Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

In the 19th-century US, masculinity was defined by hard physical work and “gentlemanly self-restraint” (15). However, by the 1890s, a cultural crisis of masculinity occurred since an increasing number of men were working in offices instead of with their hands. This led to the popularity of figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who promoted a “rougher, tougher masculinity” (16) to white Protestant men. This was reflected in Roosevelt’s persona and his more aggressive, expansionist foreign policy in the Spanish-American War. For Roosevelt and others, personal and national masculinity were one and the same.

By the 1910s, the trend led to an effort to “‘re-masculinize’” Christianity by drawing on Christian concepts in the US South, where rigidly hierarchical, slave-based society had shaped Christianity. By drawing on Southern Christianity, “rugged American masculinity united northern and southern white men and transformed American Christianity” (17).

Pastor Billy Sunday, who promoted the new, “muscular Christianity,” supported American intervention in World War I and denounced pacifism. Sunday’s brand of Christianity was promoted through evangelical revivals, which rivaled the traditional Protestant Christianity that was structured around institutional churches. Unlike those churches, revivals tapped into consumer culture and modern marketing and preferred fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.

These fundamentalist Christians rivaled modernist Christians, who likewise sought to modernize Christianity but to do so through academic readings of the Bible.