If you want to understand evangelical support of Trump, the roll-back of women’s reproductive rights, the fight over the bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, the general obsession with Braveheart, whatever happened to Promise Keepers, WTF is going on with Hobby Lobby, how whiteness undergirds it all - this book is a skeleton key. Ideals of masculinity and femininity, of course, but also of purity and nationhood, of power and dominance, of how tailgate decals like the one above became commonplace in so many corners of the United States. If you didn’t, it will connect a different set of dots about how white evangelical culture has explicitly and implicitly shaped the dominant ideologies we wade through, no matter our own belief systems, every day. If you grew up in and around Christian churches or in spaces shadowed by evangelical culture, it will connect a whole lot of dots.

Like The Season, it is academically rigorous but deeply absorbing. Instead of doing that, I asked Kristin if she’d do a Q&A - with particularly focus on the intersection between her work and “ The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill ,” a new podcast about the implosion of one of the most influential evangelical churches (and pastors) of the last two decades and the deeply toxic patriarchal ideology that defined it. Pride makes us do very weird things, including avoiding books we know we will love.Įarlier this month, I got over that pride and read Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, which is indeed so good, and so deeply aligned with my generalized interests, that I wanted to throw it across the room multiple times. It’s a bizarre, illogical thing, and for me, at least, it probably has something to do with 1) resentment that my interests are so incredibly transparent (even though I spend most of my days yelling about them in various digital forms) and 2) fear that it’s going to be really good, like the sort of very good that makes me want to throw the book across the room. The sort that so many people recommend to you - to you, specifically, because of the way they intersect with your demonstrated interests and obsessions - that you almost develop an aversion to them. There are books out there that are so in your wheelhouse that you resist them.

This tailgate decal can be yours for $49.95.

Jesus and john wayne chapter titles