Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

As early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, and this funding continued through the 1990s, reaching its peak under the George W. Bush administration; by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would receive more than $104 million in federal funding. Here was a case of government intrusi

But it was pop star Pat Boone who stole the show that night, closing with an impromptu address that Reagan would recall years later: “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists,” Boone asserted. His audience was thrilled, even

Borrowing from modern advertising techniques, evangelical innovators crafted a generic, nonsectarian faith that privileged individuals’ “plain reading of the Bible” and championed a commitment to the pure, unadulterated “fundamentals” of the faith.

Roger Olson, a Baptist theologian who opposed the Calvinist insurgency, compared the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement to Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts seminar, observing that there was “a certain kind of personality that craves the comfort of absolute certainty as an escape from ambiguity and risk and they find it in religion or politics

By promising intimacy in exchange for power, servant leadership passed off authority as humility, ensuring that patriarchal authority would endure even in the midst of changing times. As far as critics were concerned, this was more insidious than a straightforward power grab.

Accounts of the battles over the SBC commonly focus on the question of biblical inerrancy, but the battle over inerrancy was in part a proxy fight over gender.

Initially, this southern culture of mastery and honor seemed to conflict with the egalitarian impulses of evangelical Christianity.

The path forward was clear, and it would not be through denominational structures. To evangelize the nation, evangelicals needed magazines that could reach millions, and access to the airwaves for national radio broadcasts.

Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat.