Jesus and John Wayne - 01 - Saddling Up

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Introduction · Next: Chapter 2 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)

Chapter 1: Saddling Up

Chapter Objective

Du Mez reconstructs the historical path by which aggressive white manhood became compatible with—and eventually exemplary of—American evangelical faith. Beginning with the late nineteenth-century crisis of masculinity, the chapter follows muscular Christianity, fundamentalist institution-building, Billy Graham’s postwar evangelicalism, the religious marketplace, and the cowboy myth. It establishes the cultural and organizational foundations that later allow John Wayne, despite lacking conventional Christian virtue, to function as an icon of Christian masculinity.

Industrialization and the Crisis of Manhood

Nineteenth-century Protestant manhood had joined hard work, thrift, self-denial, and gentlemanly restraint. Industrialization and corporate employment weakened the link between physical production, independence, and male status; urbanization, immigration, professional women, and falling birth rates intensified white native-born Protestant anxiety. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Reformers answered by redefining masculinity as rough, vigorous, and willing to use force. The perceived stakes were civilizational: white Christian men imagined that their authority, the nation, and “Christian civilization” were all endangered together.
Theodore Roosevelt became the model. Mocked as effete when young, he remade himself as the “Cowboy of the Dakotas.” His frontier mythology represented white men bringing order to supposedly savage spaces through protective violence. When the continental frontier disappeared, imperial ventures such as the Spanish-American War supplied a new arena for masculine regeneration. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Muscular Christianity and Sanctified Force

Christians had to reconcile the new aggressive ideal with a faith associated with gentility and restraint. Early twentieth-century advocates announced that Christianity was also masculine, militant, and warlike and called men to retake feminized churches.
Du Mez locates an important precedent in southern evangelicalism, where white male mastery over wives, children, and enslaved people was presented as protective stewardship. Violence could be sanctified when used to preserve hierarchy and order. This tradition helped fuse northern muscular Christianity with southern racial patriarchy. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Former baseball player and revivalist Billy Sunday embodied the style. His combative preaching treated Christianity as a fight, and during World War I he collapsed patriotism into discipleship: citizens were either patriots serving country and Christ or traitors to both.

Fundamentalism, Markets, and Enemies

After the Civil War, revivalist entrepreneurs borrowed advertising methods to sell a generic, nonsectarian, “old-time religion” directly to individuals. This shifted authority away from denominations and educated clergy toward celebrity preachers, consumer choice, and a supposedly plain reading of scripture. Attachment (file not included in this release)
The resulting fundamentalist coalition was internally unstable. Populists and respectable professionals could unite most effectively by identifying enemies—modernists, liberal theologians, evolutionary science, and later political foes.
Modernists and fundamentalists disagreed over biblical criticism, social reform, and personal conversion, but both tried to masculinize Christianity. Liberals described social activism as manly; fundamentalists cast doctrinal rigidity as courage and liberal theology as effeminate surrender.
World War I complicated the alliance between nationalism and conservative faith. Some fundamentalists initially denied that America could be a Christian nation before Christ’s return and placed loyalty to God above patriotism. Liberal Protestants used that ambivalence to call conservatives un-American; fundamentalists responded by associating liberal theology with Germany and intensifying their patriotism. Attachment (file not included in this release)

From Wartime Disillusionment to an Evangelical Army

The carnage of World War I discredited fantasies of redemptive violence for many liberal Protestants. A managerial model of manhood reappeared in Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, which recast Jesus as a magnetic business executive and organizational winner rather than a weak, sorrowful figure. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Premillennial fundamentalists were less disillusioned because apocalypse and continuing war already fit their theology. Institutional defeats in denominations and seminaries further turned combativeness into a badge of fidelity.
Ridicule from figures such as Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken strengthened the fundamentalist identity as an embattled faithful remnant. Fundamentalists built alternative churches, Bible schools, missions, and publishers, then sought national reengagement.
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), founded in 1942, rebranded a portion of fundamentalism as respectable and forward-looking. Yet its leaders retained military language: Harold Ockenga urged scattered “lone wolves” to unite into an army and go on the offensive before liberal dominance brought annihilation. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Their strategy was networked rather than denominational—magazines, radio, missions, colleges, schools, and national organizations would amplify one another and reach consumers directly.

