Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Kristin joins us to talk about her book, evangelical support for Trump, and how Project 2025 looks to advance the MAGA-evangelical movement’s broader goals to transform the nation.
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Your book, Jesus and John Wayne, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, offers readers a resource to understand why Trump has so much support within this faith. And part of that stems from Evangelicals’ abandonment of Jesus from the gospels as a role model and a role model for Christian manhood, for a more rugged, if not toxic, patriarchal figure and brand of militant masculinity embodied in past pop culture icon John Wayne. How and why did this transformation begin within the evangelical faith?
It goes way back really. I actually started the research for what became Jesus and John Wayne in the early 2000s. And even then I knew I needed to look back to history. And so I became fascinated at that point in time in this whole Evangelical men’s movement that was becoming increasingly militant, rugged, I saw it connected to foreign policy at the time.
And so I just started to take a closer look and look at this enormous popular culture. If you don’t know about Evangelicalism, you should know that there is a massive consumer culture. Christian bookstores, publishers, Christian radio, Christian television, massive bestsellers. So one book, Wild at Heart by John Aldridge, God is a warrior God and men are made in his image, every man has a battle to fight, right, sold millions of copies, every Christian guy was reading it in the early 2000s. And so that really piqued my curiosity. And I looked back in time and I saw how this emerged in the Cold War era. This is where John Wayne comes in, right? Not an Evangelical, not a particularly godly man, kind of sounds familiar, but he embodied this kind of red blooded American manhood, a good guy with a gun, where righteous violence would bring order. And what we saw back then is conservative white Evangelicals embracing that model of masculinity and calling it Christian manhood and embracing a kind of warrior God that went along with it. And this was anti -feminist. It was also in the context of opposition to desegregationism, the civil rights era, and very pro war in Vietnam. And so that is the historical context and you can see it evolve over time. And then in the early 21st Century, it really takes off against the backdrop of September 11 and this external threat. And we’re really still living in that era today.
And so why this embrace of war, if not the United States as an empire?
I mean, fundamentally, it comes down to the question of power. And for generations now, conservative Evangelicals have been promoting the idea that they are under attack. Despite the predominance of Christians in this country, their truth is that Christians are persecuted and conservative Christians especially, and that they need to fight back and that they need to fight back by seizing power, seizing political power, using whatever weapons God gives them. Sometimes often that enemy is external, at least early on, Cold War era it was communism, anti-God, anti-family, anti-American. And then of course we had the phase of Islamophobia after 9/11. So there’s an external enemy, but there was always also an internal enemy. So secular humanists is a phrase that you would hear a lot in the 1970s, feminists, liberals, Democrats, today it’s the woke, fill in the blank. So there’s always also an internal enemy. And these are enemies of Christian America. And so essentially this is a kind of Christian nationalist vision where godly men are called to step up and fight to preserve Christian America, and they have to fight against their fellow Americans.
So many ways, this is just like a backlash to kind of social progress or change in the country?
I mean, that’s certainly an element, but I think it’s even deeper than that. This just goes, it certainly can use that backlash energy and it uses that very effectively, right? Also I think it’s worth noting that much of this backlash or much of the fear that is generated in these communities, it’s not organic, right. It’s not just kind of bubbling up.
We have leaders who have worked diligently for decades now to stoke fear in the hearts of evangelical people in the pews. People like Jerry Falwell a couple of generations ago. Mark Driscoll, very famous for this. Listen to Christian radio today, listen to really any conservative Christian leader, and you’re just gonna get this drum beat of the world is against you, fellow Americans are against you. And you need to be afraid. You are losing the culture. We are losing the culture. We are losing our rights. We need to defend religious liberty. And this is the very last moment we could possibly do so. And you’ve been hearing this literally for generations, right? One of the questions when I was writing this book is what came first. And this was a really key moment in my research because the conventional wisdom around 2016 was look, conservative Evangelicals were just so afraid that they kind of rushed into the arms of Donald Trump because you have demographic changes, you have religious liberty challenges, the sea change on LGBTQ rights. They were just so afraid. But when I actually looked to the history, I realized that in so many cases we had to flip the script. That conservative evangelical leaders were actively stoking fear in the hearts of believers so that then they could control them, they could consolidate their own power, they could drive donations and really take advantage of that fear. You see that over and over again. And so yes, this is part of a backlash, but it’s also a lot of strategy at play and this has been practiced now for several decades.
