jesus and john wayne

Anne Helen Petersen interviews Kristin Kobes Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne.

It rings true.

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The book is excellent. Like The Season, it is academically rigorous but deeply absorbing. If you grew up in and around Christian churches or in spaces shadowed by evangelical culture, it will connect a whole lot of dots. If you didn’t, it will connect a different set of dots about how white evangelical culture has explicitly and implicitly shaped the dominant ideologies we wade through, no matter our own belief systems, every day. Ideals of masculinity and femininity, of course, but also of purity and nationhood, of power and dominance, of how tailgate decals like the one above became commonplace in so many corners of the United States.

If you want to understand evangelical support of Trump, the roll-back of women’s reproductive rights, the fight over the bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, the general obsession with Braveheart, whatever happened to Promise Keepers, WTF is going on with Hobby Lobby, how whiteness undergirds it all — this book is a skeleton key. You can think of this interview as, like, the first turn in that larger unlocking process. Don’t be like me and spend months resisting it when you could have all that knowledge now.

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