The Russell Moore Show - Kristin Du Mez Tells Me How Evangelicals Fell in Love with John Wayne

[Music] hello this is the russell moore show brought to you by the public theology project at christianity today where every week we explore conversations and questions from a christian perspective and as you know every once in a while what i like to do is a segment called tell me where i'm wrong this isn't really one of those uh because we're going to have a we're going to have some things we disagree about we're also going to have a great deal of agreement so there's not one specific issue that we're sort of uh talking about but we'll we'll still abide by my rules for tell me where i'm wrong which is if we do come into areas of disagreement i'm not allowed to debate uh i'm allowed to ask questions for information and to reflect on that and so it may be that that doesn't yet we don't even get into that territory but if we do kristin you call me out on it and tell me tell me that i'm breaking my own rules so our guest today is kristen dumas calvin university who is the author of jesus and john wayne which is a book that uh you know oft it's not often that a scholarly work of history uh becomes a kind of viral read but uh this time it did i would find people all over the place especially conservative evangelical women who would sometimes whisper and say i've been reading jesus and john wayne and there's a lot that really uh that really describes what we've all seen in recent years and so this is this has uh really shaped and reshaped a great deal of conversation and debate on some really important issues because this intersects with a lot of things that that we've seen over the past several years i had kristin with me at the university of chicago this semester talking to our students really about the entire history of not just evangelical christianity but the overlap between religion and culture and politics and all of those things this semester it was really fascinating so i wanted to have her on to um have this conversation with you kristen thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today oh thank you for having me you know i mentioned to you the other day um that i i sort of i have a list um that i sort of keep in google keep of of milestone dates so that i can sort of think about oh well this is the date of my baptism or this is the date of some significant thing happening one of those dates is october the 7th because this was the this was the day in 2016 when the access hollywood tape released with a candidate for president talking in really really shockingly crude and violent i would say terms about women and one of the things that the reasons that i mark that as a as a defining point is because i thought well a lot of my fellow evangelicals who have been well-meaning they didn't to really understand what was going on here they'll stand up and and repudiate this and they didn't uh instead i started hearing well this is just locker room talk and and so forth and even some of them who did say something about it then later changed their mind and and turned around so i was surprised and i think it's fair to say rattled by that but i think you would say i shouldn't have been surprised by that is that is that right yeah you know going back in time that day too for me is is uh uh a kind of a turning point that's it was in the aftermath the the days after that uh event that i knew i needed to write this book and and it was because i uh years earlier more than a decade earlier i had started researching evangelical masculinity and particularly what seemed to be a really militant strand of it in the early 2000s this kind of warrior ideal and i spent a year and a half looking into it and i was i was disturbed by what i what i saw um i encountered deeply misogynistic crass teachings about masculinity that were you know cloaked as as christian and i also saw the implications in terms of uh militarism and foreign policy and i was exploring all those things and then i set the project aside and i um partly because i wasn't sure if what i was looking at was was really a fringe movement and if as a christian as a christian scholar if i should be you know if it was fringe if it if it was right for me to to shine what might be a you know bright light on the darkest underbelly of american christianity to be honest uh so i set it aside um i didn't stop paying attention to some of the proponents of this really militant christian manhood and what i saw in the ensuing decade is one after another become implicated in scandal in sexual abuse and abuse of power and i saw these repeated patterns of people surrounding them condoning that defending them blaming the victims and so in the days after the access hollywood tape released it suddenly dawned on me when i heard all the excuses when i heard the justification when i heard when i saw that conservative evangelicals were sticking with him um because he was going to defend them and it's kind of boys'll be boys mentality all of a sudden it clicked i had heard this before i'd seen this before and it's at that point that i realized kind of what we were looking at and it wasn't an aberration this wasn't a betrayal of of core evangelical values in many ways this is the fulfillment of of the shape that i'd seen evangelicalism take particularly around issues of gender and masculinity okay well let's take a several parts of that um that i'm interested in exploring one of those things would be you talk in the book and elsewhere about this idea of militancy of sort of a warrior christ would you say would it be fair to say that sometimes there is an over-reaction to the last bad thing and so you have a you have a picture in scripture of a very complicated uh jesus who is um who is i mean revelation 19 uh appearing in the sky drenched in in blood i mean this is a this is a warrior uh someone who's coming out of the house of david when mary uh when when the annunciation happens she starts singing about military victory in terms of the abrahamic covenant so there's that aspect of it do you think that do you think that sometimes there's a flipping back and forth from a a very soft uh gentle jesus where people go to the new testament say that doesn't really fit everything there to this sort of hyper-masculine um battling uh everyone and and stacking up the enemies jesus do you think that there's some of that that's that said overreaction for people yeah in either direction you can see a kind of cultural pendulum swing uh when we look at perceptions of masculinity of christian manhood but i would complicate that just a little bit and what may be some assumptions there of you know what is masculinity and what is femininity and you know that there's a lot of kind of cultural packaging that goes on there and that shapes kind of theological conceptions as well so as a historian of gender i'm i'm attentive to the ways in which what it means to be a man changes dramatically over time what it means to be a woman changes over time and how in recent decades conservative evangelicals have tended to emphasize difference emphasize opposites so what it is to be a man is the opposite of what it is to be a woman so strength versus vulnerability and you know protector versus protected and what happens then is many of the attributes that are held up as for all christians as followers of christ things like the fruit of the spirit love joy peace patience kindness goodness gentleness self-control these get labeled feminine i think uh erroneously so and then other traits like courage or assertiveness get labeled masculine and so what you see is this real artificial division of christian virtue in a way that isn't good for virtue it isn't good for men and it isn't good for women so what would you say to someone who says well that that probably did go too far but it's a flannery o'connor push back as hard against the age as the age pushes on you and you're in a time when uh when gender distinctions are evaporated and erased and and there's a great deal of confusion about well what does it mean to be a person first but then what does it mean to be a man or a woman and so emphasizing the differences that's because no one else will acknowledge them what would you say to someone who who sort of gets into that mode of argumentation here so i actually don't have these kinds of arguments all that often because as a historian i i tend to be quite descriptive so describing you know how people have these arguments rather than telling people what they ought to think right that's what historians can do here is just bring in the context and say ah this is uh you know how how this set of individuals are making sense of their world this is how they're making sense of of masculinity in this moment and and this is how they're interacting with the christian scriptures in this moment so i have some expertise in that area when it comes to telling people what they ought to think and what they ought to do that's where you know i'm i'm kind of um sure uh and amateur in a sense i do have some opinions though uh but here i think that the biggest caution would be to um to stay close to the scriptures and to uh you know to to take the scriptures in their entirety certainly we can look up specific passages but to remember that you know the vast majority of the scriptures that we have as a guide to our our faith and to our lives are written for women and men alike and and to remember that jesus uh in so many ways was uh radically counter-cultural as a man as a human as a messiah in so many ways jesus disrupted human expectations and and he did so in a way that was uh you know divesting himself of power and that that's what's so extreme and and he calls all of his followers to take up our cross and to follow him in that and i think that for masculinity for femininity this radical counter-cultural self-sacrifice and a courageous self-sacrifice right is is the model of what it is to follow christ and then maybe way down the road we can we can think about as a woman what does that look like as a man but even there that that's assuming a binary that that each of us as god created us in all of our diversity um should be fit neatly into a category of this is what it is to be a christian man this is what it is to be a christian woman instead of thinking about the the um creativity of each of us being uniquely gifted in so many different ways and and we do have a spectrum um that if you look at certain traits you know that that might fit more with masculinity or with femininity that might be exhibited more by men than by women so physical strength things like that even there you have a lot of variety women who are very physically strong women who are not men same thing right and so rather than trying to enforce um boxes on um created reality uh maybe to think in terms of of variety and of uh giftedness and of the body of christ really being a diverse mix and that each of us can seek to respond faithfully to how god has created us as as gendered individuals and just as as individuals and i i think that you know when i look at the history when i've interviewed people when i hear from readers of jesus and john wayne i hear heartbreaking stories from women but also from men from so many evangelical men who tried to fit themselves into an artificially constructed box uh that to be a man is to love to go rock climbing on the weekends or to not like to go to an art museum on the weekends and that either they weren't real men or that christianity wasn't for them and and i think that's what we really want to move away from of course my colleague here at christianity today mike cosper has a a podcast the rise and fall of mars hill that to be honest i thought would at the beginning i thought well this will be a very interesting podcast for those of us who remember mars hill and who are looking at the history of it all in light of some of the things that have come to light since then but it has gone everywhere and there are people listening to this podcast who haven't even uh who don't maybe weren't even born when when mark driscoll was in his heyday i'm curious what you think about i i had a pastor um in the area who was talking about some young men from his church who would go to mars hill sometimes for the services and they would just sort of sit in the balcony and he said what was going on there was a kind of catharsis because what mark would do is come in and i think some people don't really remember this there was a sense of a hyper masculinity turned against men in in one sense so there was a very strong denunciation of young men for mistreatment of women and porn and not not getting their lives together and those sorts of things and this pastor said it was almost like going to confession and paying an indulgence you had that and then you could could leave and sort of go back to go back to normal but why why did the driscoll phenomenon both what we saw publicly and what we know was happening privately why why did that resonate at least to the degree that it did yeah it was often in in my research for jesus and john wayne i felt like i was running up against the limits of my my discipline and i i several occasions really wanted to pass the baton to psychologists and i've talked with a couple psychologists since the book published and been exploring some of these things just a bit but um uh that said you know i think i think there is uh one of the interviews that i did uh that was really illuminating i i have a portion of this in the book was a young man who said you know there was something incredibly empowering about the teachings of somebody like driscoll uh and that that you know each of us mediocre white guys you know like nothing special um we're called to greatness and we were called to lead and you all we had to do is just really step up and as he put it keep our noses clean and you know and it was being handed to us and it felt really good and it felt empowering and it and you're not empowering just in a bad way but you know for for young men uh who are seeking purpose who are trying to figure out who they are in life what they ought to be doing um and you know this is this is all couch in the language of this is what god wants for you and i think it's important to keep that in mind too that this is you know a lot of people who have been drawn into these sorts of teachings genuinely are seeking to honor god and to do god's will and they're being told by their pastors in their churches in their small groups with their brothers in christ this is what it looks like and so i think i think it's enticing i think it's empowering and i think that there is genuine belief here as well but but then of course we have to ask you know who's how is this affecting people um and and what are these men not able to see um in in in i've been really surprised uh and impressed with the the reception of um my book among so many conservative white evangelical men and white evangelicals generally who who are using it to examine their own participation in this culture but not just in a in a distancing kind of way like what was done to me i've had a number of readers ask the next question which is um why was i so comfortable with this right how could i be complicit in this now that i see really what was going on now that i see how all these pieces fit together now that i see what harm was done to so many others to women to people outside of these communities to people inside of these communities what was it that blinded me to this harm and why was i so comfortable and honestly i think that is such an important question i think that is a question that many of us ought to be asking you know one of the one of the things that's really uh illuminated quite a bit uh for several of us uh is the sexual abuse uh scandals um that have happened within evangelicals not only within evangel christianity but within i mean we have john howard yoder in the anabaptist tradition all the way over to things in the secular world and the roman catholic church and elsewhere but uh when we look at evangelical christianity with people who often were the very ones warning about sexual anarchy uh and uh the sexual revolution and so forth who we we later find were involved themselves in sexually predatory behavior as you look historically is is this just something that i ask this question all the time about various things is this just the way history works and the way uh the way life is and we sort of lose our ideals and our illusions or is there something uniquely uh uniquely dark in this way about this time yeah oh so i'm a calvinist so i don't i don't speak in terms of uniquely dark with all that much confidence right you know i think that there are there are temptations and basic human temptation is is you know grasping power power over others and then uh at the same time yes this this does seem a little bit unique in the circumstances with such an emphasis on purity right such an emphasis on sexual purity being a marker of faithfulness and of enforcing that drawing those boundaries um and and particularly for young women for generations right to you know kind of christian discipling uh if you were a teenage girl from the 1980s up to you know the last few years really a lot of that uh was was how to not have sex how to stay pure and then and then once you're married how to have sex to please your husband you know it was really centered in terms of um being a godly young woman and and we can talk about that and some of those implications