I, of course, have long known that Christianity, like other monotheistic “religions” or bureaucratised meaning systems such as theocratic Judaism and its predecessors and theocratic Islam, had and has a dark and intolerant side. I know about the Crusades, the execution of heretics, and the persecution of Anabaptists and Quakers, to choose three of the many instances of theocratic Christian paternalistic holier than thou intolerance.
I also know Christian theocratic intolerance because I have experienced it in my life. One day, for instance, when I was walking through the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington I ran into one of the seemingly innumerable groups soliciting for ideological purposes in the Union. In this case the group soliciting for attention was, if memory serves, the theocratically oriented Catholic group, Opus Dei. I struck up a conversation—or perhaps better they forced a conversation on me—with them after they hooked me in. It was impossible for innocent me to avoid talking to them thanks to their tactics. The subject of abortion came up at one point. I told them that I was for a woman’s right to choose. As I stood there they lectured me in their tried and true paternalistic way on the evils and dangers of my pro-abortion ways as if I was a dangerous child because I was pro-choice. At one point during our “discussion" one of the female members of this group got as close to me as she possibly could. As our conversation continued she continued to yell at me and move closer and closer to me. In response I instinctively put my hands in self defence and pushed her back very lightly when she was literally almost upon me.
Despite rare occasions like this in the 1970s, occasions during which I experienced the dangers of theocratic Christianity, I really didn’t grasp how dangerous theocratic Christianity could be and was until the 1990s when I moved to Utah and later to South Dakota. I had moved to Utah to study and research Mormonism. There were several things that struck “Gentile” me after I arrived in the Mormon Zion, things that clued me into the prominent presence of theocratic and right wing populist intolerance in the United States. There was, for example, the popularity of the book None Dare Call it Treason by the “born again” fundamentalist Christian, John Bircher, and Republican John Stormer, a book I repeatedly ran across in Provo’s used book shops. This book, which one of the city’s used bookshop owners told me was a popular seller, argued that America was being betrayed by pro-communist elites whose mission was to take over America by growing an activist American state. Sound famiiar? I soon discovered to my horror that a significant number of Mormons, including several of the Mormon elite, had ties to the John Birch Society including its president and prophet from 1985 to 1994, Ezra Taft Benson and his son Reid, who taught religion at BYU.
My next lesson in right wing theocratic Christian intolerance involved one James “Bo’ Gritz. Gritz was popular in certain circles in Utah and in the Mormon culture region (Utah, southern Idaho, parts of Arizona and even Southern California). Gritz, a retired US military special services officer who converted to Mormonism, had ties to the anti-US government Christian Patriot movement and right wing militias, militias that shared the anti-big government and anti-communist ideology of the John Birch Society. I later learned that Gritz had tried to mediate the dispute between Randy Weaver, a Christian separatist and survivalist who had ties to the White identity group Aryan Nation in Idaho. In 1992 Gritz ran for president (shades of Joseph Smith) of the United States on a platform of opposition to the New World Order, a populist rightwing catchphrase for the supposed one world government that some believed elite others were trying to secretly foist on unknowing and unaware Americans; opposition to US foreign aid, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the federal income tax, another populist rightwing favourite; opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank, still another populist rightwing favourite; and non-opposition to the reestablishment of a "Christian America”, yet another populist rightwing favourite. Gritz received 2.13% of the vote in Idaho, a state with a significant population of Mormons. In that election year Gritz garnered 10% of the vote in Duchesne County, Idaho and Oneida County, Idaho and 23% of the vote in Franklin County, Idaho where he almost pushed the Democratic Party nominee Bill Clinton into fourth place. He did even better in heavily Mormon Utah (Mormons constituted over 70% of the population of the state when I lived there in the early 1990s) where he received 3.84% of the vote or almost 30,000 votes. He received 7500 votes in Utah County, the intellectual capital of the Mormon version of the Bible Belt, home to Brigham Young University and seat of a goodly number of Mormon apologists and polemicists. I heard rumours, in fact, that Gritz actually did better than Clinton in several BYU wards where he finished second behind the Republican nominee and eventual president George Herbert Walker Bush.
