⬅️ Book: Jesus and John Wayne - Kristin Kobes Du Mez · Previous: Chapter 11 · Next: Chapter 13 · Source: Attachment (file not included in this release)
Chapter 12: Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo
Chapter Objective
Du Mez uses Colorado Springs—the organizational center of twenty-first-century evangelicalism and a major military city—to show how militant faith moved in both directions between evangelical institutions and the armed forces. The chapter argues that this exchange did more than borrow military metaphors: it sacralized command, aggression, and American power while military heroes supplied evangelical masculinity with authenticity and authority.
Colorado Springs as Evangelical-Military Hub
- The Air Force Academy, multiple bases, NORAD, and nearly one hundred parachurch organizations clustered in Colorado Springs. The proximity of Focus on the Family, military ministries, churches, publishers, and defense institutions made the city an unusually dense network for exporting evangelical ideas. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- James Dobson converted Focus on the Family’s enormous media reach into direct electoral power. His 2004 intervention helped John Thune defeat Senator Tom Daschle and demonstrated influence largely invisible outside evangelical networks. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- Ted Haggard’s New Life Church joined spiritual warfare, electoral activism, free-market ideology, and gender hierarchy. Its warrior angels, “Fort Victory,” and “spiritual NORAD” made militarization architectural as well as rhetorical.
Proselytizing and Coercion at the Air Force Academy
- Mikey Weinstein’s complaints about antisemitism and aggressive proselytizing prompted an investigation that found pervasive religious intolerance at the academy. “Team Jesus,” official prayers, and institutionally promoted Christian media blurred voluntary expression and command authority. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- Commandant Johnny Weida’s constant “warrior” language resembled Southern Baptist president Bobby Welch’s You, the Warrior Leader, which treated Christianity as an offensive war and even invoked Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest as leadership models.
- Retired colonel David Antoon contrasted this “holy bloodlust” with an older military ethic that treated killing soberly. He viewed New Life and Focus-sponsored Bible studies as a “Trojan horse” for evangelical influence. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- Critics’ reform efforts met resistance framed as religious-liberty defense. By 2005, evangelicals were disproportionately represented among active-duty personnel and chaplains.
- The academy’s concurrent sexual-assault crisis complicates the claim that militant gender order produced superior virtue: reports described widespread abuse, retaliation against victims, and significant hostility to women’s presence. Attachment (file not included in this release)
Military Heroes as Spiritual Authorities
- Oliver North renewed his military-hero brand through Fox’s War Stories, evangelical thrillers, and books celebrating soldiers’ faith. His stories fused Bible reading, masculine bravado, media resentment, and the claim that aggressive commanders possessed moral clarity.
- North’s account treated criticism of war as betrayal of soldiers, repeating a conservative narrative that hostile media—not strategic or political failures—had lost Vietnam and now threatened Iraq and Afghanistan. Attachment (file not included in this release)
- Former Ranger Chuck Holton made military initiation a template for spiritual formation. In A More Elite Soldier, the Christian is called out of ordinary ranks into an elite brotherhood; violence is terrible yet “somehow glorious,” and Jesus becomes an ideal noncommissioned officer.
- Holton’s fiction depicted Muslims as a looming, barely differentiated menace and “good men” as those willing to use the enemy’s violent language. Christian publishing and retail networks carried this martial worldview to civilian readers. Attachment (file not included in this release)
The Chapter’s Synthesis
- Colorado Springs illustrates an institutional feedback loop: evangelical organizations supplied the military with spiritual-war ideology, while soldiers and veterans refashioned Christianity around combat experience.
- Du Mez argues that fear of Islam did not merely cause militancy. Leaders could also cultivate fear to market militant faith, consolidate authority, and make their promise of protection more valuable.
Key Concepts
- Evangelical-military complex: A network of churches, parachurch groups, publishers, chaplains, political organizations, and military institutions that mutually reinforce militant Christianity.
- Spiritual NORAD: The conversion of military command-and-control imagery into a model for organized prayer and culture-war mobilization.
- Coercive religious environment: Religious advocacy backed by institutional hierarchy, where subordinates may lack meaningful freedom to refuse participation.
- Warrior leadership: A model treating offensive action, strict command, ideological conformity, and readiness for casualties as Christian virtues.
- Soldier as spiritual exemplar: The claim that combat training and military brotherhood reveal mature Christian manhood more clearly than ordinary church life.
- Militarism-fear feedback loop: Threat narratives justify aggressive leadership, while militant institutions continually reproduce the threats that sustain them.
Questions for Reflection
- Which features of Colorado Springs made it unusually effective at transmitting ideas between churches, politics, and the military?
- Where is the line between religious expression and religious coercion inside a command hierarchy?
- How did military veterans gain authority to define Christian maturity for civilian audiences?
- What is lost when criticism of a war is interpreted as contempt for soldiers?
- Does Du Mez show that Islamophobia produced evangelical militarism, or that leaders used it to intensify a preexisting system?
Citations and References
Author’s complete endnotes
Chapter 12 endnotes 1–25: Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release).
- Colorado Springs, Dobson, and Haggard (notes 1–10): Jeff Sharlet; Mikey Weinstein and Davin Seay; Dan Gilgoff; and research on Focus on the Family, New Life Church, and the NAE.
- Air Force Academy religion and abuse (notes 11–18): New York Times and NPR reporting; Weinstein and Seay; Bobby Welch; and academy investigations.
- Oliver North and Chuck Holton (notes 19–25): North’s and Holton’s military memoirs, evangelical fiction, publisher reporting, and their own program materials.