but then the hypocrisy to see that so many of the men who were preaching this uh and and who were um you know who were enforcing this were um were predatory and and then you know historically when i went back and looked at these teachings on sexuality when i read the sex manuals from the 1960s and the 1970s i could just see plain as day how these values were setting women up for um a victimization really being told that it is up to you as a woman to protect uh purity because uh men are filled with testosterone restraint isn't really their thing it's up to you you have to protect it through your modesty and then you have to protect uh purity when you're married by meeting your husband's sexual needs and it's one thing to read this uh you know in in a in a sex manual or an advice to a young wife another thing to just hear this over and over again when uh among community members when a pastor a leader is is caught in sexual misconduct and then to hear exactly these teachings coming back and it's the wife's fault blame the woman blame the young girl for seducing her own father right it is just um horrifying to read this and and this isn't just uh in you know every once in a while this becomes a repeated pattern and and yes so as a historian or as a christian i can fall back on you know sin and power and it's pervasive as a historian it does seem like this is a uniquely um troubling situation you know there's a there's a new book that i'm reading now that argues that one of the reasons we have so many awful people in power is because awful people tend to be the ones who don't mind being in power and the the analogy that this book is is using or the the phenomena that it's looking at one of the phenomena it's looking at our is school boards and so he would say tip you know 20 years ago someone would run for school board because he or she really cared about education in the community now in a time where that person is going to have to endure being screamed at and sometimes having their families threatened and so forth the people who are willing to risk all of that tend to be machiavellian narcissistic sometimes psychopathic uh people and as he was talking about this that really had a lot of parallels for me with what often goes on in the church do you think that that's historically the case as well just sort of uh uh not not so much that the power corrupts but the the the people who are corruptable which is the name of this book corruptable are the ones who want the power is that is does that uh does that thesis make sense to you it does up to a point it's certainly something i've struggled with when i when i try to make sense of okay where do we go from here how can we have better institutions healthier institutions because there's a bit of a conundrum when i look at the history i look at somebody like jerry falwell senior jerry falwell jr mark driscoll you know these figures or we could say doug wilson these empire builders really you know that they they um uh uh really were were deeply concerned about amassing power and now they could say you know and would all say that they were doing so for godly reasons uh but uh you know you can see some some really uh detrimental effects um and at the same time wow did they get things done how did they influence culture and we could go those are more extreme examples we could also look at some you know somebody like john piper and desiring god and the gospel coalition you know these really uh these organizations that end up having a massive reach um and then you know what what does it take to make something like that work what kind of a vision what kind of leadership what kind of exclusions go into that but in the case of leaders like like falwell or driscoll yes they seem incredibly narcissistic and they had uh enormous power i mean reach they they influenced generations of um of american evangelicals and when i look at kind of more wholesome models and when i look at some of the teaching say uh why look what happened in the evangelical left uh in the 1960s 1970s when i look at those evangelicals who are on the forefront of civil rights of racial justice um who are working who are questioning christian nationalism or links between american christianity and american militarism and stepping back from that they weren't able to amass the power um nor necessarily did they desire to do so their models were much more collaborative they were very conscious of power and so i'm a bit at a loss honestly as a historian looking back because i can see the the the dangers of grasping power i can also see the effectiveness in a bad way in many cases of having somebody at the center who um who knows how to consolidate his own power and it's been enormously effective and often in detrimental ways so i don't know i don't know well you mentioned christian nationalism and one of the things that i'm curious about is when you're looking at this historically of course in jesus and john wayne you talk quite a bit about uh the cold war and the effect of the cold war on evangelical identity and so forth um it seems to me that there's continuity and discontinuity so one of the things that i have seen since i was five and able to pay attention to it is this sort of god and country um idea of the united states as being in covenant with with god in in a second second chronicles 7 14 sort of uh way it seems to me that that has grown uh and and maybe mutated from that to something even stronger uh in alliance with some ethno-nationalist movements and and the the prizing of people who often not only are not christians but will ridicule uh for instance i mean one of the the figures that's been very influential uh here argues that um that you shouldn't even argue against theism because it's not even worth taking seriously and and sort of a nietzschean view of jesus is weak uh