With brilliant analysis and detailed scholarship, Kristin Kobes Du Mez shows how conservative evangelical leaders have promoted the authoritarian, patriarchal values that have achieved their finest representative in Trump. “ Jesus and John Wayne demolishes the myth that Christian nationalists simply held their noses to form a pragmatic alliance with Donald Trump. An evangelical-focused anti-Trump book that carries academic weight.” Readers not on the fringe right will find it difficult to take issue with her arguments. “The well-researched narrative is reasoned and dispassionate…. I then set out to tell the whole story in Jesus and John Wayne. Or so I argued at Religion & Politics the week of Trump’s inauguration. Trump didn’t represent the betrayal of American evangelicalism, he was its fulfillment. How could they embrace a man who made a mockery of their deeply held “family values”? But then I realized that popular evangelical literature on masculinity had prepared evangelicals for a man like Trump. Even after the Access Hollywood tape, white evangelicals continued to support Trump. It was in October 2016 that things clicked for me. I first started exploring evangelical masculinity and militarism nearly a decade ago, not knowing that the presidency of Donald Trump would be its culminating chapter.
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