So going back to this idea of this kind of rugged warrior that’s going to protect the Christian nationalist project, save the country from cultural and spiritual decay, and preserve Christianity and Christian values. How is it that someone like Donald Trump, who lacks Christian values by all accounts, has become this figure? How does that make sense?
Yeah, in 2016, there were so many pundits, including some Evangelicals themselves, asking exactly that question. How could conservative Evangelicals betray their values to vote for a man like Donald Trump? All right, these are family values voters, and the moral majority, and you have a guy like Trump. How could they?
But if you look back to the history, you can see that celebrating a rugged kind of warrior leader was nothing new. And one of the places where I saw this consistently in my research was defense of predatory pastors, of abusers, of those abusers of power, sexual abusers in the pulpit. And some of that has come to light in recent years. I thought if you knew where to look, you could see that for decades already.
So you could see that pattern already in place, but essentially the reasoning went, the times are, the threat is so great, the times are so challenging that in this moment, we need a fighter. We need somebody who will protect us, who will fight ruthlessly on our behalf. And that is exactly what Donald Trump told them he would do. He told conservative Evangelicals when he was running for president in 2016 that he would fight for them and he would protect them, and he would privilege them. And in that context, it actually worked better that he was not a man of Christian virtue, right? Meek and mild and self-sacrificial and all those things. That’s not really who they were looking for. They wanted somebody who would fight ruthlessly on their behalf. And he was the right man for the job. And so you hear these kind of justifications of prophecies of, you he’s God’s anointed. He’s the King Cyrus. He doesn’t have to be a Christian guy. In fact, he’s God’s chosen one precisely because he is not a Christian guy, but he is the guy God has picked for us and he is going to fight for us and the ends will justify the means.
And how did Trump deliver for this movement?
He’s delivered in so many ways. In one way, probably most immediately, he made them feel powerful. And he invited them to kind of let down their guard, invited them that they didn’t have to be the kind of Ned Flanders Christians out there. He allowed them to just throw away political correctness.
And for evangelicals who felt like they were kind of on the outs of where culture was driving and that some of the views that they had long held were now seen as kind of unpopular at best, and bigoted at worst. And so there was this kind of catharsis that hey this guy in this time can come out and say these things that we’re not allowed to say anymore, you know, we can cheer him on. And I heard a lot inside these communities of, like, well, we wouldn’t say things exactly like what he’s saying, but, but then they loved it, right? Totally had his back, totally defended that and took some pleasure in the fact that, you know, he could get away with saying these. We’ve actually seen in conservative Christian spaces is that this kind of behavior and this kind of rhetoric now of talking crass and even raunchy in some of these spaces, even among quote unquote godly Christian men is now more acceptable. I mean, we’ve seen that across American culture, particularly on the right, but we see that inside Christian communities as well. Trump didn’t create this, but he certainly has been a catalyst for kind of increasing radicalization on this front.
So is it that the MAGA movement is influencing evangelicalism? Or is evangelicalism kind of pushing the MAGA movement? Or is it a little bit of both?
It’s absolutely both. So you certainly have the MAGA movement influencing evangelicals, but evangelicals were there at the start. Evangelicals, you can go back and see in August of 2015 already, we had the first survey data pointing to white Evangelical support for Trump. And at that time, Evangelical pastors, so the Evangelical elite, if you will, the respectable ones, just dismissed it. They were like, no, no, no. You know, this is, as Russell Moore said at the time, this is the reality TV stage of the campaign. No, no, no. And he said, I don’t know a single pastor who’s supporting Trump. Well fast forward a couple of years, Russell Moore is no longer employed at the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention. He was pushed out by the MAGA forces because he refused to bend a knee. And, but very early on we saw that.
