#Jesus and john wayne wikipedia movie#

To prove their point, readers narrated their life stories in vivid detail: They had been indoctrinated into family-values evangelicalism by listening to James DobsonвЂ™s Focus on the Family radio broadcast every day. Almost every message contained some version of the same realization: вЂњThis is the story of my life. I had been warned to brace myself for vicious trolling, but this wasnвЂ™t hate mail. Nearly a year later, they still flood my inbox, several a day, most written by evangelicals. Within days after my book was released, I began receiving letters and messages from readers.

#Jesus and john wayne wikipedia movie#

For the last 75 years, heroic ideals inspired by mythical warriors, soldiers and cowboys - many of them portrayed onscreen by men like John Wayne, and Mel Gibson in the movie вЂњBraveheartвЂќ - transformed the faith itself, replacing core biblical teachings such as loving oneвЂ™s neighbors and oneвЂ™s enemies with a militant battle cry. The book traces how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood came to pervade evangelical popular culture in America. The disruptive power of history became clear to me last summer, when my book вЂњJesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a NationвЂќ was published. For example, there was a time when many conservative Protestants rejected the very idea of вЂњChristian America.вЂќ Those taught that patriarchy is essential to Christian orthodoxy would be surprised to learn of the long history of evangelical feminism. History also disrupts simply by showing that things have not always been as they are now. This was not the Graham they knew and loved. Billy Graham had a decidedly mixed record when it came to civil rights, was politically ambitious, promoted American militarism and tacitly condoned atrocities in Vietnam. Evangelicals are shocked, for example, to learn that the Rev. Within academic circles, some evangelical historians have produced narratives that tend to downplay the darker sides of their religious tradition.ДЇor those who have only ever encountered whitewashed portrayals of their own past, a more complex account of evangelical history is enormously disruptive.

At a popular level, pseudo-historians have played fast and loose with historical evidence to spin fanciful tales of AmericaвЂ™s Christian origins. ItвЂ™s not that evangelicals disregard history entirely, but they tend to prefer their own versions of events. However, to an unusual degree, evangelicals have remained oblivious to how their own stories map onto larger histories.