The work traces the heavy imprint of such celebrity preachers as Billy Graham, Eldredge, and Mark Driscoll. After the lecture two students commented how her analysis aligned with their reading of John Eldredge’s best-selling Wild at Heart, which she described as bearing “a striking resemblance to Roosevelt’s muscular, and even militaristic, ideal.” Roosevelt is not the only cowboy mentioned in the book-as the title implies. Her research began while she was lecturing at her conservative Christian university about Teddy Roosevelt’s rugged cowboy masculinity, American power, and how attractive both are to white Evangelicals.

It is rife with the makings of our current social-religious-political climate.ĭu Mez’s analysis is a potent recipe that combines ingredients of American hypermasculinity, militarism, white supremacy, conditional moralism, and patriarchal religion. Du Mez’s book (issued in paperback in 2021 by Liveright Publishing) is a history of the white Evangelical church since World War II. Kristin Kobes Du Mez reaches the same conclusion with provocative, cringeworthy detail in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez In a recent post, Diana Butler Bass resurrected a question posed by Harry Emerson Fosdick in 1922: Shall the fundamentalists win? Her conclusion: They already have.

She is the long-time editor of the weekly Crossings text studies and serves on the Crossings Board of Directors.Ī Review: Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Mark’s Lutheran Church, Spokane, Washington. She urges us to be theologians of the cross, trusting in Christ’s full benefits for us. Lori’s astute review prods us to move beyond shaking our finger at the toxic mix of bad theology and patriarchy, racism, and sexism that Du Mez exposes. In this instance Lori reviews an important book that recently became available in paperback: Jesus and John Wayne, by Calvin University scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez. This week the clear prose and sharp insights of Lori Cornell once again give Thursday Theology readers much to ponder. Loops and Swift Horses are Surer than Lead, 1916 by Charles M Russell.

Review jesus and john wayne