By doing these two things, she engages in the exact kind of thing that ultra-Fundamentalists like Ken Ham engage in, just from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
(2) She politicizes Christianity and gives the clear impression throughout the book that real Christianity consists of liberal Democrat values and political stances. Instead, it argues that white Evangelicals, en masse, by virtue of them being white and conservative, have corrupted the Christian faith.
The book doesn’t argue that there are bad actors within Evangelicalism who threaten the faith and bring Christianity to ridicule. More specifically, she does two things in her book that bother me: (1) She points to the bad behavior of certain Evangelical leaders and extrapolates that bad behavior on all Evangelicals. That, though, is what I feel KDM does in her book.
The deeper problem is the politicization of the Christian faith, whether one is on the political right or political left. For that matter, I think there are plenty of liberal Christians who have mistaken the Kingdom of God for the Democrat party platform as well. Having said that, I’m not one of those who thinks the GOP is all evil and the Democrats are all good. One of my major criticisms of modern American Evangelicalism is that it has often mistaken the Kingdom of God for the GOP party platform. I’m also not going to defend how various Evangelical leaders have become overt political partisans. Some of them are truly deplorable people. I am not going to defend some of the truly corrupt Evangelical leaders KDM has highlighted in her book. Having said that, I want to be clear on just what my criticism of the book is. In order to make this argument, KDM highlights a number of big-name Evangelical leaders who have either gotten too involved in American politics and have pushed for a conservative agenda or have been exposed for a number of bad things, from sexual immorality a wide range of other abusive behaviors. Therefore, white Evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump doesn’t show their hypocrisy, but rather what their true colors have been all along. Now, in her book, Kobes Du Mez (KDM) argues that white Evangelical Christians have corrupted the Christian faith by promoting patriarchal authority, sexism, racism, xenophobia, violence, and Christian nationalism. Second, I will then share my thoughts on each of those chapters. First, I will give a very brief summary of each chapter in question in that particular post (I will try to cover 3-4 chapters per post). Beginning here in Part 2 of my analysis of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s book, Jesus and John Wayne, I want to do two things in every succeeding post of this series.
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