This is the Introduction to Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
INTRODUCTION
On a Bitterly cold day in January 2016, Donald
Trump stood on the stage of an auditorium at a small
Christian college in Iowa. He boasted of his poll num-
bers and his crowd sizes. He warned of the dangers
posed by Muslims and undocumented immigrants, and
he talked of building a border wall. He denigrated
American politicians as stupid, weak, and pathetic. He
claimed that Christianity was “under siege” and urged
Christians to band together and assert their power. He
promised to lead. He had no doubts about the loyalty of
his followers: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Av-
enue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any vot-
ers,” he claimed.
That morning, the Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First
Baptist Dallas, introduced Trump. As a pastor Jeffress
couldn’t endorse a candidate, but he made clear that
he wouldn’t be there if he didn’t think Trump “would
make a great president.” Jeffress wasn’t alone. Already
at that point, before the Iowa caucuses at the begin-
ning of February, 42 percent of white evangelicals sup-
ported Trump—more than any other candidate. The
reason was simple, Jeffress contended. Evangelicals
were “sick and tired of the status quo.” They were look-
ing for the leader who would “reverse the downward
death spiral of this nation that we love so dearly.”
I wasn’t in Iowa at the time, but I watched this spec-
tacle unfold as it streamed online. I knew the setting
well. The college was Dordt College, my alma mater.
The town was Sioux Center, my hometown. I’d grown
up a short walk from campus, on the other side of the
old farmstead only recently converted back to native
prairie. I’d attended the local Christian grade school,
where my mom was my PE teacher. My dad, an or-
dained minister, taught theology at the college since
before I was born. Every year as a child I’d attended
Easter sunrise services in that auditorium, and as a
college student I faithfully attended chapel services in
that same space. Standing on the stage where Trump
now stood, I had led prayers, performed in Christian
“praise teams,” and, during choir rehearsal, flirted with
the man who would become my husband. We married
in a church just down the road. Although I moved away
after college, the space remained intimately familiar.
But as I watched those in the overflow crowd waving
signs, laughing at insults, and shouting back in affir-
mation, I wondered who these people were. I didn’t rec-
ognize them.
Not everyone present that day shared in the enthusi-
asm for Trump. Some were there out of curiosity. Oth-
ers came in protest. A small group of residents, includ-
ing students from the college and the Christian grade
school, stood bundled against the chill, holding hand-
made signs proclaiming “Love Your Neighbors” and
“Perfect Love Casts Out Fear.” But their numbers were
dwarfed by Trump’s supporters. Their numbers were
again dwarfed on November 8, 2016, when 82 percent
of Sioux County voters voted for Donald Trump—a pro-
portion remarkably close to the 81 percent of white
evangelical voters who backed Trump, according to na-
tional exit polls, and proved crucial to his victory over
Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s confidence in the loyalty of his followers
seemed like bluster at the time, but it soon took on a
prophetic ring. His evangelical supporters stuck by his
side even as he mocked opponents, incited violence at
his rallies, and boasted of his “manhood” on national
television. Then there were Trump’s sexual indiscre-
tions. Divorce was one thing, rumors of sexual es-
capades another, but the release of the Access Hollywood
tape furnished irrefutable evidence of the candidate
speaking in lewd terms about seducing and assaulting
women.
How could “family values” conservatives support
a man who flouted every value they insisted they
held dear? How could the self-professed “Moral Ma-
jority” embrace a candidate who reveled in vulgarity?
How could evangelicals who’d turned “WWJD” (“What
Would Jesus Do?”) into a national phenomenon justify
their support for aman who seemed the very antithesis
of the savior they claimed to emulate?
Pundits scrambled to explain. Evangelicals were
holding their noses, choosing the lesser of two evils—
and Hillary Clinton was the greatest evil. Evangelicals
were thinking in purely transactional terms, as Trump
himself is often said to do, voting for Trump because
he promised to deliver Supreme Court appointments
that would protect the unborn and secure their own
“religious liberty.” Or maybe the polls were misleading.