and so forth am i seeing that correctly that there's there's something that was sort of in in seed form but then has has altered a little bit as time has gone on maybe in coincidence with the trump era maybe uh because of that am i seeing that accurately no i think i think that is a good way of of um of depicting what's what's happened and and it's important to keep in mind that you know christian nationalism versus you know patriotism or it there's there's a whole spectrum here and in that many you know kind of god and country uh americans uh christians who who see nothing wrong with having a flag up in front of their church who you know like to shop in the the you know for patriotic home decor at hobby lobby and things like that you know that there's a full spectrum so many of those people who who might be you know comfortable with a certain level of christian nationalism that i frankly am not you know are are not necessarily one of the same with white nationalists however um where alliances are drawn right where people say yes we are the same we are on the same side uh this is where questions of identity come in and i think for many conservative christians uh being a kind of god and country americans is a part of their identity as christians and and so when they see some of these more secular figures or some of these extreme examples the affinities are in that direction rather than say the other direction where you're gonna get more of a critique where you're gonna get more of a you know no or or actually we need to lament our our nation's sins we need to examine our nation's shortcomings right that's where we ought to be engaged and so one of the the themes really of my research for the book was was trying to map out these affinities um how identity is constructed and what i came to see is in the 1960s and 1970s a lot of conservative white evangelicals ended up identifying with secular conservatives around ideals of masculinity around ideals of whiteness of even in some cases white supremacy and that their religious and cultural identity was formed around those values and so separates them from evangelicals other evangelicals who might hold very similar theological beliefs but a different application of those beliefs when it comes to uh politics or when it comes to identity issues and i think that's very much where we're still in that space today um and one of the challenges for evangelicals for american christians is to figure out you know what what that we we are assuming or stating is you know biblical christianity or god's word is in fact you know on the left on the right shaped largely by maybe secular ideals um or identities and how can we kind of peel back some of those layers and come together and take another look at the scriptures and and kind of build up from there again one of the places where i think you and i might see things differently is the um it seems to me and correct me if i'm wrong that one of the things that you're arguing in jesus and john wayne is that there's there's no such thing as evangelicalism uh theologically that there is no there is no theology there um except maybe as a as a a mechanism a means to an end that instead what evangelicalism is is a sort of cultural political consumer uh identity am i seeing your argument correctly i'm not quite so extreme i'm not such a relative okay so so i'm a cultural historian right and um i'm actually i've written on this in other places about how evangelicalism is an imagined religious uh community in that many different people define it in many different ways and so i would imagine you would define it more closely attuned to the babington quadrilateral the theological definition right biblicism cruciocentrism conversionism and activism uh or you know go to the website of the national association of evangelicals you know first and foremost these are bible-believing christians and and go from there um or we could add barna and have a few more uh points to to uh check off uh i'm not saying that that isn't what you should say evangelicalism is right as a kind of aspirational ideal as an evangelical leader uh by all means go for it for me as a cultural historian describing what i'm seeing i ran up against some issues with that definition um first of all i was aware of you know surveys that evangelicals themselves are doing that show high levels of theological illiteracy high levels of heresy if you will uh right among evangelicals um and so i started to question how central is you know traditional theology to evangelical identity should we say those aren't evangelicals right if we're using a theological rubric or do we have to look somewhere else for what it means to be an evangelical when i looked at the issue of race in particular you know all those theological beliefs the majority of black protestants chuck all those boxes the strong majority of black protestants who check all those boxes do not identify as evangelical so right there as a cultural historian i pay attention to that because they know there is more to being evangelical than simply checking off those boxes and i want to take that seriously i want to take seriously when people self-identify as evangelical and don't know this theology or theology isn't essential who are they and what do they mean by that and that's what pulled me more into a different understanding of evangelicalism not disconnected from theology theology plays a role but it's not limited to that and so i don't actually give a definition of evangelicalism i'm more in the description territory i'm not looking for a timeless rubric that i can impose over all all space and time that's not what i do as a historian i'm looking at in this particular historical era who is identifying as evangelical what does that mean to them what does it look like and that's where i end up really understanding