“I just plugged my nose and voted.”

When I hear evangelicals defend their 2016 vote for Donald Trump, it’s usually a variation on this theme. Sure he’s an amoral scandal-magnet, but at least he’s a capital “C” Conservative. When forced to choose between a rogue and the party that stands for abortion rights, the choice is simple—if . . . smelly.

Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez has a different theory. She argues that Donald Trump was not merely the best of a bad choice. Rather, he was the culmination of everything white evangelicals have desired. In Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez carefully traces white ‘biblical manhood’-style evangelicalism from Billy Graham to the present. Spoiler alert: it ain’t pretty. The ideal rugged male Christian leader who fights back against liberalism and feminism—a John Wayne figure—has been reworked time and time again in Graham, Regan, Dobson, Baker, Bush, Driscoll, and on, and on.

The details in Jesus and John Wayne are, simply put, shocking. The amount of damage done by so many evangelical leaders is simply unconscionable. These stories deserve to be told and heard since there will always be another political leader in line ready to leverage the a movement, ethics be damned.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright, 2020.