By confusing “evangelicals-in-name-only” with good,
church-attending, Bible-believing Christians, sloppy
pollsters were giving evangelicalism a bad rap.
But evangelical support for Trump was no aberra-
tion, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was,
rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of
militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patri-
archal authority and condones the callous display of
power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived
proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white
evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges
humility and elevates “the least of these” for one that
derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Rather
than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend
their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge
that the ends justify the means. Having replaced the
Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s
no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same
way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangel-
icals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality,
evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs,
but because of them.
Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn;
his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condi-
tion. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the con-
temporary evangelical worldview. More than any other
religious demographic in America, white evangelical
Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use
of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more
likely than members of other faith groups to own a
gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns
in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around.
White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration
reform and have more negative views of immigrants
than any other religious demographic; two-thirds sup-
port Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white
evangelical Protestants—more than any other demo-
graphic—do not think that the United States has a re-
sponsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white
evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US
population would be a negative development. White
evangelicals are considerably more likely than others
to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to
see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,”
and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and
democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals be-
lieve that Christians in America face more discrimina-
tion than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly
more authoritarian than other religious groups, and
temporary evangelical worldview. More than any other
religious demographic in America, white evangelical
Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use
of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more
likely than members of other faith groups to own a
gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns
in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around.
White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration
reform and have more negative views of immigrants
than any other religious demographic; two-thirds sup-
port Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white
evangelical Protestants—more than any other demo-
graphic—do not think that the United States has a re-
sponsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white
evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US
population would be a negative development. White
evangelicals are considerably more likely than others
to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to
see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,”
and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and
democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals be-
lieve that Christians in America face more discrimina-
tion than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly
more authoritarian than other religious groups, and
they express confidence in their religious leaders at
much higher rates than do members of other faiths.
For evangelicals, domestic and foreign policy are two
sides of the same coin. Christian nationalism—the be-
lief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be
defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of
intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and
non-Christians. It is linked to opposition to gay rights
and gun control, to support for harsher punishments
for criminals, to justifications for the use of excessive
force against black Americans in law enforcement sit-
uations, and to traditionalist gender ideology. White
evangelicals have pieced together this patchwork of
issues, and a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggres-
sive, militant white masculinity serves as the thread
binding them together into a coherent whole. A father’s
rule in the home is inextricably linked to heroic lead-
ership on the national stage, and the fate of the nation
hinges on both.
By November 2016, the affinities were clear. A sub-
stantial number of white evangelicals shared Trump’s
nationalism, Islamophobia, racism, and nativism.
They condoned his “nasty politics”: they agreed that in-
jured protestors got what they deserved, that the coun-
try would be better off getting rid of “bad apples,” and
that people were “too sensitive” about what was said in
politics. Drawn to his populist appeals, white evangel-
icals demonstrated a preference for rejecting political
compromise, for strong, solitary leadership, and for
breaking the rules when necessary. These dispositions
held whether white evangelicals were defined by affili-
ation, self-identification, or belief and behavior.
FOR THEIR PART, evangelicals prefer to define themselves
not by their political beliefs but according to their theo-
logical convictions or, more precisely, according to four
“evangelical distinctives.” To be an evangelical, accord-
ing to the National Association of Evangelicals, is to
uphold the Bible as one’s ultimate authority, to confess
the centrality of Christ’s atonement, to believe in a
born-again conversion experience, and to actively work
to spread this good news and reform society accord-
ingly. When defined in this way, “evangelicalism” man-
ifests as a racially diverse and global movement. Yet
when it comes to delineating the contours of modern
American evangelicalism, the primacy of these four
distinctives is arguable.