Billy Graham, War, and the Patriarchal Home

Billy Graham personified the new evangelicalism. His height, looks, athletic discipline, and salesmanship were repeatedly emphasized. He explicitly framed Jesus as a male athlete, powerful hero, and military commander, and the Christian life as total war. Attachment (file not included in this release)
World War II erased much conservative ambivalence about national war. Evangelicals defended total-war tactics more readily than many chastened mainline Protestants, using militarism and patriotism to escape their marginal reputation.
Evangelicals initially regarded the military as morally corrupt rather than intrinsically virtuous. They entered it as a mission field through the Navigators and other organizations; military leaders welcomed their help with discipline, beginning a durable and mutually beneficial alliance. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Graham’s 1949 Los Angeles crusade linked Soviet nuclear threat, sexual morality, national strength, and household order. A nation could be secure only if its homes were strong, and a strong home meant a patriarchal hierarchy in which the husband protected, provided, and ruled while the wife submitted, maintained attractiveness, and served domestic peace. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Du Mez stresses contingency: egalitarian evangelicals had argued that Christ’s atonement ended Eve’s curse and supported women’s rights. Graham chose a reactionary fundamentalist interpretation and connected it to Christian nationalism; it was not evangelicalism’s only available theology.

Celebrity Cowboys and the Evangelical Marketplace

Cowboy singer Stuart Hamblen’s conversion helped turn Graham’s Los Angeles revival into a national media event. Hamblen kept the rugged style and dark themes of his country music, blending secular celebrity, wrath-centered religion, and born-again testimony. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Southern evangelicals migrating to the Sunbelt brought a combative faith into proximity with Hollywood, defense industries, and celebrity culture. The cowboy myth matched evangelical individualism: a righteous white protector enforcing order on a dangerous frontier.
Graham, Pat Boone, radio ministries, magazines, publishers, colleges, and parachurch groups built a national infrastructure. The Christian Booksellers Association solved distribution problems and expanded from roughly 270 stores in 1950 to about 3,000 by the end of the 1970s. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Broad distribution rewarded generic “Christian living” products over denominational specificity. Celebrities and retailers therefore became major authorities, shaping a shared evangelical identity through stories, advice, music, and consumer habits.

John Wayne as the Coming Symbol

Wayne did not convert like Hamblen, model family values like Boone, or live by evangelical moral rules. He was divorced twice, had affairs, drank heavily, and smoked. His acceptance shows that symbolic masculinity could outweigh personal virtue and theology. Attachment (file not included in this release)
His Westerns translated Cold War moral certainty into stories of good men using violence against clearly identified enemies. Red River and Fort Apache established him as the heroic cowboy; Sands of Iwo Jima fused that cowboy with the American soldier.
Wayne had avoided military service, but his screen persona became a more powerful cultural fact than his biography. Commands such as “Saddle up” and “Lock and load” entered conservative speech, and his invented toughness became a standard for authentic Christian manhood. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

Crisis of masculinity: Anxiety that industrialization, urban life, immigration, women’s independence, and reduced physical labor had deprived white Protestant men of their traditional authority and identity.
Muscular Christianity: A remaking of Christian virtue around physical vigor, militancy, competition, and the willingness to fight.
Southern mastery: A patriarchal model in which white men claimed moral authority over dependents and justified coercion as protection of the household and social order.
Market-driven revivalism: Religious authority organized through advertising, celebrities, consumer choice, and interdenominational products rather than inherited church structures.
Embattled remnant: A minority identity in which institutional defeat and cultural ridicule confirm fidelity and justify a more aggressive posture.
Cowboy-soldier: The mythic fusion of frontier enforcer and patriotic warrior who restores order through righteous violence.

Questions for Reflection

Which mattered more to the remasculinization of Christianity: changing economic conditions, racial hierarchy, or religious competition?
How did the move from denominational authority to consumer choice change which kinds of masculinity could become spiritually authoritative?
Why did World War I weaken militant Christianity for some Protestants but strengthen it among many fundamentalists?
What does Billy Graham’s patriarchal household teaching add to the Cold War claim that national security begins at home?
Why could John Wayne’s fictional persona carry more evangelical authority than his actual conduct?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Chapter 1 endnotes 1–35 are attached to this chapter in the source: Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).

Masculinity and muscular Christianity (notes 1–5, 10, 12): Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization and her study of the Men and Religion Forward Movement; Joe Creech on southern white Christian manhood; reporting on Billy Sunday; Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows; and Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity.
Fundamentalism and evangelical organization (notes 6–15): Timothy Gloege, Guaranteed Pure; Matthew Sutton, American Apocalypse; George Marsden; NAE records; Harold Ockenga; and Robert Wuthnow. These sources document market revivalism, wartime disputes, the embattled remnant, and the NAE’s offensive strategy.
Graham, masculinity, and the military (notes 16–25): Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor; Graham sermons and books; Hunter Hampton; Anne Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military; Sara Moslener; Joel Carpenter; Cynthia Enloe; and Graham’s household teaching.
Sunbelt culture and the religious market (notes 26–32): Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt; reporting on Stuart Hamblen; Michael Hamilton; and Daniel Silliman’s research on evangelical publishing and sex-and-marriage manuals.
Wayne and the cowboy-soldier (notes 33–35): Du Mez flags unsupported evangelical conversion rumors; Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors; and Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America ground the analysis of Wayne’s screen mythology.