A taxonomy of hatred

I realized while reading Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez that I have a perhaps unconventional slant on this book. The book is a meticulously researched and compassionately constructed taxonomy of the individuals and social movements which throughout my lifetime have tried to exclude me from the human family. I feel these people.

Du Mez contends:

Today, what it means to be a ‘conservative evangelical’ is as much about culture as it is about theology. This is readily apparent in the heroes they celebrate”

That would be the actor/imitation cowboy/phony warrior John Wayne, on through Oliver North of Iran-Contra notoriety, James Dobson the professional homophobe, Jerry Falwell the rightwing conservative organizer, Pat Robertson the outspoken fascist -- and probably more significant to most ordinary white evangelical Christians, a rogues gallery of charlatans making a buck on what they call "ministries" but which look from the outside like cons hidden under a light religious gloss. And all this leading to grievance and hatred of the other ...

From the start, Evangelical masculinity has been both personal and political. In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself. 

... Despite Evangelicals’ frequent claims that the Bible is the source of their social and political commitments, Evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by theology. Evangelical views on any given issue are facets of this larger cultural identity, and no number of Bible verses will dislodge the greater truths at the heart of it. 

... White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach in large part because of the culture it has created, the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast quantity of religious products: Christian books and magazines, CCM (‘Christian contemporary music’), Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home décor. Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture.

Oddly enough, the cast of shady characters Du Mez chronicles are probably more familiar to people who have lived intimately the political struggles for women's and LGBTQ liberation than to most Americans: the gay press, when such thrived, published voluminous research on these people. Some awareness was essential to defense against them.

This book's success is fascinating. The publisher, the Liveright division of W.W. Norton, had no great expectations for it. But DuMez's history took off: it soon sold 100,000 copies a month and when it came out in paperback leaped to No. 4 among nonfiction paperbacks.

Who are all these book buyers? This professor of history at Calvin University was offering something to millions of evangelicals who were jolted by sex scandals in their denominations and the climate of division promoted by the contemporary GOP. If many evangelicals seem impervious to well-researched critiques of white masculine hate masquerading as faith, millions of others -- many of them women -- are not. Du Mez writes forcefully yet compassionately from within their culture.

Obviously, this isn't a book for the likes of me. But I'm not sorry I picked it up. She's done a solid, painful, necessary piece of work.