreciate it.

[00:49:56]
Kristin Du Mez: Thank you for having me.

[00:49:59]
Brian Mackey: Her book again is "Jesus and John Wayne." Her forthcoming book later this year is "Live Laugh Love." That's it for us today. The 21st Show is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thanks for listening.