Evangelicals claim to uphold the Bible as the high-
est authority in the Christian life, but there are more
than 31,000 verses in the Bible. Which ones are consid-
ered essential guides to faithful Christian practice, and
which are readily ignored or explained away? In like
manner, when evangelicals define themselves in terms
of Christ’s atonement or as disciples of a risen Christ,
what sort of Jesus are they imagining? Is their savior
a conquering warrior, a man’s man who takes no pris-
oners and wages holy war? Or is he a sacrificial lamb
who offers himself up for the restoration of all things?
How one answers these questions will determine what
it looks like to follow Jesus.
In truth, what it means to be an evangelical has
always depended on the world beyond the faith. In re-
cent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come
to recognize (and frequently lament) that a “pop
culture” definition has usurped “a proper historical
and theological” one, such that today many people
count themselves “evangelical” because they watch
Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Re-
publican. Frustrated with this confusion of “real” and
“supposed” evangelicals, evangelical elites have taken
pollsters and pundits to task for carelessly conflating
the two. But the problem goes beyond sloppy catego-
rization. Among evangelicals, high levels of theologi-
cal illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views
traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question
the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.
Moreover, many who do subscribe to these distinctives
do not in fact identify as evangelical. This is the case
especially when it comes to Christians of color: just 25
percent of African Americans who subscribe to all four
distinctives identify as evangelical.
This is not a simple misunderstanding. Black Chris-
tians have long resisted embracing the evangelical
label because it is clear to them that there is more to
evangelicalism than straightforward statements of be-
lief. Survey data indicate that on nearly every social
and political issue, black Protestants apply their faith
in ways that run counter to white evangelicalism. The
differences may be rooted not just in experience but
in the faith itself; in practice, the seemingly neutral
“evangelical distinctives” turn out to be culturally and
racially specific. Although white evangelicals like to
point to the existence of black “evangelicals” to dis-
tance their movement from allegations of racism and
associations with conservative politics, black Chris-
tians themselves have attempted to draw attention to
evangelicalism’s “problem of whiteness,” and to white
evangelicals’ inability or unwillingness to confront this
problem. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the
chorus of those calling out evangelicalism’s problem of
whiteness became more difficult to ignore. To many
black Christians, evangelicalism had become “a white
religious brand.”
Although foundational to white evangelical identity,
race rarely acts as an independent variable. For conser-
vative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Chris-
tian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch
commitment to patriarchal authority, gender differ-
ence, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are in-
tertwined with white racial identity. Many Americans
who now identify as evangelicals are identifying with
this operational theology—one that is Republican in its
politics and traditionalist in its values. This God-and-
country faith is championed by those who regularly at-
tend evangelical churches, and by those who do not. It
creates affinities across denominational, regional, and
socioeconomic differences, even as it divides Ameri-
cans—and American Christians—into those who em-
brace these values, and those who do not. In this way,
conservative white evangelicalism has become a polar-
izing force in American politics and society.
White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach
in large part because of the culture it has created,
the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or
so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast
quantity of religious products: Christian books and
magazines, CCM (“Christian contemporary music”),
Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry
conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home decor. Many
evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate
even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have
nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular
culture. They’ve raised children with the help of James
Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio programs or grown
up watching VeggieTales cartoons. They rocked out to
Amy Grant or the Newsboys or DC Talk. They learned
about purity before they learned about sex, and they
have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion
of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film
with their youth group. They attended Promise Keep-
ers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in
small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robert-
son, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition
than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons.
The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture ex-
tends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches.
Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into
mainline Christianity, to the point that distinguishing
members of a denomination like the United Methodist
Church from evangelicals obscures more than it re-
veals. (My own upbringing in the Christian Reformed
Church, a small denomination founded by Dutch im-
migrants, is a case in point; for generations, members
defined themselves against American Christianity, but
due to the onslaught of evangelical popular culture,
large swaths of the denomination are now functionally
evangelical in terms of affinity and belief.) Denomina-
tional boundaries are easily breached by the flow of re-
ligious merchandising. Indeed, one can participate in
this religious culture without attending church at all.
