IT’S ONE OF the leading conundrums of our time: why do evangelical Christians so fervently support Donald Trump? Not only is he a twice-divorced adulterer and sexual assaulter, which would seem to bar him from consideration for people as keen on sexual morality as the evangelicals are, but he seems also to have no familiarity with or genuine commitment to Christianity itself (seen, for example, in his reference to “Two Corinthians”).
Meghan O’Gieblyn argued years back that evangelicals saw Trump as a Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan prince who supported and encouraged the true prophet Daniel (= Mike Pence?), and I have heard similar arguments that they see Trump as Cyrus, the gentile king who delivered Israel out of its bondage to a hostile government. Helpful…but I think Du Mez has the best explanation yet.
In a nutshell, she argues that white evangelicals in the USA have long been energetic in turning Christianity into a prop for patriarchy. She begins at the the turn of the 20th century, with the “muscular Christianity” of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday and takes a close look at the mid-century efflorescence of John Wayne and Billy Graham, but really digs in when showing how pushing back against second wave feminism shot to the top of the agenda for evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s. Patriarchy was taking a hit—women working outside the home, practicing sexual freedom, not having babies—and God was recruited into the effort to Make Men Great Again.
I’m amazed at the sheer perseverance Du Mez must have had to trawl through the mountains of self-help guides to reclaiming masculinity written by evangelical men for evangelical men—not only the famous ones, like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and the Promise Keepers, but weird, impossible-to-mainstream ones John Eldredge, Steve Farrar, and Mark Driscoll, with their celebration of William Wallace as the exemplary Christian man—not the real William Wallace, of course, but the one played by Mel Gibson in Braveheart.
If a ruthless, sword-wielding, revenge-seeking warrior with blue facepaint is your idea of a Christian hero, well…you’re ready for Trump, aren’t you? If you see Jesus as a brawny, straight-talking dude who took no shit and probably knocked out a couple of centurions as he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, you are really ready for Trump.
Du Mez’s final chapter addresses why the evangelicals can so readily forgive Trump his wide and frequent deviations from strict sexual morality: they have had lots and lots and lots of practice, as Du Mez shows with story after story of evangelical star preachers caught with their pants down.
I found myself wondering (not that she owed her readers any explanation) what Du Mez’s own relationship to Christianity is. She teaches at Calvin College, which is steeped in the Dutch Reformed tradition, but probably Calvin is willing to hire faculty of other faiths or of no faith. She seems to have seen this whole phenomenon from very close up, though.
I’d like to buy a copy and just slip it onto the shelves of the local evangelical bookstore.
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