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.
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