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

First introduced in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the US constitution that would nationally guarantee legal and civil rights for people regardless of sex. When the ERA got close to being ratified by the states, activism against it became a major issue for conservative evangelicals in the 1970s, especially for anti-feminism activist Phyllis Schlafly. The ERA was ratified in 2023 but as of this writing was not yet formally certified.

The term “evangelicalism” refers to a fundamentalist movement across various denominations in Protestant Christianity. (Non-evangelical Protestants are often called “mainline Protestants.”) Although wide theological variations exist even within evangelicalism, it is usually defined by four core theological tenets: a belief that conversion requires an intimate and transformative spiritual experience called being “born again,” a view that the entire Bible is in some way divinely inspired and is more than a historical document, an emphasis on the belief that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection led to the atonement of humanity, and the practice of social activism. The latter often extends to the political sphere and, as Du Mez points out in this book, strives to elect “strongmen” to positions of power.