Nassar for seeking forgiveness without repentance.
#Jesus and john wayne podcast trial#
In a powerful statement presented at the trial of Larry Nassar, the former doctor for the American gymnastics team who was convicted of committing multiple sex crimes against aspiring athletes, Ms. Near the end of my book, I quote the words of the abuse survivor and advocate Rachael Denhollander. Knowing that I was a Christian, he pressed me on how I thought anyone would want to become a Christian after reading my book. Only after we had gone off the air did he ask the question that had been troubling him. Both hosts were respectful and engaging, but one was clearly more skeptical than the other. Not long ago, I gave an interview about my book to a Christian radio station. While evangelicals are not alone in preferring flattering accounts of their own past, they have clung to these narratives for distinctly evangelical reasons. As one man explained, “I bumped into so many of these trees, but I never saw the forest.” The emotional intensity of their responses and the frequency with which writers expressed bewilderment gave me pause. Yet despite their intimate acquaintance with the events I charted, most readers also expressed astonishment upon seeing for the first time the contours of the world they had inhabited much of their lives. They had proudly voted for Ronald Reagan and attended weekend warrior boot camps sponsored by their churches. They had embraced the teachings of purity culture and structured their own marriages around male authority and female submission. They had shopped at Christian bookstores and attended Promise Keepers rallies as part of the evangelical men’s movement. To prove their point, readers narrated their life stories in vivid detail: They had been indoctrinated into family-values evangelicalism by listening to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio broadcast every day.
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Almost every message contained some version of the same realization: “This is the story of my life. I had been warned to brace myself for vicious trolling, but this wasn’t hate mail. Nearly a year later, they still flood my inbox, several a day, most written by evangelicals. Within days after my book was released, I began receiving letters and messages from readers.
#Jesus and john wayne podcast movie#
For the last 75 years, heroic ideals inspired by mythical warriors, soldiers and cowboys - many of them portrayed onscreen by men like John Wayne, and Mel Gibson in the movie “Braveheart” - transformed the faith itself, replacing core biblical teachings such as loving one’s neighbors and one’s enemies with a militant battle cry. The book traces how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood came to pervade evangelical popular culture in America. The disruptive power of history became clear to me last summer, when my book “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” was published.
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For example, there was a time when many conservative Protestants rejected the very idea of “Christian America.” Those taught that patriarchy is essential to Christian orthodoxy would be surprised to learn of the long history of evangelical feminism. History also disrupts simply by showing that things have not always been as they are now. This was not the Graham they knew and loved.
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Billy Graham had a decidedly mixed record when it came to civil rights, was politically ambitious, promoted American militarism and tacitly condoned atrocities in Vietnam. Evangelicals are shocked, for example, to learn that the Rev. Within academic circles, some evangelical historians have produced narratives that tend to downplay the darker sides of their religious tradition.įor those who have only ever encountered whitewashed portrayals of their own past, a more complex account of evangelical history is enormously disruptive. At a popular level, pseudo-historians have played fast and loose with historical evidence to spin fanciful tales of America’s Christian origins. It’s not that evangelicals disregard history entirely, but they tend to prefer their own versions of events. However, to an unusual degree, evangelicals have remained oblivious to how their own stories map onto larger histories.