I didn’t recognize them.” By the end of her book, however, Du Mez concludes that evangelical Trump support, which from early on in Trump’s term has been highest among evangelicals who attend church frequently, “shouldn’t have come as a surprise.” She asserts flatly, and correctly, that in choosing to back Trump, “evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values.” That January, she was horrified to see evangelicals “waving signs, laughing at insults, and shouting back in affirmation.” She laments, “I wondered who these people were. “I wasn’t in Iowa at the time,” she writes, “but I watched this spectacle unfold as it streamed online.” Establishing her positionality as the daughter of a theologian and a Christian school PE teacher, Du Mez recalls, “Standing on the stage where Trump now stood, I had led prayers, performed in Christian praise teams.” The book’s narrative arc begins and ends at Dordt University in Sioux Center, Iowa, on January 23, 2016, where Trump infamously declared that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” Dordt happens to be Du Mez’s alma mater, and Sioux Center her hometown.
I don’t remember if the band performed “Jesus and John Wayne,” the 2008 song that Kristin Kobes Du Mez chose as the title for her “ Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” But Gaither’s exhortation to focus on the gospel rather than politics is in keeping with the more “tender” version of white Christian masculinity that Du Mez identifies as prominent in the 1990s and that she associates with the song, which locates ideal Christian manhood “somewhere between Jesus and John Wayne.” Most of Du Mez’s impressive book, however, is about the historical origins and present ascendance of a more militant Christian masculinity - less Jesus and more John Wayne, in her framing - that has culminated in white evangelicals’ steady and unflinching support for the swaggering, immoral Trump. Attending despite already being non-religious and uncomfortable in a crowd like the one drawn in by Bill Gaither in his home state, I was somewhat heartened when he declared at the outset that we should set political differences aside for the afternoon as we worshiped God and enjoyed gospel music. Trump had been confirmed as the presumptive GOP nominee in the upcoming presidential election. About a month earlier, on May 3, Donald J. On June 12, 2016, I joined my mother and some relatives for a concert by the Christian group Gaither Vocal Band in Carmel, Ind.
0 kommentar(er)
