Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and The Daily Beast, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is 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 (1st Edition)

I first started exploring evangelical masculinity and militarism nearly a decade ago, not knowing that the presidency of Donald Trump would be its culminating chapter. It was in October 2016 that things clicked for me. Even after the Access Hollywood tape, white evangelicals continued to support Trump. How could they embrace a man who made a mockery of their deeply held “family values”? But then I realized that popular evangelical literature on masculinity had prepared evangelicals for a man like Trump. Trump didn’t represent the betrayal of American evangelicalism, he was its fulfillment. Or so I argued at Religion & Politics the week of Trump’s inauguration. I then set out to tell the whole story in Jesus and John Wayne. 

It’s been a wild ride.