Jesus and john wayne chapter titles how to#

(Ed: Captivating was co-written by EldredgeвЂ™s wife, Stasi.) My home church was doing them. At that time it was hard to find a church anywhere that wasnвЂ™t holding a Wild at Heart study for men and a Captivating study for women. So I looked into it and found that it was practically ubiquitous. Some of my students brought in this book, Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, and told me that I had to read it because of the way it fashioned a manly Christianity. I was doing a unit on Teddy Roosevelt, focusing on the relationship between gender and foreign policy and things like that. It was my students who first brought this to my attention, back in about 2006. But in Jesus and John Wayne, I trace the history of a particularly militant strand of evangelical masculinity that has been a defining feature of conservative white evangelicalism. To be clear, there isnвЂ™t just one evangelical masculinity, and individual women and men respond to prescriptive advice in all sorts of ways. To understand American evangelicalism, we have to take gender seriously, to understand how gender connects to theology and politics, and how it is at the heart of the evangelical worldview.

Jesus and john wayne chapter titles how to#

Evangelicals have bought and read millions of books about how to raise boys and girls, how to be a man, and how to be a woman. For over half a century, evangelicals have been вЂњfocusing on the family,вЂќ and distinct gender roles have been at the heart of this. Kristin Kobes Du Mez: Evangelicalism isnвЂ™t just about theological doctrines, and вЂњfamily valuesвЂќ evangelicalism isnвЂ™t just a set of political commitments. Religion & Politics: What is the relationship between evangelicalism and masculinity, and what prompted you to write about it? Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Miller spoke with Du Mez about the book by phone. Along the way, this model of Christian patriarchy seeks to govern the home, the school, the church, and ultimately, the nation.ДЄ professor of history at Calvin University and the author, previously, of A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism, Du MezвЂ™s new book pledges to explain the current state of white evangelicalism-from family dynamics to voting preferences-with help from gender analysis.Д®ric C. Men are pushed to be extra-manly, wives to be sexy and supportive, and children to mind authority as they grow into their own designated gender tracks. For the past 80 years, she argues, white evangelical speakers, writers, and media figures have been idealizing a form of manliness that is at once all Jesus and all John Wayne, calling their audiences to hyper-masculinity as an orienting center.

And yet, as readers of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation will quickly discover, Du Mez is not describing a movement in search of a happy medium.

He resigns himself to a compromise lifestyle somewhere between вЂњa cowboy and a saint.вЂќ When Kristin Kobes Du Mez set to work on her study of white evangelical masculinity in 2016, the Gaither song offered her a title. Though striving after the soft purity of Jesus as exemplified by his mother, the man often finds himself living like a rough and rugged John Wayne as modeled by his father. In 2008, the Gaither Vocal Band released a song called вЂњJesus and John Wayne,вЂќ about a young manвЂ™s struggle to live a godly life. Donald Trump stands near a statue of John Wayne during a news conference at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa.