"As late as 1952, the NAE had joined mainline groups in denouncing the nation's peacetime militarization, but by the end of the decade, the conflation of 'God and country,' and growing reliance on military might to protect both, meant that Christian nationalism-and evangelicalism itself-would take on a decidedly militaristic bent" (36).
In addition to the seminal influence of Theodore Roosevelt, a crucial development was the shift from a relatively nonviolent and non-nationalist faith to a nationalist and militaristic one. As Robert Jeffress so eloquently expressed in the months before the 2016 election, "I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that's where many evangelicals are." (13-14) 2 Du Mez's (highly compressed) narrative first sketches the basic elements of American evangelical religion and examines the cultural, religious, and political dynamics of the first and second world war era. Generations of evangelicals learned to be afraid of communists, feminists, liberals, secular humanists, "the homosexuals," the United Nations, the government, Muslims, and immigrants-and they were primed to respond to those fears by looking to a strong man to rescue them from danger, a man who embodied a God-given, testosterone-driven masculinity. Men like James Dobson, Bill Gothard, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Mark Driscoll, Franklin Graham, and countless lesser lights invoked a sense of peril in order to offer fearful followers their own brand of truth and protection. For decades, evangelical leaders had worked to stoke them. " Yet these fears were not simply a natural response to changing times. The incentives for strong male protection were ultimately based on fear-and "evangelical fears were real. The assertion of masculine power would accomplish these goals. With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangelicals believed that they had a special role to play in keeping America Christian, American families strong, and the nation secure.
Īntecedents can be found in the nineteenth-century southern evangelicalism and in early-twentieth-century "muscular Christianity," but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal "gender traditionalism," militarism, and Christian nationalism coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical identity. But as we will see, the roots of a militarized and politicized evangelical masculinity stretch back to earlier in American history.
Conventional wisdom tells us that fundamentalists and evangelicals retreated from public view and political engagement after the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, or with the end of Prohibition in 1933, or out of a desire to focus on individual soul-saving, or due to various combinations of the above, only to reappear on the national stage in the 1970s, seemingly out of nowhere.