Grace urges men not to abandon their manhood, but to be men for Christ. So could Heinrich Bullinger, the magisterial reformer, when he preached against “dainty fools and effeminate hearts will not hazard the loss of a limb for their religion, magistrates, wives, children, and all their possessions.” He understood that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. Paul could be charged with promoting militant masculinity when he exhorted the Ephesians to put on the armor of God. And in doing so, I’d join the collective witness of the Christian tradition through the centuries. But if asked whether I support what is generally, if not very helpfully, called “militant masculinity,” “family values,” and “Christian nationalism,” I’d answer yes. It encompasses many things that even a Protestant like myself would be inclined to disavow.
But Du Mez sees his rugged individualism, unapologetic political incorrectness, and loyalty to home and country as instinctive expressions of a “corrupted” faith that “enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power at home and abroad.”Į vangelical has always been a vague and over-capacious term. The Duke was not a particularly religious man, so he may seem an odd avatar of conservative piety. She blames James Dobson, John Piper, Wayne Grudem, and Billy Graham for promoting a form of family values that links the gospel to forms of “patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism,” which in turn are “intertwined with white racial identity.”ĭu Mez singles out John Wayne as the embodiment of this heresy. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, argues that far from betraying their principles, the 80 percent of evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump were acting in accord with a “militant masculinity” that has always been central to the movement. Academia, the institution that forms and enforces upper-class opinion, supplies the ammunition. One mob is praised and encouraged by America’s power-elite the other, America’s true canaille, is given the rhetorical grapeshot. In America today, we often hear of two mobs, antifa and the deplorables. No, not John Wayne (“The Duke”), but the Duke of Wellington. P our la canaille, il faut la mitraille: For the rabble use the grapeshot, the Duke reportedly said of an Irish mob. How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
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