"Saddling Up" -- book review of Jesus and John Wayne

Trying to read a chapter a week of Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne. I did manage to read chapter 1 this week, "Saddling Up."

1. In the age of industrialization in the late 1800s, men were feeling less and less manly. There was also a sense of the "feminization" of Victorian Christianity. Thank goodness for world wars to save us men from all becoming sissies. It's really quite pathetic.

du Mez credits Theodore Roosevelt for helping to revive the "Rough Rider" (although I guess as a young man he was ridiculed for a high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing. In the 1910s, she argues that Christian men set out to "re-masculinize" American Christianity. "In the early twentieth century, a rugged American masculinity united northern and southern white men and transformed American Christianity" (17).

There was Billy Sunday, former professional baseball player. "As an evangelist for war, Sunday was known to leap atop his pulpit waiving the American flag" (18). However, in general, liberals were more in favor of WW1 than conservatives. For liberals, it was a sense of progress, the "war to end all wars." Well, that didn't work. 

Meanwhile, conservatives believed it trivialized the kingdom to call America a Christian nation. "Such a nation does not exist on earth, and never has existed, and never will exist until our Lord comes again" (19). That was out of Biola. And quite right. Pre-millennialists after all expected things to get worse and worse.

"In a move that seems incomprehensible today, liberal Protestants pounced on this ambivalence, denouncing conservatives' 'un-American' faith and labeling their lack of patriotism a threat to national security" (19).

2. In the time between the wars, the militant masculinity thirsting for the world war got old. There was a desire for something more respectable. Here comes the new evangelicalism of the 1940s. "'Evangelical' came to connote a more forward-looking alternative to the militant, separatist fundamentalism that had become an object of ridicule" (21). Further, "George Marsden one quipped that the simplest definition of 'evangelical' might well be 'anyone who likes Billy Graham'" (23).

This statement was interesting: "Contrary to later myths about 'the good war' and 'the greatest generation,' the military was known as an institution where drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and sexual disease abounded" (25).

The last part of the chapter discusses the rise of Billy Graham who embodied a sense that faith does not conflict with masculinity. Graham's rise coincided with the rise of the red scare. Two days before Graham's first LA crusade, Russia successfully tested an atomic bomb. Boom! Graham went viral as he preached the need for repentance before Jesus returned. 

Further, Graham linked "patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism" (27). "Satan and the communists were united in an effort to destroy the American home" (26).

Some stars made it cool. Stuart Hamblen, a hard-drinking cowboy singer believed and began to write evangelical songs. "Hamblen was in many ways a harbinger of a new era of American evangelicalism" (29). Pat Boone, the actor-singer was another.

One more person closes out the chapter--John Wayne. Wayne wasn't an evangelical. There's no actual evidence that he ever prayed the sinner's prayer. He became a Catholic at the end of his life. He never served in the military.

But he became a model for evangelical masculinity. "Wayne's embodiment of heroic masculinity would come to serve as the touchstone for authentic Christian manhood" (32).

The fact that Wayne was hardly a Christian reveals something significant, I think. It suggests that a great deal of evangelicalism today has very little to do with Christianity at all. It's just predictable humanity pushed about by the tides of culture and human herd nature. Could it be that a lot of American Christian culture is only tangentially Christian?