Today I Learned

From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes du Mez

Antecedents can be found in nineteenth-century southern evangelicalism and in early-twentieth-century “muscular Christianity,” but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal “gender traditionalism,” militarism, and Christian nationalism coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical identity. With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangelicals believed that they had a special role to play in keeping America Christian, American families strong, and the nation secure. The assertion of masculine power would accomplish all these goals.

By the 1960s, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War led many Americans to question “traditional” values of all kinds. Gender and sexual norms were in flux, America no longer appeared to be a source of unalloyed good, and God did not in fact appear to be on her side. Evangelicals, however, clung fiercely to the belief that America was a Christian nation, that the military was a force for good, and that the strength of the nation depended on a properly ordered, patriarchal home. The evangelical political resurgence of the 1970s coalesced around a potent mix of “family values” politics, but family values were always intertwined with ideas about sex, power, race, and nation. Feminism posed a threat to traditional womanhood, and also to national security by removing from men their duty to provide and protect and opening the door to women in military combat. In similar fashion, Vietnam was not just a national security issue, but also a crisis of masculinity. Civil rights, too, dismantled time-honored traditions and destabilized the social order. Representing federal government overreach or even an insidious communist agenda, desegregation also heightened the long-standing imagined threat to white womanhood, and to the power of white men to police social and sexual boundaries. The reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.