Jesus and John Wayne - 02 - John Wayne Will Save Your Ass

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Chapter 1 · Next: Chapter 3 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)

Chapter 2: John Wayne Will Save Your Ass

Chapter Objective

Du Mez explains how white evangelicals helped produce the mid-century partisan realignment by binding anticommunism, white patriarchal authority, militarism, civil religion, law-and-order politics, and family values into one conservative identity. Billy Graham’s access to presidents and evangelical support for the Vietnam War show the movement moving from the margins into national power. John Wayne supplies the chapter’s master image: when gentle Christian virtue seems inadequate, a mythic white protector may be excused from ordinary morality because he promises to defeat enemies and restore order.

Billy Graham and the Cold War Presidency

Graham remained a registered Democrat, but his political relationships show how evangelical loyalties shifted before the formal rise of the Religious Right. His disastrous 1950 meeting with Harry Truman—including an intrusive conversion appeal and a staged reenactment for reporters—closed one presidential door. His criticism of Truman’s restraint in Korea widened the distance. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Graham encouraged Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero rather than an evangelical, to run and mobilized religious support for him. Eisenhower then cultivated Graham, the National Prayer Breakfast, cabinet prayer, and public symbols such as “one nation under God” and “In God We Trust.” The relationship elevated evangelicals as guardians of Christian America. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Christianity became a Cold War resource: communism was cast as a satanic religion, American power as the defense of worship, and evangelicals as uniquely able to supply the nation’s spiritual strength. Although Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, conservative evangelical concern about peacetime militarization faded as God, country, and military power became mutually reinforcing.
The 1950s nuclear family—a historically recent male-breadwinner arrangement—was remembered as timeless tradition. Suburban growth, church expansion, Cold War consensus, and access to government made evangelicals feel culturally secure and politically important. Civil rights, feminism, and Vietnam would turn that confidence into a determination to recover threatened authority. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Civil Rights, Race, and Family Values

White evangelical responses to civil rights ranged from progressive support to open segregationism. Southern fundamentalists drew on Lost Cause religion and portrayed integration as disorder or communist agitation; some northern evangelicals and the later evangelical Left supported civil rights.
Graham integrated his crusades, praised Brown v. Board, and invited Martin Luther King Jr. to pray, yet repeatedly urged gradualism. After 1964 he withdrew from stronger activism, rejected civil disobedience, and framed racism as a matter for individual conversion rather than government remedy. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Du Mez resists choosing between race and “family values” as rival explanations of evangelical politics. The two were historically entangled. Segregation academies defended racial separation through parental authority and religious liberty; opposition to busing, welfare, and federal intervention translated older racial aims into apparently race-neutral language.
The political ideal remained racialized even when explicit segregationist language disappeared: the heroic protector was usually a white man defending family, neighborhood, and nation from nonwhite people, foreigners, disorder, and federal power. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Cowboy Conservatism and the Politics of Fear

Southern California evangelicals connected Cold War defense industries, private Christian schools, celebrity culture, and right-wing activism. Pepperdine’s 1961 freedom forum and Fred Schwarz’s anti-communism events brought businessmen, pastors, Ronald Reagan, Pat Boone, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and John Wayne into a shared political theater.
Barry Goldwater embodied cowboy conservatism: armed, uncompromising, hostile to “peace at any price,” and willing to risk escalation. His 1964 defeat concealed a deeper realignment as Sunbelt evangelicals and southern whites moved toward Republican defenses of states’ rights, law and order, and military power. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Bob Wells’s Heritage High taught “Christian Americanism” through approved textbooks, patriotic musicals, military heroes, and student spectacles. Knott’s Berry Farm offered the political imagination in miniature: a mythic West, free enterprise, Founding Fathers, and heroic white order. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Reagan’s televised Goldwater speech framed the choice apocalyptically: victory and national destiny or a thousand years of darkness. The form matters to Du Mez’s argument—political compromise becomes weakness when every election is a cosmic battle.

Nixon, Ceremonial Politics, and Evangelical Media

Richard Nixon recognized evangelicals as part of his “Silent Majority.” His anticommunism, moral-values language, Southern strategy, and law-and-order politics translated white anxiety about desegregation, riots, antiwar protest, and counterculture into a respectable coalition. Sixty-nine percent of white evangelicals voted for him in 1968. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Graham coached Nixon in born-again language and publicly signaled support. In office, Nixon staged worship services and patriotic religious events while Charles Colson selected useful guests. This ceremonial politics made symbols of piety and national unity serve partisan ends.
The alliance also affected policy. Colson sought Southern Baptist support for Nixon’s Cambodia bombing, while Graham promoted the administration’s foreign policy and reelection. Evangelical access became a mechanism for legitimating state violence.
George McGovern—a former ministry student, minister’s son, and decorated pilot—offered an explicitly religious antiwar critique. Yet powerful evangelicals preferred Nixon’s militancy; McGovern was booed at Wheaton. The contrast demonstrates that shared piety was less decisive than the emerging operational theology of nationalism and force. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72 combined military pageantry, Flag Day, conservative views, Nixon outreach, and a “Christian Woodstock.” Christian contemporary music made the evangelical marketplace an increasingly effective conduit for political identity. Nixon won 84 percent of the evangelical vote, even as Watergate exposed the corruption beneath the alliance. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Vietnam and the Church Militant