Yet this cultural evangelicalism remains intertwined
with “establishment evangelicalism.” Denominational
organizations and parachurch groups, pastors and the-
ologians, colleges and seminaries, publishing houses
and charities generate much of the religious con-
tent that is marketed to an immense congregation of
consumers. Evangelical leaders bestow authority upon
one another, blurbing each other’s books, defending
each other on social media, and determining which
up-and-coming writers, pastors, and organizations are
worthy of promotion—and which should be shunned.
At times, evangelical popular culture can subvert the
authority of the evangelical elite. During the Trump
campaign, many pastors were surprised to find that
they wielded little influence over people in the pews.
What they didn’t realize was that they were up against
a more powerful system of authority—an evangelical
popular culture that reflected and reinforced a com-
pelling ideology and a coherent worldview. A few
words preached on Sunday morning did little to dis-
rupt the steady diet of religious products evangelicals
consumed day in, day out.
Rather than seeking to distinguish “real” from “sup-
posed” evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think
in terms of the degree to which individuals partici-
pate in this evangelical culture of consumption. There
are those who rarely consume media produced outside
of this world; when it comes to music, news sources,
books, and radio, these individuals inhabit a separate
and sanctified consumer space. There are also many
who participate to lesser degrees—they may listen
to “secular” music, catch the latest Hollywood block-
busters, and read occasional “non-Christian” books,
even as they regularly tune in to Christian radio, sing
along to “praise music,” purchase books on Christian
child-rearing, and devour Christian romance novels.
Still, by partaking in a common culture, individuals
form bonds with other like-minded consumers, and
these affinities form the basis of a shared cultural iden-
tity.
At any given time, numerous creeds have coexisted
and competed for influence within evangelicalism.
Even today, the evangelical tent includes Calvinists
and Pentecostals, “social justice warriors” and pros-
perity gospel gurus. However, over the past several
decades conservatives have consolidated their power
within the broader movement. Offering certainty in
times of social change, promising security in the face of
global threats, and, perhaps most critically, affirming
the righteousness of a white Christian America and,
by extension, of white Christian Americans, conserva-
tive evangelicals succeeded in winning the hearts and
minds of large numbers of American Christians. They
achieved this dominance not only by crafting a com-
pelling ideology but also by advancing their agenda
through strategic organizations and political alliances,
on occasion by way of ruthless displays of power, and,
critically, by dominating the production and distribu-
tion of Christian consumer culture.
Like evangelicalism in general, evangelical popular
culture encompasses a broad spectrum of religious and
political commitments. The same store might stock
books by conservative financial advisor Dave Ramsey
and social justice activist Jim Wallis, Christian feminist
manifestos penned by Rachel Held Evans and Sarah
Bessey, and classic defenses of “traditional woman-
hood” by Elisabeth Elliot. Yet the power of conservative
white evangelicalism is apparent in both the size of
its market share and its influence over religious distri-
bution channels. As a diffuse movement, evangelical-
ism lacks clear institutional authority structures, but
the evangelical marketplace itself helps define who is
inside and who is outside the fold. LifeWay Christian
Stores, once the nation’s largest Christian retail chain
and an affiliate of the Southern Baptist Convention,
has wielded that power overtly. When Rachel Held
Evans and Jen Hatmaker ran afoul of conservative
orthodoxies related to sexuality and gender, LifeWay
stopped carrying their books. It did, however, stock
Todd Starnes’s The Deplorables’ Guide to Making Amer-
ica Great Again (“Winning was just the beginning...
change may start at the White House, but it finishes
at your house”) and R. C. Sproul and Abdul Saleeb’s The
Dark Side of Islam.
