But it is a good book, with useful things to say, and I recommend it as a book on modern fundamentalism, not the book. Her writing has appeared in a number of outlets including The Washington Post, and she regularly blogs at Patheos’ Anxious Bench. Jesus and John Wayne did not, I fear, come any closer to explaining this phenomenon to me. And, in fact, the book has the feel of a sociological study of. Though theoretically evangelicalism is a set of specific theological propositions, in reality it is less a religious belief system and more accurately defined as a culture. She is also the author of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford 2015). Jesus and John Wayne is the history of evangelicalism, tracing the movement from its roots in the early twentieth century to its modern-day iteration. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor in the history department at Calvin University. Careful statements about correlation and sociological and anthropological secondary literature are often missing. In her new book, Jesus and John Wayne, Calvin University History Professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez tells the story of how a group of fundamentalist Christians formed the National Association of Evangelicals in the 1940s and how, over the past 75 years, that group became more politically powerful as they preached a message of rugged masculinity and. It is eminently readable, but there have been scholarly virtues traded for popular appeal. The result is a book that covers a century of cultural and intellectual development, and gives us a sense of how Trump turned out to be the right man for the job of winning the Evangelical vote. Jesus and John Wayne is a book that needed to be written and needs to be widely read and discussed. Jesus and John Wayne is a trade book, written for popular appeal and a broad readership. The book traces a century of Evangelical ideas around masculinity, gender, family and identity, and how these ideas became intertwined with ideas around nationalism, militarism, foreign policy and race. This is the argument my guest today, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, makes in her new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation(Liveright 2020). However, some would argue that the Evangelical support of Trump makes total sense given that, in spite of his supposed moral failings, he was just the sort of man they were looking for. The fact that a thrice-married reality-TV star has been able to hold onto the ‘moral majority’ through thick and thin the last few years seems to many to be a sort of cultural contradiction. One of the most perplexing elements of Donald Trumps’s 2016 electoral victory was the overwhelming support he received from white Evangelicals, a demographic that has stubbornly clung to him in the face of everything he has done.