So white evangelicals have been Trump’s stalwart base from the very earliest days. And so they have certainly fed into the MAGA movement and sustained that movement through thick and thin. I watched the survey data just regularly, zealously, after Trump’s inauguration, okay, so the threat of Hillary Clinton has been vanquished. What are we seeing? No decline in support, no critique, the impeachment, January 6, all of that. You might see a slight temporary dip every once in a while, and then it’s right back up there, right around that 80, 81 percent. So they have shaped the MAGA movement undoubtedly, and also the MAGA movement has shaped Evangelicalism, not just in terms of tone, but also we’re seeing enormous pressure exerted on conservative Evangelicals, individuals and institutions who refuse to get on board. So I already mentioned Russell Moore out of a job. This is repeated just hundreds, thousands of times over across the country at the local level in churches, in Christian organizations, Christian colleges. Right now Evangelicals who claim to uphold biblical truth. Right now, the thing that many of them seem to care about most when it comes to who can be hired and who can be fired is what’s your politics? Where do you align on your politics? And you can say the creeds and the confessions and you can get your theology right. But if you don’t have the right views on certain culture wars issues, the right political views, right, you’re going to be pushed out or excluded. And that is just happening across the country. It’s tearing institutions apart. The human toll is significant. It’s actually tearing families apart?
What’s being done to kind of fill the vacuum that’s being left with that?
It’s an open question right now. I don’t know that there’s a, that vacuum is quite the right word. What you see happening now is a movement that’s getting quite a bit of attention, the Exvangelical movement, right? You have a whole lot of people, because when you’re talking about evangelicals, you’re talking about a huge number of Americans. The numbers kind of shift, but we’re up in the 20 some percent recently now depending on how the category is drawn and recent data, it puts in around 14, 15 percent of Americans and a higher percentage of American voters because they’re very politically mobilized. So this is a huge swath of the country. And so even if a small number start to say, I can’t do this anymore or get pushed out of these communities, that’s a sizable group. And so now we see a kind of exvangelical movement coalescing.
It’s not an organized movement. It’s just a group of people who identify with that term because evangelicalism is a faith that really emphasizes holistic formation. This isn’t just what you do on a Sunday. It’s not just the Christian songs that you sing. It is a kind of your whole life is supposed to be shaped by this faith and often your entire kind of social world is situated within evangelical spaces. So you might go to an evangelical mega church, your kids go to the youth group, many send their kids to Christian schools or their homeschooling, right? And so they’re listening to Christian radio several hours a day. This is their world and it’s so formative to them and they’re reading these books and then to leave, what does it look like to leave? To leave your whole social network in many cases, to leave some members of your family, to leave this whole way of life.
And so people on the other side, Exvangelicals, are trying to figure out who they are and what they have in common is this past. And so you can’t really lose the past. It comes with you as you’re trying to chart a new course. So right now we’re seeing just a lot of people trying to figure out what’s on the other side as they leave Evangelicalism. Some are finding homes in the main line. Some are leaving Christianity altogether. It’s really up for grabs right now.
It’s actually really sad and just a testament to just how corrosive this movement is.
It is, I’ve been quite critical here, and there’s a lot to be critical about. But what makes this so painful is that there are so many good people and good intentions mixed up in this. Go to an Evangelical church, any Evangelical church, and you are likely to be welcomed with open arms. And they’re gonna be extremely friendly, and your kids are gonna be invited to join youth group, and it will be a very positive experience for many. And for quite some time where the problems start to form is if you ask questions you’re not supposed to ask, or again, if you differ on some of these political issues and then it can become kind of lonely and all of this kind of goodness and friendliness that kind of erodes or evaporates. And I heard one explanation that really seemed to capture well what this is like and what the dynamics are like. And it was from somebody inside a large Evangelical organization. And what they told me was, and essentially the rule here is you don’t have to agree with Trump and certainly not with everything Trump says. You just can’t speak out against it. And that’s kind of how these rules work. So you can keep your mouth shut and you can be fine. You can still be part of the club.
