Jesus and John Wayne - 08 - War for the Soul

⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Chapter 7 · Next: Chapter 9 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)

Chapter 8: War for the Soul

Chapter Objective

Du Mez follows evangelical militancy after the Cold War removed its organizing enemy. Conservative networks converted anticommunism into a culture war for America’s soul, targeting globalism, feminism, gay rights, children’s rights, and the Clintons. The chapter exposes selective moral concern: leaders demanded Clinton’s impeachment for sexual misconduct while dismissing abuse allegations within their coalition, and secular conservative media became an authority system nearly indistinguishable from evangelical culture.

Power Without a Common Enemy

• Reagan-era evangelicals built policy and donor networks through the Family Research Council, Council for National Policy, Moral Majority, and coalitions for traditional values, religious freedom, and military policy. Their membership linked religious leaders to politicians, business figures, gun advocates, and movement operatives. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Success weakened fundraising based on embattlement, while televangelist scandals damaged credibility. Falwell and LaHaye resorted to increasingly harsh rhetoric and alliances with authoritarian anticommunist regimes; major organizations dissolved near the end of Reagan’s term.
• Pat Robertson’s presidential campaign mixed Christian America, aggressive foreign policy, and personal mythmaking, but most evangelical elites chose the more viable George H. W. Bush. Even a pastor was judged less capable of national toughness than a secular establishment figure.

From Cold War to Culture War

• The Gulf War briefly restored confidence in heroic American force. After the Soviet collapse, Robertson’s The New World Order reassigned apocalyptic fear to the UN, global elites, conspiratorial bankers, and one-world government. The book sold widely, and his Christian Coalition built a million-member grassroots organization. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Pat Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech declared a religious and cultural war as consequential as the Cold War. Republican policy hardened around abortion, gay rights, prayer, homeschooling, and “pro-family” identity.
• Bill and Hillary Clinton embodied the 1960s enemy: draft resistance, feminism, civil rights, career women, and perceived contempt for homemakers. Hillary’s cookie remark activated decades of teaching that women’s public independence devalued domestic femininity. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Health-care reform, federal childcare, children’s rights, and It Takes a Village were reframed as state seizure of parental authority. International cooperation became a threat to both patriarchal family sovereignty and American sovereignty.

The Feminized Military

• Clinton’s proposals on gay service members, women in combat, and UN peacekeeping appeared to dissolve masculine military identity. Evangelical groups distributed opposition materials inside the armed forces, demonstrating the depth of their institutional alliance. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Peacekeeping especially unsettled the heroic model: multilateral missions lacked nationalist conquest and a clearly evil enemy. Even marines reported uncertainty about their purpose without a conventional war.

Clinton, Character, and Selective Protection

• Schlafly, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, Grudem, and SBC leaders made the Lewinsky affair a referendum on law, truth, sexual conduct, and presidential character. Petitions, pastoral mailings, ads, and theological statements demanded impeachment or resignation. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Yet Clinton’s affair also made him appear more conventionally masculine to some Americans, improving his approval. This frustrated a movement that had long portrayed liberal men as weak.
• Du Mez argues evangelical concern centered more on Clinton as enemy than on predation itself. Dobson warned that women could bait husbands into violence; leaders dismissed Anita Hill and rallied around Clarence Thomas; conservative groups opposed the Violence Against Women Act and minimized harassment statistics.
• Feminism was blamed for removing chivalric protection and then asking law to replace it. The structure is circular: male authority is justified as women’s protection, and women who seek protection from male authority are accused of causing the problem. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Fox Evangelicalism and Paths Not Taken

• The end of the Fairness Doctrine enabled Rush Limbaugh’s talk-radio world of white male supremacy, misogyny, military enthusiasm, and ridicule of liberal men. Fox News and Bill O’Reilly turned similar anger into a television identity of aggressive male commentators and sexualized female presentation. Attachment (file not included in this release)
• Fox did not need formal Christian doctrine. Its nostalgic racial and gender order matched evangelical operational theology, attracting white evangelicals and then reshaping the faith through daily consumption.
• Alternatives still existed. The NAE elevated human rights, global poverty, trafficking, AIDS, and persecuted Christians; Ralph Reed urged inclusion and an end to intemperate rhetoric. Old-guard leaders and grassroots members resisted compromise.
• The chapter closes with masculinity itself unsettled. Without communism, some evangelical men considered whether Christian manhood should change. The next chapter examines the “tender warrior” attempt to reconcile softness and strength. Attachment (file not included in this release)

Key Concepts

• Culture war: A struggle in which disputes over family, sex, media, education, and authority are treated as a battle for the nation’s moral soul.
• New World Order conspiracy: Post–Cold War fear that international institutions and hidden elites will erase American and parental sovereignty.
• Family sovereignty: The claim that parents—especially fathers—possess near-exclusive authority over children, protected from state or international standards.
• Selective moralism: Strict accountability for political enemies paired with skepticism or forgiveness when allies face comparable accusations.
• Fox evangelicalism: The cultural fusion of conservative media and white evangelical identity around nostalgia, grievance, gender hierarchy, and militant nationalism.
• Threat substitution: Replacing a defeated external enemy with domestic or transnational enemies that can sustain an embattled identity.

Questions for Reflection

1. Why did political success threaten organizations built around cultural embattlement?
2. How did family sovereignty and national sovereignty become versions of the same conservative fear?
3. What explains the different evangelical responses to Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and allegations inside evangelical homes?
4. Did Fox News politicize evangelicalism, or did a preexisting evangelical culture make Fox possible?
5. Which post–Cold War evangelical alternatives could have displaced the culture-war framework?

Citations and References

Author’s complete endnotes

Chapter 8 endnotes 1–30: Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).

• Networks, candidates, and the culture war (notes 1–12): Anne Loveland; Frances FitzGerald; Andrew Hartman; Jackson Katz; Andrew Bacevich; Daniel White; Christian Smith; and reporting on the Council for National Policy and Christian Coalition.
• Family and military sovereignty (notes 13–16): Schlafly reports; Bacevich; Loveland; and Cynthia Enloe.
• Clinton and sexual politics (notes 17–25): Schlafly; Dobson; congressional and press reporting; Stephen Ducat; Kathryn Joyce; R. Marie Griffith; Charles Colson; and sources on Anita Hill and VAWA.
• Conservative media and alternatives (notes 26–30): Jackson Katz; Amy Sullivan on “Fox evangelicalism”; Elisabeth Bumiller; Bacevich; and FitzGerald.