The products Christians consume shape the faith
they inhabit. Today, what it means to be a “conserva-
tive evangelical” is as much about culture as it is about
theology. This is readily apparent in the heroes they
celebrate. Establishment evangelicals might count
Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield among their
eminent fore-bearers, but evangelical popular culture
is teeming with a different ensemble of heroes—men
like William Wallace (as brought to life by Mel Gibson),
Teddy Roosevelt, the mythic American cowboy, Gener-
als Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, and the
ordinary American soldier. And the actor John Wayne.
As the onscreen embodiment of the heroic cowboy
and idealized American soldier, and also as an outspo-
ken conservative activist in real life, John Wayne be-
came an icon of rugged American manhood for gener-
ations of conservatives. Pat Buchanan parroted Wayne
in his presidential bid. Newt Gingrich called Wayne’s
Sands of Iwo Jima “the formative movie of my life,” and
Oliver North echoed slogans from that film in his 1994
Senate campaign. In time, Wayne would also emerge
as an icon of Christian masculinity. Evangelicals ad-
mired (and still admire) him for his toughness and his
swagger; he protected the weak, and he wouldn't let
anything get in the way of his pursuit of justice and
order. Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, despite
rumors to this effect regularly circulated by evangel-
icals themselves. He did not live a moral life by the
standards of traditional Christian virtue. Yet for many
evangelicals, Wayne would come to symbolize a differ-
ent set of virtues—a nostalgic yearning for a mythical
“Christian America,” a return to “traditional” gender
roles, and the reassertion of (white) patriarchal author-
ity.
Although Wayne occupies a prominent place in the
pantheon of evangelical heroes, he is but one of many
rugged and even ruthless icons of masculinity that
evangelicals imbued with religious significance. Like
Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Chris-
tian masculinity were those unencumbered by tradi-
tional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculin-
ity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping
to secure an alliance with profound political ramifi-
cations. For many evangelicals, these militant heroes
would come to define not only Christian manhood but
Christianity itself.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM tells us that fundamentalists
and evangelicals retreated from public view and politi-
cal engagement after the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925,
or with the end of Prohibition in 1933, or out of a desire
to focus on individual soul-saving, or due to various
combinations of the above, only to reappear on the na-
tional stage in the 1970s, seemingly out of nowhere.
But as we will see, the roots of a militarized and politi-
cized evangelical masculinity stretch back to earlier in
American history.
Antecedents can be found in nineteenth-century
southern evangelicalism and in early-twentieth-cen-
tury “muscular Christianity,” but it was in the 1940s
and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal “gender
traditionalism,” militarism, and Christian nationalism
coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical
identity. With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangeli-
cals believed that they had a special role to play in keep-
ing America Christian, American families strong, and
the nation secure. The assertion of masculine power
would accomplish all these goals.
By the 1960s, the civil rights movement, feminism,
and the Vietnam War led many Americans to ques-
tion “traditional” values of all kinds. Gender and sexual
norms were in flux, America no longer appeared to be
a source of unalloyed good, and God did not in fact
appear to be on her side. Evangelicals, however, clung
fiercely to the belief that America was a Christian na-
tion, that the military was a force for good, and that the
strength of the nation depended on a properly ordered,
patriarchal home. The evangelical political resurgence
of the 1970s coalesced around a potent mix of “family
values” politics, but family values were always inter-
twined with ideas about sex, power, race, and nation.
Feminism posed a threat to traditional womanhood,
and also to national security by removing from men
their duty to provide and protect and opening the door
to women in military combat. In similar fashion, Viet-
nam was not just a national security issue, but also a
crisis of masculinity. Civil rights, too, dismantled time-
honored traditions and destabilized the social order.
Representing federal government overreach or even
an insidious communist agenda, desegregation also
heightened the long-standing imagined threat to white
womanhood, and to the power of white men to police
social and sexual boundaries. The reassertion of white
patriarchy was central to the new “family values” poli-
tics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriar-
chal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.