evangelicalism as a consumer culture people who are shaped by these products these cultural products christian radio christian music christian publishing and as a series of networks and alliances again these these para church organizations some denominations individuals affinities and that's how i try to map out what evangelicalism is and i pay attention to how evangelical leaders and theologians are defining it i just don't privilege that definition over more of an understanding of evangelicalism and what it means to ordinary evangelicals who are participating in it i see a lot of parallel with uh some of the things happening in the republican party and within movement uh conservatism because one of the things the trump era has done is to resort all of the alliances and so there will be uh lots of us who will be in conversation and i'll be talking to say uh jewish uh william f buckley sorts of uh conservatives yes who will say something along this line uh we always knew that there was a fringe uh we always knew that there were kooks and loons and nuts but we assumed that they were the fringe and we assumed that most people really were motivated by limited government and burkian understanding of uh of the role of tradition and of culture and strong national defense and so forth and then you come into this moment where you you look around and you say oh wait a minute that that actually wasn't what was uh uniting the coalition and so you have some people who are really rattled by that and saying well what happened it seems to me that a lot of that is the sort of reflection that's taking place uh within evangelicalism and and just as sometimes these conservatives who said i'm not going to go along with the populist demagogic sorts of uh sorts of forms of of ideology that are present right now we'll have people who will say well you should have seen this coming 40 years ago uh and uh therefore you can't see it coming now uh it seems like there's a lot of parallels there with some people saying well i mean i think about when we're talking about even these these gender conversations the fact that uh i look back and i see there are there are places where an understanding of gender roles is actually more important than the eternal generation of the sun i mean literally conciliar uh ideas uh is that is that a fair parallel or am i just seeing that i'm seeing it too we're both seeing it right i mean yes uh there's so much there in what you just said uh you know yes there's a a new sorting happening there's a new recognition of what was fringe uh is not fringe and maybe it never was maybe you know it depends where we were looking if we were looking to you know define evangelicalism according to what was going on at christianity today in wheaton college we we miss something here um and and this is really part of the writing of this book right i set it aside um 15 years ago thinking is this really you know if this is this is fringe um and it was in in the fall of 2016 and i thought no no this is not fringe i need to do this um and then we start i mean a story of the book is what is mainstream and what is fringe and then what is the relationship between what was perceived as mainstream and this fringe and this is where we can get into i think where you're going um with uh with this question too uh you know should we have seen this coming um when we look back to evangelicalism you know and race and gender and even though evangelicals uh certainly they put gender up front uh didn't talk about race um as much right color blindness um and you know this is just a theology it's not a racial identity or a cultural identity and yet you know when you go back to the early 20th century the fundamentals you know african-american pastors weren't invited into that when you look at the national association of evangelicals it's a it was a white organization at its founding despite theological affinities right and so history can make some of this plain to us and yes when it comes to gender i mean my own life story i grew up in a dutch calvinist community i you know took entire courses on calvin's institutes and you know was deeply theological and then i um went to graduate school in the late 90s and this was right at the you know the rise of the young restless and reformed and and the you know john piper heyday and um and i thought good for us right calvinist we get our moment in the sun this is great and then i realized you know this isn't this isn't for there is no place for me as a woman as an intellectual as a woman who didn't believe that complementarianism was the only way to be faithful right i could say then i see and i see in creed the apostles creed right i could embrace calvin's institutes all of that and there was no place for me and so it was how orthodoxy was defined how um yes what was the center of the faith and when the center moves from right the um um you know the core teachings of the scriptures the uh love your neighbor as yourself and love god above all uh going to those historic creeds and confessions and is instead identified around gender roles and then increasingly elaborate gender roles i think inevitably the center ends up shifting and who you see as an ally will end up shifting which which can end up transforming the faith itself because that core has shifted i remember teaching a class um coinciding with the southern baptist convention every year and i would have students who would attend to the meetings and i was i would prepare them for it by saying you know every family has the crazy uncle uh up in the attic and so you have to be prepared for some crazy things that are going to be said at the microphone but you know that's that's family uh and then as time went on i i realized oh wait maybe i'm the uncle in the attic maybe that was the the issue all along is that i was the one