After I left Utah with a friend in order to travel and hike our around the US and Canadian Wests I ended up living in Rapid City, South Dakota for three months while my touring and hiking companion worked at the Indian Health Service hospital in Rapid. With time on my hands I decided to do ethnography at a local Mennonite Church, a Mennonite Brethren church, a fact to remember since there is a great diversity theologically and ideologically among American and Canadian Mennonites. The Mennonite Brethren are Mennonites who immigrated to the US and Canadian Wests from Russia and who have since been heavily influenced by pietism and later evangelicalism and fundamentalism, both of which tend to make Mennonite Brethren politically conservative and less enamoured of historic Mennonite pacifism or non-resistance. The pastor of the church, apparently feeling that I needed to know what a real man was, urged me to attend the Promise Keepers meeting at the church. The Promise Keepers were then and are now an evangelical men’s group founded by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney—something that points up the links between football, evangelical Christianity, and the Christian manhood movement (we haven’t gotten to the links with the US military yet and won’t)—dedicated to “traditional values” and to melding masculine strength with the what have traditionally been the female values of nurturance, churchgoing, and marital fidelity.
What I saw of the radical populist religious right in Utah and beyond frankly ended up scaring the bejesus out of me. In fact, the fear I felt as I moved amongst the radical populist right and the radical Christian populist right in the Intermountain West (see also Alberta) was akin to the fear I felt as a Jew when I lived in blood and soil nationalist Russia where Jews could not really be blood and soil Russians save by dispensation, usually fame, and where I heard on several occasions statements that were clearly anti-Semitic. By the way, the Russia I lived in was not only a place of anti-Jewish prejudices, it was home to anti-Gypsy sentiments. One day while I was at a market buying food to eat near the Universitet metro station I witnessed an attack on Gypsies by the militsia, the police.
My experience of Russian blood and soil nationalism made me sensitive to the similarities and differences between blood and soil nationalism like that of Russia and other Eastern European and Western European nations and American White Christian nationalism. Like blood and soil Russians (and their kin in other parts of Europe and across the known universe) the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right in Utah, South Dakota, and beyond delineated and delineate between the elect or chosen, those with the right mentality, themselves, of course, and those who were not one of them, whoever the them might be—heretics, communists, socialists, New Dealers, liberals, you fill in the blank. For the radical populist right the US was and is their nation, not the nation of liberals, socialists, communists, or recent immigrants (paradoxically they, of course, are the children of immigrants themselves). Like much blood and soil nationalism the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right was and is militantly patriarchal and misogynist thanks to their patriarchal cult of domesticity ideology, a cultural system in which males were leaders and women were groomed for marriage and hence the domesticated helpmeets of their husbands. Like blood and soil nationalists the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right were and are nationalist and even fascist, seeing the nation, their nation, as a extension of their chosen church. For the radical populist right and the radical populist religious right the US was and is the promised land, a promised land charged with a messianic mission not only to the nation itself but to, in a very parochial form, the world (something remarkable given that Christianity in its infant form was internationalist), a world that, they believed, must be a mirror image of the US economically, politically, and culturally. Nationalist Russians, of course, believed and believe their nation has a messianic mission to save the world as well.
There have been a number of excellent books on nationalist, militant, militaristic, misogynist, and “literalist” White evangelicalism. No one, however, has helped me understand the ins and out and twists and turns of the culture and cultures of blood and soil, authoritarian, misogynist, and cherry picking "literalist" White evangelicalism than Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, edition with a new preface, 2021) by Kristen Kobes Du Mez. In Jesus and John Wayne Calvin College historian (Calvin is a conservative Christian Reformed college located in Grand Rapids, Michigan) Du Mez takes readers on a journey into post-Cold War militant White evangelical culture, its subcultures (for example, complementarian, dominionist, Zionist, an ideology that links American nationalism with a support for Israel, Calvinist, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, intellectual), and the battles for hegemony within this social movement between the various cultural identity groups each of whom, to a great extent, create overlapping if somewhat different ideologically grounded realities (Americanism, anti-abortion, anti-femisist).