As soon as you start speaking out against it, that’s when you’re gonna see another side of this community, another side of this movement. And there are so many war stories that people have. Again, not just the famous ones like Russell Moore or Beth Moore or David French, some of these very popular figures where we can kind of see it play out, but these stories are repeated thousands of times over by people with zero name recognition and people who don’t have book deals on the other side.
Well, I guess that makes sense because in a way, like Trump is the patriarch of the broader evangelical family. So everyone else is expected to be submissive and subservient towards him.
Yeah, yeah, they celebrate his strength. They celebrate his power. And in their communities, they’ve really, you I guess you could use the word, they’ve been groomed to respect authority, to respect strength and power. And he has positioned himself at the top of the earthly chain of command, if you will. And so, yeah, he demands respect and he gets it from a lot of these folks.
Let’s talk about Project 2025 for a few minutes here. Can you explain how this project is going to advance the political goals of MAGA Evangelicals and the broader Christian nationalist movement?
Yeah, how much time do you have? This is a 900-some page document and it is fascinating. It does many things. On the one hand, it advances kind of a typical, perhaps radical version of conservative policy agenda. And I feel like we have to just put conservative in scare quotes at this point. But then it also proposes a plan to completely restructure the federal government. And that’s key to enhance the authority of the executive, who they plan to be Donald Trump, and to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with Trump loyalists, including in the Department of Justice. And so weaponizing the Department of Justice so that Trump can use it against his political enemies, he has said this is exactly what he wants to do, what he plans to do, and you can just see that all spelled out in Project 2025.
What does this have to do with Christian nationalism?
You already kind of hinted at this. If Trump is their standard bearer, if Trump is their kind of patriarch-in-chief, and you give him unlimited power, essentially unlimited power, what is he going to do with that? They have a lot of suggestions. And here it’s important to look at who’s responsible for Project 2025. One of the key authors, and in fact, the author of the chapter on executive power is Russ Vought. Russ Vought, former Trump administration director of budgets, and people are talking about him as potential in a second administration a chief of staff. So not an insignificant figure. He is also a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, very close ties to a number of Christian nationalist leaders in various denominations. And when you read Project 2025, this is the kind of language you’ll come across – that the American Constitution guarantees the right to do not what each person wants, but what each person ought. What do they mean by that? You have the freedom to obey God’s laws as they define it. So within that framework, there are no reproductive rights, reproductive health rights, right? There’s no right to abortion. LGBTQ rights? No, that goes against God’s plan. So this idea of what rights are guaranteed in the Constitution, protected in the Constitution, only the rights that align with their understanding of God’s law. And so it’s a very, very selective list right there. Also language of not the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of blessedness. And they mean by that the same thing. You will be blessed and you have the right to pursue blessedness, which means obedience. And we’re going to lay out the laws for you. And these have to be Christian laws. And that is the future of this nation. That is for a strong nation and a Christian nation. And the two are one and the same. And so it’s fundamentally a Christian nationalist framework around this entire document. So you take that Christian nationalism, you look at the people who are involved, and then you add to it this enhancement of executive power. And if you want to throw in the mix, which is not in the document, but just our current political context, which is where SCOTUS is at this moment, not a lot of checks and balances left in the system. And you have the ingredients for fundamentally and irrevocably remaking the federal government. And that is exactly what they say they want to do.
Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, who is over this Project 2025, talks about a second American revolution, which will be bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Well, that’s scary. I mean, but this is really like a it is a radical revolutionary document that would essentially, like you said, just reshape America, if not turn us into kind of a reactionary, theocratic state.
