Little Men: Jesus and John Wayne and a Nation on the Edge

I was raised in East Texas, miles from the nearest town. I rode the bus for an hour to school. My teachers were my parents’ teachers. Everyone knew everyone. For generations.

We weren’t a town, just dirt roads and windy highways for beer runs and ran over dogs. Little tiny white churches next to Civil War-era cemeteries. 

I grew up in churches, first Little Mound Baptist, then Rosewood Baptist, Smyrna Baptist, and a dip into Little Hope Baptist. Most of my memories are with Little Mound, where my grandfather led the Sunday singing and was an ordained minister who would occasionally be brought in to preach a sermon. He hadn’t finished eighth grade. My grandmother was the church’s housekeeper, a role I would take on later. I lived my entire childhood in a Baptist church. I had every hymn and its corresponding page number memorized (blue-bound Heavenly Highway Hymnal page 310 “My God is Real”). I attended every time the doors were open: twice on Sundays, evenings on Wednesdays. A week of Homecoming and Bible School in the summer. As I got older, I took on “leadership” roles intended for women: cleaning the church, nursery work watching the babies, printing Sunday morning bulletins, and leading the Bible school music ministry my last summer before leaving for college. By then, I was already an atheist. I just didn’t have the words for it yet.

It was a strange history. On one hand, the church was pretty much all many of us had. That whole “Drugs or Jesus” thing (which begs the inevitable question: what’s left for people like me?). Sometimes both on the same weekend. For better or worse, my grandparents’ insistence on Sunday morning attendance was a bit of stability in my otherwise chaotic young life, with parents who had each other (bad), their respective extra partners (worse), and their individual and group addictions (worse and worse). If I was at church with my grandparents on Sunday, at least I wasn’t at any given unsafe bonfire in the woods on Friday and Saturday nights, with unknown men and wolves in the canopies of the trees.

But church wasn’t without its pain. My grandfather wasn’t permitted to lead as pastor or be a deacon because he had been divorced. I vividly remember huddling next to my great-grandmother, a short, defiant, but very much holier-than-thou product of the Oklahoma dust bowl and great depression. The preacher's wife was berating me: for not wearing dresses and for asking too many questions. “Those are the devil’s questions. You have a Jezebel spirit.” My great-grandmother nodded in affirmation. 

In short, I feel credentialed, if nothing else other than the decades of life lived in this universe to roundly state: what the actual fuck?! when it comes to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump was everything I was taught to be wary of as a Southern evangelical. Married multiple times, publicly, with children by several women. A wealthy Yankee. The MAGA hat, on any other man, especially of slightly dark skin color, would have been a sign of the antichrist. And yet, my “people” have fully embraced him. 

And I just didn’t understand. 

I’d long come to terms with the fact that my family wasn’t healthy, for reasons that extended far beyond, but were certainly exacerbated, by the church. When I had my first child, assigned female at birth, I knew I had to get us both out. My family is what it is. Or, rather, was what it was. My grandparents are gone now. As is my father, not that he stuck around much anyway. 

I could psychologically, philosophically, even biologically understand, at least, the generational trauma we were all unfortunate products of. I could even philosophically understand the singular influence of a local church. But, objectively, I struggled comprehending the Evangelical collective, even before Trump, but certainly after. 

Until I read Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and a Fractured Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University, notably, a Christian university. Du Mez, a product also of Notre Dame, shines a stark light on the history of Evangelicalism that brought us to Donald Trump and, in retrospect, was always going to because it intended to. Drawing on evangelical preaching in the early twentieth century, dipping into its racist and misogynistic roots, Du Mez paints a picture of a section of America not necessarily in decline, but in rage. Rage at its lack of former centrality. A vindictive solipsism that manifested itself in symbols such as John Wayne. 

Jesus and John Wayne points out the disturbing inaccuracies within American history and its uniquely white, rural, Americanized theology, while also poking holes in the hypocrisy of evangelicalism’s Strongmen leaders: from 80s televangelists and John Wayne’s own lack of military involvement, while going down in American history for playing the manliest of men’s men. It isn’t until the very end of the book, history laid out and explained, that Trump comes to the fore and every piece of Du Mez’s puzzle falls into place.

And everything makes terrifying sense. 

When I read the book, Trump was an ever-looming threat but his maw had been muzzled. Since then, he has returned. More dangerous, in my opinion, than before. 

Jesus and John Wayne doesn’t necessarily solve any problems, but it does certainly explain them. The rest of the work is up to us.