out of step with all of this right so yeah something i have to say to to be watching that from the outside right this is something when we connected uh in person i told you that as a historian i uh up until this book i've only written about people who are long dead and so to actually get to talk with you a character in my book uh is in itself thrilling but also to have you know been writing this book and then watching things play out in real time um it was was uh it was it was just it was a very strange experience i'm sure it was even stranger to be living through and kind of realizing what was happening what i will say too is that um you know to kind of bring um both race and gender into this conversation you know as a conservative white man some of these boundaries were probably not instantly evident to you um because you could move freely in those spaces whereas as a woman or as a person of color i think some of these boundaries that had been set up you couldn't help but bump up against and so um you know i think that is uh perhaps worth noting and um and also you know your experience it became visible to you when you started pushing back against some of these and then it was apparent just how um how significant these these boundaries were yes i think that's absolutely the case and i i remember having a conversation with a group of these were conservative complementarian evangelical women who said uh in a very not in a uh not in a oppositional way at all in a very friendly way said we sense that some of the things that have been revealed over the past several years with sexual abuse and and scandal and cover-ups and so forth that this is deeply rattling to you and what we want you to know is that none of us are surprised and so i looked around the room and it didn't matter whether that was the 25 year old um woman who was a phd student or the 70 year old pastor's wife who was in the room they they all were saying we're not surprised by some of the things that we've seen yeah you know i hear the same thing from uh from black christians especially those who have been in evangelical spaces you know the response to this book among many white evangelicals is shock and recognition among black christians it's it's recognition absolutely zero shock like they say yeah thanks kristen for writing this all down but nothing new here right there's no shock there yeah yeah well well i kept you longer than i promised you i would because i've enjoyed the conversation and so uh the book is jesus and john wayne uh can you tell us what you're working on now or are you one of those scholars who likes to keep that a secret no it's it's out there it's public my next book is called live laugh love and it is a cultural history of white christian womanhood so uh kind of similar to jesus and john wayne but uh looking at how cultural products like christian romance novels and uh mommy blogs and hallmark movies and a whole host of other things uh shape religious cultural and political identities well that will be fascinating i can't wait to read that kristin dumay thanks so much for being on the program today oh thank you it's a pleasure so like i say uh this wasn't really a tell me where i'm wrong episode we didn't follow the format there i just really wanted to have a conversation with her about this scholarship and about where she see things sees things going but i think that the book jesus and john wayne um what she said about what kristen said about a sense of shock and recognition i think that's right and and some i don't agree with her on all of it um i i really do think that there is a a um there is such a thing as evangelicalism that can be defined theologically i just think it's probably a different group than we thought it was or a smaller subset than we thought it was and i think that sometimes people looked around and said wait a minute the things that we thought were the first order issues weren't the first order issues for all of us and the things that we thought were minor notes were for some of us major notes and uh so i think that that's that's a big place where i would differ but i think overall what the book is demonstrating is showing is that there is a a kind of culturally defined masculinity wrapped up in the idea of fighting i mean you can see that not just in terms of the driscoll and and trump stuff and so forth but uh but also the fact that there are many uh evangelical pastors i hear from all the time for whom the controversy is not just what they are saying the controversy is that they're not angry at the right people or they're not angry at the right volume i think that really is identifying something dangerous and something that should be reformed so this is russell moore and this is the russell moore show thanks for listening be sure to uh subscribe send this episode to a friend if you think that they would enjoy it and leave a review uh if you could that really helps people to find the show and be sure to check out christianity today lifting up the sages and storytellers of the church you can click on the cover art to find out how you can get a free trial membership to check it out this is russell moore and you're listening to the christianity today public theology projects russell moore show [Music] the russell moore show is a production of christianity today eric petrick is our chief creative officer russell moore is the executive producer and host mike kosper is our director of podcasts production assistants by coremedia beth gravenport serves as coordinator kevin duthu producer audio mixing on today's episode by kevin dufu our theme song is 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Channel: Christianity Today

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Id: p-1lCvNZo54

Length: 50min 31sec (3031 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022