It is, and I think that’s really important because as Americans, Republicans, Democrats, Christians of various stripes, non-Christians, we all have different ideas about where our country should go. We have different ideas around any issue. Let’s talk abortion. Let’s talk income tax. Let’s talk environmental regulations. This is a pluralist society and there are going to be all kinds of different views.
But that’s why things are messy, but that’s also democracy. But what the vision here is, it’s for getting rid of that messiness and just saying, no, know, some of these voices are not legitimate. Certain rights will not be protected. And we’re going to achieve this through seizing power and then rewriting all of the rules. And that’s simply because democracy, they’ve calculated, will not get them what they want. They’ve looked at the numbers. Many of the policy proposals are very unpopular. If you look at survey data, voters aren’t going to vote for them. And if you look at demographic change, in recent years, you’re seeing what one sociologist has called the decline or the end of white Christian America, right? You’re seeing some real demographic changes. And so they’ve looked at those numbers and realized democracy isn’t going to get us what we want. Political mobilization isn’t going to get us what we want. We need to seize power while we still can and completely remake this country.
What about the blood and violence that Roberts alluded to? Do you think that that is something that should be taken seriously?
Any time somebody is talking about violence, we need to take that seriously. Violent rhetoric is a precursor to violent actions. Historically speaking, that is the truth. If you look at the history of authoritarianism, reactionary populism, if you look at political violence, you always have violent rhetoric preceding it and dehumanization of the other, the other side. And you have both of those in spades right now among certain corners of the right. And I think that we always have to take that language seriously and call it out, and not let people just dismiss it, and not respond in kind, right? To reject violence and language of violence because what we’re seeing in survey data there too is some disturbing trends. The numbers of Republicans and particularly the numbers of white evangelicals who think that violence might be necessary to save this country. And that number is tacking up much lower, but it is tacking up on the left now as well because of this kind of heightened rhetoric. And so I think what we really need to do is reject violent rhetoric, be aware of it, call it out, and rigorously pursue democratic means to achieve our ends and to protect those.
Have there been any voices within the Evangelical movement even like the the MAGA Evangelical movement that have kind of taken pause by this and and spoken out against this this normalization and mainstreaming of you know violent and rhetoric and talk of civil war?
That’s a really good question. When I look at, and I watch these faces fairly closely, it’s possible I’ve missed something, but I do try to watch these faces closely. Generally what I’ve seen over the past several years is those who initially spoke out, so some of these never Trump Evangelicals, continued, many have continued to speak out, some have gone quiet, but many have continued to speak out. I have seen very few converts to that cause. I will say that much. What I’ve seen instead is consistency or further radicalization.
And so to answer your question, no, I have not seen many people who are not already calling this out. Who are not already standing against this, not just the rhetoric, the entire agenda, the anti-democratic impulses. Folks like David French, who very early on, as a constitutional lawyer said, wait a minute guys. And he was in the mix, not in the MAGA mix, but very much on the Christian right and he was a lawyer who worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, right? Religious Liberty primarily not exclusively but certainly primarily for conservative evangelicals, right? One of those guys and you know, he’s the one who called it out early on and consistently. But no there have not been many who have been kind of all in MAGA who say, okay, okay, okay wait guys, let’s let’s let’s tone down this rhetoric a little bit and we’re not going to pursue violence. You see a much more of the opposite, of this kind of fear mongering and really stirring the pot and trying to raise the temperature. And while they may not be personally recommending violence, they are doing nothing to tamp that down.
Finally, what would a Trump loss mean for the movement?
A Trump loss would mean … it’s very hard to predict. First of all, I know talking with experts in political violence, they’re deeply concerned about what a Trump loss would mean in the near term because of precisely what we’re talking about, this rhetoric, this violent rhetoric, this apocalyptic rhetoric. And we haven’t even talked about kind of the role of charismatic Christians and the prophecy movement in also ratcheting this up. When you are saying that God has told his his prophets, his apostles that Trump will win and then Trump doesn’t win you have a vast movement who’s trying to achieve God’s will, may God’s will be done and you know, we may have to give it a little nudge here. We have already seen a practice run of this with January 6th. And when you look at who was there on January 6th, a lot of these charismatic Christians, New Apostolic Reformation types who were called there by their leaders because they thought they were doing God’s work. And if you look at election denialism inside conservative Evangelical communities, it is higher than any other demographic.
