Are We Headed for an Evangelical Trump Wave AGAIN?
Jesus, John Wayne, and Me
We’re a year out from a US Presidential election that’s looking—unbelievably—like it’s going to be Trump v. Biden AGAIN. Recent polling has showed the two candidates virtually tied. Sure, inflation has been bad, and people have other qualms with Biden, but, you know, Trump did try to undermine the very foundations of our democracy? The bar for a presidential candidate has never been lower.
Ever since 2016’s stunning upset, pundits and scholars have been trying to decipher one of the most puzzling electoral swings: why did 80% of white evangelicals vote for Trump, a twice-divorced, avowed groper, who cited “Two Corinthians” and claimed he never needed to ask Jesus for forgiveness? What kind of mental gymnastics led to this voting block swinging firmly against a former Methodist altar girl? And will those same mental gymnastics propel Trump to a 2024 victory?
This November I want to examine the arguments for why evangelicals helped elect Trump. And I want to look at what we, regular folks, can do to help heal the division in our country.
I realize that I have readers who are outside the U.S. for whom this may feel very inside baseball, but I do think Trump can be a useful figure for understanding the rising popularity of Authoritarian candidates throughout much of the world.
This week we’re looking to Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s surprise bestseller, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, tracks the history of organized American Evangelicalism from the 1910s to 2020, showing how what was once a small network of churches grew to political power by embracing rugged masculinity as performed by men like Teddy Roosevelt and John Wayne.
In Du Mez’s telling, white evangelical support of Trump was not an anomaly, but a culmination of a century of venerating the “strong man.” In an election rife with fear and misinformation, Trump projected the right kind of masculine toughness for evangelicals: authoritarianism as a bulwark against chaos, peace through violence. While liberal Christians embrace a hippie Jesus and an early church that shared resources communally, conservative Christians/evangelicals (these terms have essentially become interchangeable in common use) emphasize the warrior sword-mouthed Jesus of Revelations.
Jesus and John Wayne certainly nails an overlooked aspect of evangelical culture: an obsession with gender roles. This extends beyond culture war issues like LGBT rights into purity culture. Anyone raised in a conservative church can draw upon years of experience learning how to perform their gender “appropriately” for the glory of God. Girls were policed not just for their clothing, but their posture, how loudly and how much they talked. Complementarianism (the belief that men and women have distinct roles that complement each other) was often promoted as a “gift” and a way of “honoring” women even as it drastically narrowed our choices of hobbies, relationships, studies, and professions. Boys, likewise, were exhorted towards toughness and leadership, no matter their individual temperaments or gifts. We were flattened into gender roles and told it was for the good of our morally decaying country.
These gender roles go beyond the personal, as Du Mez explains:
From the start, Evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself.
Du Mez asserts that as Democrats embraced shifting social roles following the Civil Rights Movement, evangelical allegiance shifted towards the Republican party, seeking to cling to old fashioned notions of gender and, to a lesser extent, race. This thesis goes a long way towards explaining evangelical Trump support, but I do think the problem has broader roots. Du Mez touches on issues of racism, consumerism, and Machiavellianism in her book, but I found myself wanting to know more about how these huge issues played into our current political/religious landscape. Is it just that evangelical men (and their female collaborators) see their patriarchy slipping away and will sell out any principle to get it back? Can the answer be that simple?
There are many factors at play, as Du Mez concedes when she talks about the decline in church attendance and the rise of “evangelical” as a cultural, rather than religious, label:
Despite Evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, Evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it.
We saw this in the huge numbers of Christians who refused COVID vaccine mandates on religious grounds, against the advice of their pastors. They weren’t listening to their church; they were listening to Trump-supporting conservative media.
One of the most shocking revelations of Jesus and John Wayne was the post-9/11 boom in fake Muslim-to-Christian converts who toured megachurches and Christian conferences spreading lies about Islam’s plan to wipe out Christianity. Despite these speakers’ bizarre backstories being easily proved false, these speakers were never publicly called to account. It seems like ends (in this case, support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) justified the means. It wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last, that this Machiavellian approach led evangelicals to sell out their principles.
Maintaining a patriarchal power structure is certainly central to evangelicalism. The “manly men” of this movement seek to recast Jesus not as a nonviolent revolutionary, but as a warrior king. They stand as a warning whenever we are tempted to remake God in our own likeness. It’s wise to maintain a healthy skepticism for anyone who claims to speak for someone outside their own group (as in the case of men who claim to know the needs of women, or white people who claim to speak for people of color) and we should be doubly cautious of those who claim to speak for God. In the words of Anne Lamont, “You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
How have you been affected by strict gender roles? Do you buy Du Mez’s thesis that maintaining white evangelical patriarchy lies at the heart of evangelical Trump support? Can any of this be solved by repeated viewings of The Barbie Movie? Commiserate/share your thoughts in the comments!
Have a friend who’s stressing about the election ALREADY? Why not share this post?
Ugh! I’m already having election anxiety. The 2020 election (and subsequent insurrection) is what sent me hard into deconstruction. I couldn’t believe that having the chance to do this again, evangelicals were choosing him again. And that my mom believed the election lies and supported him. Heck I got bullied by a missionary we supported at the time telling me Trump was the only possibly biblical candidate because he supported Israel. And my mom asked me if I was really going to vote for a baby killer. It was a doozy of a year, and I fluctuate between thinking it’s all going to be fine...and rushing to buy passports just in case things get worse after the election. How’s that for an answer? 😂😭
I have always been curious on the reasons why evangelicals support Trump. Du Mez's book sounds like she's spot on. The John Wayne issues, e.g., individualism, promotion of guns, and xenophobia are definitely a part of evangelical culture. But did she discuss the elephant-in-the-room, the banning of abortion? That, I think more than anything else is the reason why evangelicals voted for him in 2020. If it weren't for the primacy of this issue, I think the evangelical vote would have been spread out among many Republican candidates. But Trump gave them exactly what they wanted, three Supreme Court justices that eventually led to the Dobbs decision.