God Save the Men: Evangelical (Toxic) Masculinity with Professor Kristin Kobes du Mez
Brad and Dan are joined by Professor Kristin Kobes du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne, and an expert on evangelical masculinity and culture. They discuss why evangelicals imagine Jesus to be a heterosexual strong man, how evangelical pastors prime their congregations for fear, the trappings of gender complementarity, the #churchtoo movement, and the damaging effects of patriarchal church cultures.
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Hello friends!
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Thanks for being here, and we'll turn now to today's interview.
What's up, y'all?
Brad here.
Hope you're well, hope you had a good holiday last week, or whatever you decided to do.
We decided today would be a good day to re-release our interview with Professor Kristin Kobes-Dumé, who is the author of Jesus and John Wayne, as many of you out there, I'm sure, know.
This interview is actually from before the book came out, and so you'll notice sort of discussion about themes in the book, but the general scope of the discussion is really just on the toxic masculinity that we find in evangelical culture.
And so I hope you enjoy it.
For some of you who've been listening to our show for a long time, you might remember it, but it has been a while, and for those of you who are somewhat new, in the last couple years.
This is new content, and it's absolutely amazing.
If you're a fan of or know of Professor Kobes-Dumé, you know that she is incredibly insightful, an expert on this topic, and someone who's always worth listening to.
Thanks for being here.
We'll catch you later this week.
Here is our interview with Professor Kristen Kobes-Dumé.
We're thrilled to be joined by our guest, Dr. Kristen DuMay.
She is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin College and Chair of the Department of History.
She researches at the intersections of religion, gender, and sexuality in American history, and is recently and at present doing a lot of work on what she calls militant masculinity in evangelical and American culture.
And as listeners will know, one of our themes this season that we've been looking at is the evangelicals and the constructions of masculinity, the understanding of what it means to be a man or to be a Christian man.
And so I want to say, Kristen Dume, thank you for joining us.
Welcome to the show.
And it's my understanding you have a book right on this topic that's coming out soon.
Is that correct?
I do.
It's in copy edits.
So it should be out in a few months with Live Right.
And it's the title is still not quite finalized, but it's a book on white evangelical masculinity and militarism, really, from the 1940s, although we do, I glance back at the early 20th century, too, but really picks up in the 1940s, all the way up to the present to the Trump administration.
Well, that's great.
Again, thank you so much for joining us, and I wanted to start with something that sounds like it's very much along the lines of what you'll be discussing in your book, and it'll give us a good chance to start talking today.
You wrote in a piece for Religion and Politics a couple years ago, I think not long after the Trump election, you wrote, and I'm just going to quote from this, you said, The truth is, many evangelicals long ago replaced the suffering servant of Christ With an image that more closely resembles Donald Trump than many would care to admit.
They've traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates the least of these for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses.
Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of machismo, it's no wonder many have come to think of Trump himself as the nation's savior.
That's the quote.
We call this podcast Straight White American Jesus partly because we wanted to get it the way in which white evangelicals often envision Jesus.
Not always explicitly, right, but implicitly.
And one of the points we've been trying to make over and over is that somehow to millions of white American evangelicals, Donald J. Trump appears more like Jesus than, say, Barack Obama, or Jimmy Carter, or even somebody like Mike Huckabee, or somebody like that.
I guess I'll just throw it over to you.
What do you think about that, and how have you seen that play out over the course of this presidency so far?
Oh, yes.
I mean, you can add to that list, you know, more than Mr. Rogers, more than Mother Teresa, and in here I'm quoting white evangelicals themselves.
They're very explicit about this, and So when I wrote that, that was actually published the week of Trump's inauguration, and I was really responding to the kind of chorus in the media and in the church that, you know, the shock.
How could white evangelicals support a man like Donald Trump?
How could they betray their values?
And I was really taking issue with that sense of betrayal.
That if you look closely at white evangelicalism, and if you look at their teachings, and if you look carefully at their actual values, this is not a betrayal.
Support for Trump is a fulfillment of their values.
And so that's really what I was trying to get at.
And where you see that now in the Trump presidency, I think, is less than a very explicit, you know, Donald Trump is Jesus Christ.
You have to go to the fringes to hear anybody really defending that, but it's really a case of affinity, right?
Of not being able to condemn Trump on any front, really, except maybe he tweets too much.
That there are some underlying values that do bind the majority of white evangelicals To the values of the Trump administration and the values that Trump himself embodies, this kind of aggressive, militant, ends justify the means kind of masculinity, masculine power.
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