And this is a truth that they firmly believe in that the election was stolen. And so when we’re talking about dangers to democracy, they’ll say, absolutely. And here’s the greatest danger to democracy. You guys have already subverted it because you kept the right guy out of office, Donald Trump. And if you listen to Trump on his campaign speeches, and if you listen to really almost any speech he’s given since the last election, he’s leaning into this, stop the steal, election denial, he’s been robbed, Joe Biden’s an illegitimate president. This is playing really, really well in conservative evangelical spaces. So I think we have to look at political violence as a possibility. If Trump loses, certainly contesting the election. That is the game plan. They’re very open about that. And then what comes next?
I would love to say that, you know, maybe it would be a moment of soul searching, of taking a few steps back. Problem is we’ve seen very, very little evidence in the last several years that would lead us to expect that kind of an outcome. But you never know, you never know. But right now, you can see that on an individual level occasionally, institutionally, you’re just not seeing it.
I feel like there’s such a cult of personality around a lot of different authoritarian movements that Trump would be hard to replace. Am I wrong in thinking that? Or do you think there’s someone else that could fill his shoes?
Yeah, Trump’s charisma, which works with his base and repels everybody else, certainly, as long as Trump is around and Trump is being Trump, I can’t really see anybody replacing him.
And we saw that in the primary, right, with DeSantis, who on paper looked to be everything that evangelicals wanted. And yet, you know, we all know what happened there. And we saw that even in the 2016 primary season, there was a huge slate of Republican contenders, and none of them could hold the candle to Trump. And those who tried to out-Trump Trump just ended up looking like fools, people like Rubio and Cruz and so forth.
So as long as Trump’s in the picture, it’s hard to see anybody kind of stepping in. Now the question is if he’s out of the picture somehow at some future point. I do think he has so recast politics that we’ll see who can take up the mantle. He has certainly kind of provided this playbook and you see that a lot on the right now of candidates coming up and trying to play that game. And this is JD Vance, right? He’s also trying to kind of step into that role. Will it work? Really, really hard to say. And I think what we could very much expect is that there will be some fierce competition on the right. If Trump no longer is the leader, again, for whatever reason, then there’s gonna be a lot of people who want to, who want to take his place. And so it’ll be interesting to see how that all plays out internally. And then beyond that, so incredibly hard to say. I hear a lot of Americans, including some in conservative Evangelical churches, who are just tired of this vitriol, who are tired of the animosity, who are tired of being what they feel like demonized, critiqued, you know, look at the subtitle, how white Evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. They don’t like being called out in that way. They don’t like that families are being divided over this either. And so the question is, how many would make up that faction? And if there is a chance on the other side for everybody to kind of regroup, turn the temperature down, and find a better path forward. But at this point, it’s kind of wishful thinking and a lot has to transpire before that becomes a more realistic option.
And it’s interesting where it’ll leave the Republican Party because it’s nothing like it was, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And Trump’s done a good job of making sure that anyone that crosses him or questions him is out of the picture. Even someone like Liz Cheney, who has like one of the most conservative voting records on paper, she should be a superstar of this movement. And she was forced out just because she didn’t, you know, she decided to protect democracy.
That is all it takes. And in fact, I mean, it’s a very close parallel to what we see happening inside Evangelicalism and what we’ve already witnessed inside the Republican party and not coincidentally, right? There’s a lot of overlap there, but you see these efforts going on and ongoing efforts inside conservative Evangelical spaces to purge, I mean, to really, really attack those who are conservative theologically or maybe conservative on almost every political issue, but still defend democracy and critique Trump, right? Their life is made a living hell. The attacks are absolutely ruthless on these folks. And what we’re seeing happening right now too in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, there is a movement inside, kind of insurgent movement to have a conservative takeover 2 .0., the first one was back in the late 70s and through the 80s. They wanna do it all again. I mean, there are no liberals in the SBC, but they’re calling out the liberals in the SBC so that they can purge them and purify their movement and really connect that powerful denomination tightly then to the Trump administration. And you see people who kind of go back and forth. You see people actively trying to build that coalition, which on the one hand, Baptist, Southern Baptist, conservative politically. However, Baptists have a long tradition of defending the separation of church and state, defending the freedom of conscience and religious liberty. And so they actually have to fight hard despite having a lot of kind of common political views, to achieve this inside the SBC. And things have been really ugly inside that space for the past few years. And each year they kind of bring their forces to the annual convention and try to get that majority. They came just a little short this last summer or this summer, and they’re gonna try again next summer.
Finally, let’s try to end on a positive note. What gives you hope right now moving forward in this election year?
What gives me hope is the, not just the energy, but the tone of the conversation I am hearing around the Democratic ticket. And so I’m trying to approach this in a way that is not just partisan Democrats versus Republicans. The Democratic party, I mean, we could have a whole conversation of you know, issues that we have there and we’ve already covered kind of the nature of the Republican Party. And this is not a kind of both sides equal problems. You when it comes to democracy, we’ve got much more serious condition going on in the Republican Party right now than the Democrats. But with that caveat, the conversations that I hear around the Harris-Walz campaign right now is one of hope, positive energy, of defusing this culture wars division. Tim Walz, especially I think as you know, Midwestern guy, you know, military veteran, football coach, and sponsor of his Gay-Straight Student Alliance. All of these things, right? It’s just like saying no, no, Americans are not divided into two camps. He likes to go hunting. His daughter’s a vegetarian. Like all of these, like you can, you can, this is who we are actually as Americans. This is who we are in our families. And we should be able to live each other and frankly, to love each other across these differences, which have just been aggravated and intensified for political purposes by people who stand to gain a whole lot of power by driving wedges between citizens, between fellow family members. And so that’s what I love right now. we’ll see how much of it’s branding, how much of it’s authentic. It feels pretty authentic right now. I would love to see that kind of political messaging work. And only if it works can it really change this negativity? And when we think about what could change the Republican Party, what could change this kind of MAGA movement? Failure, repeated failure, and saying that there is a better path to success. Because right now inside conservative spaces and inside the Republican Party, the MAGA movement has been what it takes to win. And that has just defined success and that’s the playbook. So what we need is a new playbook.
Yeah, and I think another thing to just kind of piggyback on what you just said is that Governor Walz also offers a different version of masculinity that maybe they can embrace, these people can embrace as well.
100 percent. He’s a white guy, Midwestern, you know, and it’s a different model of masculinity. And frankly, you know, I almost tweeted about this today and then didn’t because I really just have to get some writing done and didn’t want to like start, start up a firestorm. You know, he’s, he’s, he’s a pretty decent model of Christian manhood, if you want to go there, you know, as a dad, as a school teacher, as self-deprecating guy, you got all the dad jokes there.
And honestly, if you look inside evangelical churches, while they may be holding up this model of a warrior macho guy, the vast majority of Christian guys, they don’t fit that mold. They aren’t out climbing mountains on the weekends. They’re wearing khakis and showing up at their kids sporting events. And that’s okay. And that is, you can be responsible and loving and a courageous man. And you can be a provider and a protector in ways that don’t look like Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. And there are just so many ways to be a man, so many ways to be a white man and to be a white Christian man even. And so I think Waltz is a great model of, hey, here’s one. And when you have the reality right in front of you, it’s a little harder to buy into the mythology. And to buy into the ideology that people like Vance and Trump and a whole host of guys on the Christian right have been trying to sell.
Well, Kristen, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the work that you do. I want to encourage everyone to pick up Kristen’s book, Jesus and John Wayne, how evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. It’s as relevant now as it ever was. Kristen, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me.
