Joel Edmund Anderson has done an analysis of Kristin Du Mez' Jesus and John Wayne, here:
PART 1: http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/a-new-book-analysis-series-jesus-and-john-wayne-part-1/
PART 2: http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/a-book-analysis-of-jesus-and-john-wayne-part-2-chapters-1-2-fundies-billy-graham-communism-and-the-southern-strategy/
PART 3: http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/a-book-analysis-of-jesus-and-john-wayne-part-3-chapters-3-4-phyllis-schlafly-the-era-bill-gothard-christian-reconstructionism-and-james-dobson/
PART 4: http://www.joeledmundanderson.com/a-book-analysis-of-jesus-and-john-wayne-part-3-chapters-3-4-phyllis-schlafly-the-era-bill-gothard-christian-reconstructionism-and-james-dobson/
Afterwards, I read this OpEd by Michael Gerson:
Opinion: When it comes to knowing U.S. history, we should all be ‘woke’
In the evangelical Christian tradition, you generally know when you’ve been “saved” or “converted.” It comes in a rush of spiritual relief. A burden feels lifted.
But how does one know if he or she has become “woke”? How does one respond to this altar call and accept this baptism?“The Broken Heart of America” is a strong antidote to such lessons. In this telling, St. Louis was “the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness” and “the morning star of U.S. imperialism.” It was the military base of operations for the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the Upper Midwest. It was the home of vicious lynch mobs and racial redlining. “Beneath all the change,” Johnson argues, “an insistent racial capitalist cleansing — forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration — is evident in the history of the city at the heart of American history.”
William Clark was not only an intrepid explorer, he was the author of treaties that removed more than 81,000 Indians from their homelands. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton was not just the populist voice of “the West,” he was the father of “settler colonialism” and an apologist for slavery. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — but merely a few days before he had ordered the execution of 38 Dakota men, which “remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.” The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was a festival of white supremacy, in which the organizers “assembled living human beings in a zoo.”
And so on. My first reaction, honestly, was to bristle. Was every character in the American story a villain? Must one accept Marxist economic and social analysis to believe in social justice? Is every institution and achievement with injustice in its history fundamentally corrupt and worthless forevermore?
It is my second thought, however, that has lingered. Historians such as Johnson might dwell on historical horrors and put them into narrow ideological narratives, but the events they recount are real. The U.S. government’s Indian wars were often conducted by sadists and psychopaths such as William S. Harney (who beat an enslaved woman named Hannah to death because he had lost his keys and blamed her for hiding them). A White lynch mob murdered a free Black man named Francis McIntosh in 1836, burning him alive while he begged his tormentors to shoot him. Over two days in 1917, a mob of Whites in East St. Louis murdered scores of their Black neighbors and destroyed hundreds of buildings, in a horrible preview of Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre.
And it’s true that white-supremacist ideology pervaded institutions and systems — labor policies, construction contracts, city planning, racist policing, the exclusion of Black children from public pools. Place names I know well — Ladue, Kirkwood, Webster Groves — were scenes of exclusion, oppression and petty cruelty.
How to process all this? If being “woke” means knowing the full story of your community and country, including the systemic racism that still shapes them, then every thinking adult should be. And books such as Johnson’s are a needed corrective to history as pious propaganda. But for a fuller explanation of what patriotism means in a flawed nation, there are more reliable guides.
Frederick Douglass, for example, felt incandescent anger at the “hideous and revolting” hypocrisy of the free country where he was born into enslavement. He said in 1852: “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States. … The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense and your Christianity as a lie.”
For Douglass, however, this founding crime did not discredit American ideals; it demonstrated the need for their urgent and radical application. He insisted that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document.” He drew encouragement from the “great principles" of the Declaration of Independence and the “genius of American institutions.” He challenged the country’s hypocrisy precisely because he took its founding principles so seriously.
How can you love a place while knowing the crimes that helped produce it? By relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and remaining “woke” to the transformational power of American ideals.
I would respond to Anderson's analysis of "Jesus and John Wayne" the same way Michael Gerson responded to Walter Johnson's The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. To paraphrase Gerson,
historians such as Du Mez might dwell on historical horrors and put them into narrow ideological narratives, but the events they recount are real.
She challenged evangelicals' hypocrisy precisely because she takes the Gospel so seriously.
How can you love a religion while knowing the crimes that helped produce it? By relentlessly confronting hypocrisy and remaining “woke” to the transformational power of Christ.
(Like Gerson, I am a native St. Louisan, raised with the narrative that my hometown was "The Gateway to the West," with Lewis and Clark as our great heroes, and the Louisiana Purchase as the Blessing of Manifest Destiny. So I can appreciate the difficulty hearing someone criticize the perspective one has imbibed with their mother's milk.
However, unlike Anderson, I was not raised in a homogeneous Evangelical home and environment. My father was Catholic, my mother was Baptist, and they practiced their faith together for over 40 years. Thus, I grew up with two seemingly competing narratives, so Du Mez' critique does not pack quite the punch of emotional outrage that it seems to have for Anderson.
I took DuMez's ultimate purpose in writing the book to be an examination and explanation of how has 80% American evangelicals could support His Stable Genius, Anderson seems to think it was to vilify conservatives. In his conclusion, Anderson writes
<She seems to be implying that merely holding conservative positions on political issues amounts to “corrupting” the Christian faith. In that respect, I find that line of attack to be no different from ultra-fundamentalists like Ken Ham, or Jerry Falwell, or a large number of those whom KDM criticizes in her book. If I can put it this way, Falwell’s “big sin” was that he politicized Christianity and essentially preached that real Christianity meant embracing the Republican Party platform. It wasn’t that he held conservative views. But KDM essentially argues that Falwell’s “big sin” was having conservative views, because conservative views aren’t Christian…thus implying that liberal views are.>
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