Tag: Kristen Kobes Du Mez

What was your last five-star read?

Bookish Question #341 | What was your last five-star read?

This question was harder to answer than it should have been.

I read a lot of books. And the more books I read, the harder it is to find stories that stick in my memory after I’ve closed the book (or switched off the Kindle.

The title that sprang to mind for this question isn’t a book I’d normally read, but I’ve seen it mentioned online and have been waiting for it to come on sale on Kindle. Then I saw it at my local library, so checked it out.

It’s not fiction.
It’s not Christian (although the author is a Christian).
It’s nothing like the books I usually read and review.

It’s Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez

(which I did recently feature in a First Line Friday post).

Jesus and John Wayne is probably best described as a history textbook, showing how the modern church has, step by tiny step, morphed the collective understanding of Jesus from the man who healed the sick and ate with sinners to some kind of nationalistic patriarchal authoritarian who was the opposite of politically correct.

Like John Wayne.

Yet Jesus was nothing like John Wayne. Jesus stood up for women, for widows (the single parents of his day), for orphans, for the oppressed, for the immigrants, the refugees (Jesus himself was a refugee in Egypt).

Du Mez makes a compelling argument for how the US Christian church has come to misinterpret Jesus by conflating him with people like John Wayne, and how that has hurt the church in the USA (I would add that it’s hurt the church globally).

You might not agree with everything she says, but it’s a well-researched and strongly written case, and well worth taking the time to read.

It might just make you think.

What about you? What’s your most recent five-star read?

First Line Friday

First Line Friday #343 | Jesus and John Wayne by Kristen Kobes Du Mez

It’s First Line Friday! That means it’s time to pick up the nearest book and quote the first line.

I’ve recently joined the local library, so this week I’m reading a book I found in the library that’s been on my to-read list since it released: the eye-opening Jesus and John Wayne by scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez.

Here’s the first line from the Chapter One:

The path that ends with John Wayne as an icon of Christian masculinity is strewn with a colorful cast of characters, from the original cowboy president to a baseball-player-turned-evangelist to a singing cowboy and a dashing young evangelist.

 

What’s the book nearest you, and what’s the first line?

 

About Jesus and John Wayne

Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism―or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.”

As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex―and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes―mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done.

Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community.

A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

Find Jesus and John Wayne online at:

Amazon | BookBub | Goodreads

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Share your first line in the comments, and happy reading!

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