Mainline clergy and some evangelical dissenters condemned napalm, indiscriminate bombing, civilian deaths, and military chaplains’ accommodation to power. Conservative evangelicals instead idealized American troops and described the war as a defense against godless communism.
Evangelical leaders minimized atrocities through moral equivalence and generalized human sin. Graham’s response to the murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai—comparing it to everyday selfishness and hurtful words—dissolved questions of state responsibility and scale into universal depravity. His private 1969 advice to Nixon included options at odds with just-war limits and the Geneva Conventions. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Vietnam deepened evangelical exceptionalism. As other Americans lost faith in the goodness of national power, conservative evangelicals concluded that the tragedy resulted from insufficient force and political will, not from militarism itself. They increasingly saw themselves as the faithful remnant capable of restoring America.
The 1973 Chicago Declaration offered an evangelical alternative: opposition to racism, patriarchy, poverty, and misplaced trust in military and economic power. It remained marginal, showing that conservative dominance resulted from historical coalition-building rather than unanimous theology. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Gender Discipline Begins at Home

Vietnam also became a crisis of manhood. Draft resistance, antiwar protest, long-haired men, and military defeat appeared to conservatives as evidence that American masculinity had become weak and feminized.
Fundamentalist pastor Jack Hyles prescribed a household solution. Boys must learn to win, fight, play with weapons, and avoid anything coded feminine; girls must submit immediately and unquestioningly. Hyles sanctified a son’s violent beating of another child and advocated prolonged corporal punishment that left marks. Attachment (file not included in this release)
The same iron-fisted command structured his megachurch and its gender hierarchy. Du Mez presents this not as an eccentric sidebar but as an early version of the authoritarian pastoral masculinity later celebrated across evangelical culture.

The John Wayne Myth

Wayne joined screen violence to conservative activism: anticommunist organizing, support for HUAC, campaign work for Nixon and Goldwater, and law-and-order politics. The Alamo turned sacrifice for liberty into a Cold War parable; The Green Berets offered a heroic fantasy of Vietnam when the real war contradicted it. Attachment (file not included in this release)
The fantasy influenced real conduct. Soldiers recalled going to Vietnam for Jesus and John Wayne; Ron Kovic enlisted under the influence of Sands of Iwo Jima, was paralyzed, and later described the war as a theft of his manhood. Wayne, who avoided service, nonetheless defined military heroism for men who fought. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Wayne’s ideal was openly imperial and racial. His films repeatedly placed white men over Japanese, Native American, and Mexican enemies, and he defended white supremacy, dispossession of Native peoples, and the minimization of My Lai. He also equated authority with order, ridiculed protestors and gay men, and defended profanity, heterosexual lust, and violence.
These biographical failures did not weaken the icon. They were evidence that Wayne was unrestrained by soft virtues. To admirers, his aggression, nationalism, sexual confidence, and willingness to use violence constituted a higher protective virtue during crisis. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Du Mez closes with the chapter’s grim formula: evangelicalism still offered Jesus for salvation, but it looked to John Wayne for practical rescue. Fear of enemies made ruthless masculine power appear more realistic than the virtues proclaimed in church. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

Partisan realignment: The decades-long movement of many white evangelicals and southern whites from Democratic affiliation into a Republican coalition organized around race, military power, and family values.
Civil religion: Public symbols and rituals that sacralize the nation—prayer breakfasts, “under God,” patriotic worship—without requiring precise theological commitment.
Ceremonial politics: The strategic use of religious events, language, and spectacle to legitimate leaders and policies.
Cowboy conservatism: An uncompromising political style that treats solitary masculine resolve, weaponry, toughness, and refusal to negotiate as proof of moral clarity.
Church militant: Evangelical self-understanding as a righteous minority at war with internal and external enemies.
John Wayne syndrome: A heroic narrative in which superior resolve and righteous violence solve political conflict, masking the complexity and human cost of actual war.
Redemptive violence: The belief that morally authorized force can restore social order and rescue the innocent, often excusing the protector from ordinary constraints.

Questions for Reflection

How does Du Mez’s integration of race and family values alter standard accounts of the Religious Right’s origins?
Why did Graham’s access to presidents make evangelical faith more politically powerful but less capable of prophetic criticism?
What is lost when atrocities such as My Lai are translated into a general statement that everyone is sinful?
How did evangelical media and spectacle make conservative politics feel like religious identity rather than one contestable application of faith?
Why did Wayne’s avoidance of military service and rejection of traditional morality fail to undermine his authority as a protector?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Chapter 2 endnotes 1–52 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).

Cold War religion and presidential power (notes 1–6): Billy Graham, Just As I Am; Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God; Daniel Williams, God’s Own Party; Jeff Sharlet, The Family; Raymond Haberski, God and War; Jonathan Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex; and Anne Loveland.
Race, civil rights, and the Religious Right (notes 7–12, 20–22): Charles Reagan Wilson; Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise; Matthew Sutton; Randall Balmer; Williams; Graham sources; and scholarship on Goldwater, Nixon, civil rights, and the Southern strategy.
Sunbelt anticommunism and cowboy politics (notes 13–19): Stanley Corkin; Darren Dochuk; records concerning Pepperdine, Fred Schwarz, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bob Wells, Heritage High, and southern California evangelical activism.
Nixon, Vietnam, and the evangelical alternative (notes 23–37): Graham and Nixon records; Charles Colson; Campus Crusade and Explo ’72 sources; mainline antiwar statements; Christianity Today; Carl Henry; Jerry Falwell; Graham’s My Lai response and Nixon letter; polling; and the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.
Hyles and militant childrearing (notes 38–41): Jack Hyles, How to Rear Children, reporting on First Baptist Church, and testimony concerning church discipline and corporal punishment.
Wayne, war, race, and masculinity (notes 42–52): Wayne’s political speeches and films; Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July; Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America; Stanley Corkin; the 1971 Playboy interview; Human Events; and Alan Bean’s formulation connecting evangelical salvation to Wayne-style protection.