No one I know of has done a better job than Du Mez of taking readers into the White nationalist evangelical countercultural media bureaucracies (for instance, publishers, bookstores, schools, camps, parachurch organisations and interest groups). No one I know of has done a better job of exploring the saints superstars and stars of the movement, the chilvarous Knights of the golden mediaeval and Christian past, including John Wayne, Rambo, and Oliver North (a fascinating mixture of the fictional and factual, many of the factional, of course, made somewhat fictional by the saint making practises associated with the movement), and the history of the failings, foibles, and hypocrisies—including bullying, wife abuse, the abuse of children, sexual abuses of adults and children, the abuse of power, and hubris—of several of these White right evangelical superstars and stars. Given this discourse it should not be a surprise that White right evangelicals would find politician “cowboys" like Ronald Reagan appealing. It probably does not need to be said at this point that many of these Christian nationalists have rallied behind a bully, a narcissist, a con man, a xenophobe, and a perceived strong man named Donald Trump and adopted him as one of their own.
White Warrior Theocratic Christian evangelicalism, of course, didn’t come out of nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, as Du Mez shows. We are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore social movements have been around for a long time and they are not going anywhere soon as there is always something that people can whinge about. Du Mez notes, for example, one longue durĂ©e precedent for White right evangelical Christian nationalism and anti-modernism, Billy Sunday, the avuncular anti-Communist and anti-evolutionist and anti-modernist Biblical criticism former baseball player (there is that sport connection again) and evangelist.
It is here, in this genealogy of the forebearers of White right nationalist evangelicalism, that I had a problem with Du Mez’s book. There were important others, many of whom Du Mez unfortunately elides, who are cut from the same intolerant ideological cloth as the Cold War “Christian” warriors Du Mez focuses on. There was more recently than Sunday, for example, Gerald L.K.Smith. Smith was yet another former supporter of the New Deal who, like Father Coughlin, morphed into a rabid right wing anti-Communist and anti-Semite White supremacist Christian nationalist crusader and evangelist populist. In 1943 Smith founded the isolationist America First Party and ran for president of the US as its nominee in 1944. Later he would run as the presidential candidate of the Christian Nationalist Crusade Party. In 1948 Smith instituted an annual passion play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas modelled after one at Oberammergau, Germany, which many considered anti-Semitic until changes were made to to its script after World War II. There were and are the White right wildcat oil men from once Confederate Texas who helped fund the White populist right evangelicals and build their counterculture, subcultures, and parachurch organisations (on this see, for example, Darren Dochuk’s Anointed in Oil).
There are other problems I had with Jesus and John Wayne. Du Mez does not explore, in as much detail as I would have liked to have seen, the links between Mr. Potter style prosperity capitalism and its ideology of godly winners and losers (shades of Donald Trump and his ilk), an ideology comparative historian and social scientist Max Weber linked to modernisation and the de-Calvinisation of Puritanism, something that eventually linked up with extreme individualism, narcissism, and hedonism in the modern and postmodern world. She downplays the role of geography, specifically the strong presence of White populist Christian nationalism US South, including Texas, and in the intermountain and far West, and the intersections between it and racism (Jim Crow, anti-Asian ethnocentrism). She downplays the echoes and the influence of the 19th and 20th century muscular Christianity and the Christian health reform of the 19th century (think the Seventh Day Adventist Kellogg) on White right populist evangelicals, some of whom clearly assume consciously or unconsciously the greater fitness of Whites and who are as conscious of the food they eat as the heirs of the countercultural hippies they so often despite and slur in order to be the strong men and obedient women god intended them to be. She downplays the fact that the cult of domesticity, the notion that males should be the head of household and the protectors of the family and by extension the nation (a notion one also finds in fascism) which maintains that women should be queens of their household and nurturers of their family, has a long history elements of which go back to the Victorian era, an era so much of White right Christian evangelicalism draws on and from (and an ideology that may even go back to hunter-gatherer societies and cultures). She does not explore the impact of romanticism with its nationalisms, its revival of chilvaric warriorism (Wagner's Parsifal, for instance), and its nationalist hiking group excursions into nature, on American populist White right evangelicalism (on this and the intersections between romanticism, nationalism, fascism, and ethnocentrism see George Mosse’s superb The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries).
Despite these underemphases and lacunae Jesus and John Wayne (did she want to write a more popular academic book for a broader intelligent audience and not burden it with information overload perhaps?) remains one of the best books I have read on Cold War nationalist and patriarchal evangelicalism. It should be on the must read list of anyone interested in American history and how America got to the Donald Trump now.