Review: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My therapist recommended I read this book, and so naturally my first instinct was to avoid it as much as possible because I figured I'd probably hate it as much as the time I tried reading Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy and had to resist throwing my Kindle against the wall during the first chapter.

This book wound up not being as bad as that. While some aspects definitely upset me about as much as I expected them to, they are not the author's fault considering the subject matter and she does a good job of consolidating the historical context behind how American Evangelical Christianity came to become the cultural behemoth that it is especially within politics today.

If you grew up in evangelical American Christian culture, a lot of the names and movements described here will sound very familiar. You may not have realized the ways in which the individuals and media and ideas were all interconnected to the extent that connections are often made within political and ideological movements. In that respect this book can be eye-opening.

On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with any of those things, it can be harder to follow. The author has a tendency to toss around names and terms that come second-nature to an evangelical immersed in that culture, with the critical eye of someone either estranged or wrestling with that culture, while at the same time I feel not really setting aside ample enough space to fundamentally define what each of these things are for people who've never had to directly deal with them firsthand.

And after reading this book, I don't know why anyone would want to anyway.

More conservative-leaning readers will probably be alienated by the frequent use of terms like toxic masculinity, misogyny, etc. that likewise feel taken face-value as problematic without fully justifying to the reader how/why they are so. If anything that just limits the scope of this book's target audience to a narrow subset of the US population (that... unfortunately includes people like me) and not necessarily the people I wish it could be serving, the ones actually still living and breathing Evangelical culture today.

One can only hope that someday we learn how to communicate face to face with the same language and common vocabulary, and not just know how to talk about each other as if we really think that's sufficient for understanding the other side. Decent first step here, but I'm looking for something more still.