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For her, John Wayne serves as a paradigmatic figure illustrating this enduring dynamic.

I would guess that my own awareness of a personal stake in this history is multiplied exponentially for Du Mez, who, I suspect, claims white evangelical Christians as her own people, too.Дu MezвЂ™s overall argument is that white, conservative, evangelical Christians in America since the early twentieth century have been at least as influenced by culture as they have by theology. She lives and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of the most significant centers of evangelicalism in America, and her book reads as an anguished and prophetic cry of the heart to her own people. They have a complex history, and their story is a story that is thrilling, fascinating, heartbreaking, and everything in between.Дu Mez has given us a history of evangelicalism going back to the early twentieth century. White conservative evangelicals are what they are for a host of reasons. Still, I am not blind to their flaws, and I am not their unconditional defender. My wife and I homeschool our children-we often laugh at ourselves as вЂњweird homeschoolers.вЂќ I have a profound love for evangelicals and a loyalty to them based in personal identity, but also in thirty years of full-time service to them and alongside them. Predominately white conservative evangelicals, of the Southern Baptist kind, are my people. I have studied it, but I have also witnessed it unfold as a seminary student, as a member of a pastoral staff in a Southern Baptist church, as a Christian school teacher, as a seminary professor, and as a husband and father.

Still, since coming to Christ in 1988, I have partaken in the recent history of evangelicalism. Thus, the history of evangelicalism in the 1970s and 1980s was a history I learned about in books, and had no direct experience thereof.

I came to Christ after I went to college, and initially joined a Southern Baptist church because the person who led me to Christ was a Southern Baptist. I was raised in a family of mainline Presbyterians and Episcopalians, and did not go to church except on holidays during my childhood and teenage years. In fact, I am the first evangelical Christian in my familyвЂ™s history, as far as I know. I was not born into an evangelical family. In short, I do not read Du MezвЂ™s book from the standpoint of total objectivity, nor do I approach her subject matter as a set of pure abstractions in which I have no part.ДЇurthermore, I bring my own experiences as an evangelical to the narrative that Du Mez has produced in her book.

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And lastly, I am a Christian historian myself, and am constantly thinking about how to be a worthy student and teacher of history, as well as a creditable teller of past stories for present audiences. I also am a white, conservative evangelical Christian, so I read the pages of this book with the realization that my people are the subject of this book (although I do question how valid the way DuMez normativizes the concept of вЂњwhite evangelicalвЂќ is). For one, I know Professor Du Mez professionally and I have a deep and abiding respect and admiration for her. I am deeply invested in more than one element of Kristin Kobes Du MezвЂ™s Jesus and John Wayne. Consider this review a cri de coeurВ over a book written as a cri de coeur.

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I have reviewed dozens of books in my professional life, but this review will be different. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a NationВ by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (New York: Liveright, 2020), 386 pages, $18.95 (Hardback).ДЄs I begin, please indulge me as I make a few personal prefatory remarks. But hope is central to a Christian historical method. All we have before us as we reach the end of the book is a cliff edge, with no path forward to forgiveness and reconciliation. Du MezвЂ™s work reads less as history and more as ideology, and an ideology with little in the way of faith, hope, or charity.

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