I am not quite sure when I first heard of Kristen Du Mez’s popular work: Jesus and John Wayne, but I know I heard about it enough to know that this is one of those books that I must read at some point in my life.
As I am writing this I do have a vague memory of Mike Cosper mentioning it in his famous podcast: The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.
And as I read Jesus and John Wayne I could see where Mike got a lot of his insight from because the overall story line in the book Jesus and John Wayne is used in the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Podcast to help explain how a church and a pastor like Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll can become what they did in the cultural zeitgeist.
The 2016 presidential election rocked many of us. It was very confusing, a mind altering moment in American history. It seemed like for many of us, we were blindsided by how divided the country was, and how the fringe parts of our culture actually were not really as fringe as we had once believed.
Kristen does an excellent job capturing the why behind the men like Mark Driscoll, Douglas Wilson and Donald Trump.
These men are not special by any means, rather they may just be the result of the men before them.
I was very shocked at how men like Billy Graham whether knowingly or unknowingly played a significant part in the idolization of conservative values and more specifically of our nation.
I personally have never really had a strong tie to our country. Though I have lived here my whole life, my parents were not servicemen or women. We did not have an American flag in our front yard and we did not really get involved in politics that much growing up.
I remember seeing Bill O’Reilly on tv but my parents really would just only have him on in the background. We just were not that much a political or patriotic family though we do love our country and where we live.
But I do know that the church environment that I mainly grew up in had some ties to politics, or at the least political jargon.
And I do remember listening to 101.1 with my dad on the way to church or school and hearing a lot of the men Kristen mentions. Men like John MacArthur teaching more literal views of the Bible and specifically of patriarchy.
After reading the book I tried to find a good interview of Kristen where I could really get a better understanding of who she was as a person. The interview I found that was very helpful was the one with Russell Moore(a character in the book Jesus and John Wayne).
In her interview she discusses how she is a Calvinist, from the Dutch reformed side and how she was stoked at the rise of the ‘Young, restless, and Reformed’ movement back in the day. She felt like her people finally were getting a shining moment in the spotlight up until she found that as a woman she really had no place in this movement. She had no place as an intellectual female who held many of the same theologically conservative view points as her contemporaries. She had no place as someone in the reformed camp who believed there were more than a complimentarian view available in this theological camp.
As she began wrestling with her displacement in her own theological home, she began noticing some of the dangers in the camp. Men like Mark Driscoll and his lack of character. A man who was enabled by many accounts to spread damaging messages about and to women, as well as damaging messages to men about how to lead or in his view, on how to be the man God designed you to be.
Or another example being a man like Douglas Wilson, who even I had a strong affinity towards for a time in my life. A time where Douglas was my favorite author because of his incredible way of speaking and using words. He taught me the idea of being a wordsmith. I love his views on spreading God’s kingdom in a post millennial sense, and his sharpness to spend time with a man like Christopher Hitchens. But like Kristen I noticed his obvious racism. A man who in one sentence of his book ‘Black and Tan’ would say that he “is not a racist” and then throughout the entirety of the rest for the book, champion men like Robert E. Lee.
Douglas a brilliant guy somehow can decipher how men like Martin Luther King Jr. is not real Christian(that is his view not mine) because of their sexual immorality, but can not decipher how men like Robert E. Lee can still be a racist even though in Robert’s own words he says he is not. For MLK, his actions disqualified his words, but for Robert E. Lee thats not the case. For the puritans that’s not the case, for Douglas and the men over at Cross-politic, that’s not the case.
Douglas like Mark and many others in the Kristen’s book are men who are so self consumed with their own rightness, and their own sense of “what the world actually needs” that they fail to realize they are more of the problem than the solution.
I would still pray for men like Douglas and Mark. Because after reading this book sometimes I’m not sure how much men like these are instigators of the problem or results of it.
We may wonder what is wrong with our men today. I for sure do, as a man myself. But one thing I have had to make very clear to myself, is that just because you can scream, yell, talk down to, bully, be aggressive and articulate in your language towards men about how passive the current group of men we have today are, does not mean that you have the solution to their passivity. What has been interesting to me, is how much guys like what I just described, men like Mark and Douglas are way more like the passive men they rail against. Two men who have no accountability. Two men who struggle to have a tender heart. Two men who struggle to understand those different than them. Let me ask: what is truly bold and courageous?
You to shoot at your enemy?
Or
You to walk across enemy lines, with guns pointed at you, and to have a conversation?
Mark and Douglas are only two characters in Kristen’s book about the rise of white evangelicalism. But they are the two examples that greatly affected me. Just like Bill Hybels or Jerry Falwell may be the ones who affected you. Either way, there is a pattern. For white evangelicals we have had the power and privilege for quite some time.
Kristen challenges those who will be self aware enough in this movement to ask the question: why do we really crave power?
Is it for the spreading of the Good news, or is it for people to be more like us?
Is it for the liberation of souls or for us to be in control?
I think the latter on both of those questions have been true for many of us. We love power, we love control. But the culture is changing. And I do not believe white evangelicals will come out on top. And I believe thats a good thing. I believe we really need to sit back and evaluate where we went wrong. We need to be honest that a lot of our issues stem from our sins of racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and so much more. We have got to be honest, that we got it wrong. And we have got to repent of the movement that built more graves than cathedrals.
So what are my thoughts on Kristen Du Mez’s book ‘Jesus and John Wayne’?
Kristen’s book was EXCELLENT! It’s a must read to understand the current state of evangelicalism. It has given me a better understanding of the world I grew up in as a Southern Baptist child. To any and everyone, READ THIS BOOK!
Leave a comment