Jesus and John Wayne - 05 - Slaves and Soldiers

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Chapter 4 · Next: Chapter 6 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)

Chapter 5: Slaves and Soldiers

Chapter Objective

Du Mez shows how “family values” became an integrated politics of sex, submission, militarism, media distrust, anticommunism, and national restoration. Tim and Beverly LaHaye built sexual hierarchy and grassroots organization; Jerry Falwell fused the patriarchal home to an aggressive state and a muscular Christ. The chapter culminates in the 1980 break with Jimmy Carter: formal born-again identity mattered less than whether a leader performed forceful masculine protection.

Patriarchal Sex as Social Order

• Tim LaHaye’s early marriage manuals taught male headship and presented heterosexual marital sex as an alternative “liberation” safely enclosed within patriarchy. Men’s aggressive leadership was said to arise from the same drive as their sexual aggression; wives had to satisfy men so they could lead confidently. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• This model resolved evangelical tension between female purity and male entitlement by demanding restraint from women before marriage and enthusiastic availability afterward. The LaHayes offered detailed sexual education while declaring feminine surrender inherent in the act itself.
• Billy James Hargis’s anti-sex-education crusade illustrates the wider bundle: anticommunism, school control, racial anxiety, gun rights, and sexual purity recruited overlapping activists. His own sexual scandal exposed the gap between moral policing and protected leadership. Attachment (file not included in this release)

The LaHayes Build an Infrastructure

• Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America converted domestic identity into disciplined political action; its members voted, petitioned, boycotted, contacted officials, and wrote newspapers at extraordinary rates.
• Tim LaHaye portrayed abortion, gay rights, feminism, public schools, busing, taxes, disarmament, the end of capital punishment, and government growth as parts of one secular-humanist project. Liberal news coverage of Vietnam was blamed for weakening national confidence; conservatives needed their own news network, wire service, and newspapers. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• LaHaye selectively borrowed Christian Reconstructionism despite its conflict with his premillennialism. The practical common ground—reclaiming culture through biblical authority and patriarchy—outweighed doctrinal contradiction.
• His Council for National Policy supplied a private network for policy formation and Republican movement-building. Ideas, organizations, media, and mobilized women together formed the Religious Right’s scaffolding. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Falwell’s Family-Nation War

• Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg ministry joined southern segregationism, Appalachian and blue-collar honor culture, Cold War industry, anticommunism, and militant masculinity. Radio and television exported this local political theology nationally. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• The Moral Majority and “I Love America” rallies staged Christian nationalism as patriotic pageantry. Falwell warned that welfare, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, secular schools, childcare, domestic-violence law, and limits on corporal punishment all attacked male headship and prepared national collapse.
• Family protection required military superiority. Falwell used Romans 13 to depict rulers as divine avengers authorized to bear the sword and terrorize evildoers. Strong fathers and forceful political leaders performed the same God-ordained function at different scales. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Falwell’s activism was selective. In the 1960s he had condemned ministers’ political engagement when civil-rights clergy challenged segregation, insisting that Christians should convert hearts rather than reform society. He reversed himself when politics could defend segregated schools, patriarchy, and conservative power.

Slaves, Soldiers, and Manufactured Threat

• Falwell imagined church as an army, Sunday school as an attack squad, radio as artillery, and Christians as “slaves and soldiers” who obey without questions. His Jesus was muscular rather than gentle, and outsiders became enemies to be subdued. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• This model made authority depend on vulnerability. Continually naming new threats maintained followers’ need for protection and made unrestrained military power seem appropriate both spiritually and nationally.
• The 1980 White House Conference on Families exposed incompatible definitions of family. Liberals included single-parent and gay households and favored public support; conservatives defended a white heterosexual male-breadwinner archetype against state interference.
• Conservative networks outorganized their opponents. After walking out, Dobson, Schlafly, Falwell, and the LaHayes staged a counter-conference weeks before the election, unifying the pro-family movement against Carter. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Carter and the Test of Masculine Leadership

• Jimmy Carter was born again, southern, a Sunday-school teacher, and a former submariner—apparently the ideal evangelical president after Watergate. Yet his support for feminism and gay rights, pardon of draft evaders, arms control, Panama Canal policy, and perceived failures in Nicaragua, Iran, and the hostage crisis made him appear weak.
• The cardigan-wearing “wimp” failed the operational test. For evangelicals who placed patriarchal power at the center of faith and politics, shared religious identity could not compensate for insufficient aggression. They would seek a leader who performed national mastery. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

• Family-values politics: A political program centered not on family welfare generally but on restoring male authority, female submission, sexual control, and private household governance.
• Patriarchal sexual liberation: Permission for explicit sexual pleasure within marriage while preserving male initiative, entitlement, and authority.
• Secular-humanist conspiracy: A unifying enemy category that makes diverse policies appear parts of one coordinated assault on Christian order.
• Issue bundling: The fusion of abortion, sex, schools, race, welfare, foreign policy, military strength, and gender into a single religious-political identity.
• Divine avenger: Falwell’s political leader, authorized by God to protect the righteous and execute wrath against enemies.
• Operational test of leadership: Evaluation by performed toughness and protection rather than by formal religious identity or private virtue.

Questions for Reflection

1. How did evangelical sex manuals challenge sexual repression while simultaneously strengthening male power?
2. Why could premillennialists borrow Reconstructionist ideas despite contradictory accounts of history and Christ’s return?
3. What political work is done by treating many distinct disagreements as one secular-humanist project?
4. How did Falwell’s position on political engagement change depending on who was using politics and toward what end?
5. Why did Carter’s evangelical credentials fail once masculine strength became the decisive measure of leadership?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Chapter 5 endnotes 1–26: Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).

• Sex, marriage, and culture war (notes 1–8): Jason Bivins; Tim LaHaye’s marriage guide; R. Marie Griffith; Hargis reporting; and Tim and Beverly LaHaye, The Act of Marriage.
• Movement organization and ideology (notes 9–13): research on Concerned Women for America; LaHaye’s Battle books; Julie Ingersoll; and reporting on the Council for National Policy.
• Falwell, segregation, and militant faith (notes 14–23): Daniel Williams; Michelle Goldberg; Falwell, Listen, America!; and Frances FitzGerald’s reporting on his “disciplined charging army.”
• The 1980 family conference and Carter (notes 24–26): Robert Self; Dan Gilgoff; and Jackson Katz on presidential masculinity.