In a time when the descriptors “evangelical” and even “Christian” are taking on destructive meanings they have not heretofore known in America, we need wise guides who can help us unravel the political from the theological, who can help us understand the toxic elements of religious practice that have led to this riven America.
Calvin College historian Kristin du Mez, best-selling author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, is one of the foremost of these commentators on how Christian nationalism and toxic Christian masculinity have become so destructive in and to our culture. I interviewed Kristin prior to her appearance at Baylor University this week at the Racism in the White Church conference, where she will join wise guides Robert P. Jones and Beth Barr in confronting what has gone wrong with American Christianity and how trends in some parts of American Christianity have aggravated rather than led to healing of America’s racial divide.
Kristin, you’re going to be talking at Baylor about what your findings suggest about race and American evangelicalism. How does this current inclination of the church you study contribute to racism in the church, and how does it result in racism in our culture?
One of the things I came to understand through my research was how much white evangelical notions of what is “biblical” — of what is Christian — are shaped by their own cultural and political identities. Evangelicals will claim the Bible shapes their identity and their politics, but history demonstrates there is always an interplay between culture and belief.
In the case of Jesus and John Wayne, I thought I was writing a book about masculinity, but very quickly I came to realize I also was writing a book about race. For example, I noticed early on that although books on Christian manhood in the 2000s rarely talked about race in any explicit way, the heroes they celebrated were all white men….
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