But it is important to note that a role model like John Wayne, who was admired for his “masculinity,” played characters who dominated women. Many other pre-1970s films included similar scenes. The spanking of women didn’t just happen in John Wayne movies. Something inside me rattled with an anger I didn’t understand. In Donovan’s Reef, he spanks a woman after saying, “I wear the pants.” These scenes are shown as positive and funny, and the woman is shown as “getting what she deserves.” John Wayne’s films had instances of feisty, independent women, but they were shamed by the ultramasculine Wayne, who used his hands to bring them to submission. In McLintock, Wayne’s character publicly spanks the leading lady, played by Maureen O’Hara, and he also encourages a man to spank his (Wayne’s) adult daughter. But I distinctly remember the way John Wayne treated women in his films.
My favorite was True Grit (because of the girl who could ride horses and shoot a gun-no surprise). We watched quite a few John Wayne movies when I was a kid. Christian nationalism has reared its well-funded and long-established head in seemingly new (but really should have been expected) ways.ĭu Mez lays out the historical cards of 20th-century American evangelicalism to show how no one should have been surprised by the white evangelical support of Trump, which she calls “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.” From the “culture wars,” to fear-mongering over communism, to systemic racism in evangelical colleges, Du Mez shines a light in all the dark corners.Īnd of course, John Wayne makes his appearances as the ideal man for patriarchy-leaning evangelicals, serving as a precursor icon of sorts for Trump: he’s masculine, gun-bearing, “law-and-order” establishing, and dominating. But more research is being done, and more people are gaining recognition of this shadow world, perhaps due to the 2016 election and the widespread evangelical support for Trump. I’ve been gone from the movement for almost eight years, and still most people I meet haven’t heard of this corner of American Christianity. No one outside of Vision Forum seemed to know anything about Vision Forum, and no one seemed to care.
I tried to search the internet for resources on my questions but found little except for Homeschoolers Anonymous. When I was still in the Christian Patriarchy movement starting to deconstruct my beliefs, I felt like everything I was taught and the people I grew up with existed in a bubble, protected from the outside world. The book untangles the web of Christian nationalism, American evangelicalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and if you don’t think those things are connected, then you definitely need to read it. With all that I’ve processed in the past decade, I am so thankful for this book and the work it is doing. Reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a little like reading a biography of my upbringing, just not the fun parts.
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