The evangelical consumer marketplace was by then
a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media
network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving
enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals
created and maintained their own identity—an iden-
tity rooted in “family values” and infused with a sense
of cultural embattlement. Christian publishing, radio,
and television taught evangelicals how to raise chil-
dren, how to have sex, and whom to fear. And Chris-
tian media promoted a distinctive vision of evangelical
masculinity. Finding comfort and courage in symbols
of a mythical past, evangelicals looked to a rugged,
heroic masculinity embodied by cowboys, soldiers, and
watriors to point the way forward. For decades to
come, militant masculinity (and a sweet, submissive
femininity) would remain entrenched in the evangel-
ical imagination, shaping conceptions of what was
good and true. By the 1980s, evangelicals were able
to mobilize so effectively as a partisan political force
because they already participated in a shared cultural
identity.
A militant evangelical masculinity went hand in
hand with a culture of fear, but it wasn’t always appar-
ent which came first. During the Cold War, the commu-
nist menace seemed to require a militant response. But
when that threat had been vanquished, conservative
evangelicals promptly declared a new war—a culture
war—demanding a similar militancy. In 2001, when
terrorists struck the United States, evangelicals again
had an actual battle to fight. Yet even then, evangelical
militancy was fueled by fraudulent tales of the Islamic
threat, tales that were promoted by evangelicals them-
selves. Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply
as a response to fearful times; for conservative white
evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present
sense of threat.
In 2008, the election of Barack Obama ratcheted up
evangelical fears. Initially, the culture wars appeared to
be lost and the power of the Christian Right seemed to
have reached an ignoble end. But conservative evangel-
icals had always thrived on a sense of embattlement,
real or imagined, and this time would be no differ-
ent. Donald Trump appeared at a moment when evan-
gelicals felt increasingly beleaguered, even persecuted.
From the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate
to transgender bathroom laws and the cultural sea
change on gay marriage, gender was at the heart of this
perceived vulnerability. On the foreign policy front,
the threat of terrorism loomed large, American power
wasn’t what it used to be, and nearly two-thirds of
white evangelicals harbored fears that a once-powerful
nation had become “too soft and feminine.”
Evangelical fears were real. Yet these fears were
not simply a natural response to changing times.
For decades, evangelical leaders had worked to stoke
them. Their own power depended on it. Men like
James Dobson, Bill Gothard, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye,
Mark Driscoll, Franklin Graham, and countless lesser
lights invoked a sense of peril in order to offer fear-
ful followers their own brand of truth and protection.
Generations of evangelicals learned to be afraid of com-
munists, feminists, liberals, secular humanists, “the
homosexuals,” the United Nations, the government,
Muslims, and immigrants—and they were primed to
respond to those fears by looking to a strong man
to rescue them from danger, a man who embodied a
God-given, testosterone-driven masculinity. As Robert
Jeffress so eloquently expressed in the months before
the 2016 election, “I want the meanest, toughest, son-
of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think
that’s where many evangelicals are.”
ACROSS TWO MILLENNIA of Christian history—and
within the history of evangelicalism itself—there is
ample precedent for sexism, racism, xenophobia, vi-
olence, and imperial designs. But there are also ex-
pressions of the Christian faith—and of evangelical
Christianity—that have disrupted the status quo and
challenged systems of privilege and power. The Chris-
tian Scriptures contain stories of a violent warrior God,
and of a savior who summons followers to care for the
“least of these.” The Bible ends in a bloody battle, but it
also entreats believers to act with love and peace, kind-
ness, gentleness, and self-control. Contemporary white
evangelicalism in America, then, is not the inevitable
outworking of “biblical literalism,” nor is it the only
possible interpretation of the historic Christian faith;
the history of American Christianity itself is filled with
voices of resistance and signs of paths not taken. It
is, rather, a historical and a cultural movement, forged
over time by individuals and organizations with varied
motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring
order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their
own power. The story that follows is one of world wars
and presidential politics, of entrepreneurial preachers
and theological innovation, of blockbuster movies, sex
manuals, and self-help books. It does not begin with
Donald Trump. Nor will it end with him.
