2022 Summer Reading (3.0)

​My last summer book has been read! While I did not get to read everything I wanted to read, I am pleased that over the last few months I beat my book pile down. That said, I think I bought more books this summer than I read, so I am actually more behind now than I was at the start of the summer. So many good places to buy used books in my neighborhood is to blame.

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

 
A sobering but insightful survey of the last few generations of American white evangelicals and their view of males and leadership. Making such “leadership” necessary was the perceived threats facing the church and the nation, and only a John Wayne type of “leadership”, with guns blazing, was seen to be able to set things right. The litany of powerful male leaders that embraced a muscular Christianity – with the troubling linkage with patriarchal abuse – is cause for pause and self-analysis. That said, one is left wondering how evangelicals fared compared to other religious groups – were they the only ones who struggled with what a male (or female) was meant to be?
 
As an aside, this is the kind of book that helps to make sense of the present. For instance, some of the troubling aspects of what we see today among American evangelicals are not anomalies. Rather, such actions have generations of precedent and are part of the DNA of the movement.
 
Memorable Quote: “But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. By the time Trump arrived proclaiming himself their savior, conservative white evangelicals had already traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates ‘the least of these’ for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means. Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them.” (3)