Alan Jacobs. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 2020): 63-75

Book Reviews

Jacobs, Alan. The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 256 pages, $29.95.

Reviewed by Rachel B. Griffis

In the last decade, Alan Jacobs has written several thoughtful and accessible books that explore cultural, intellectual, political, and moral issues pertinent to educators and their work with students. For example, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011), articulates the challenges twenty-first century readers face not only in the age of the internet but in a society that prioritizes practicality and productivity at the expense of delight and rest. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (Currency, 2017) connects the incorrigible rancor pervading many conversations, in both public and private spheres, to insufficient thinking. In this pithy book, which was named one of “10 Books to Read the Summer Before College” in 2019 by Christianity Today, Jacobs provides strategies for fostering a sharp, charitable mind and generous modes of communication. In The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Jacobs again broaches serious questions that reflect the current cultural terrain of many Western countries, though this book does so by looking backward, to the conclusion of World War II. He focuses on work produced by five Christian intellectuals—Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, and T.S. Eliot—at this significant moment in Western civilization. Jacobs notes that these thinkers “believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches but for the whole of society,” and that each was completing or in the midst of projects that explored this responsibility in 1943, when the outcome of the war was clear (xi). Maritain and Auden both gave notable lectures, “Education at the Crossroads” by the former and the latter, “Vocation and Society.” Lewis also gave the lectures that would become The Abolition of Man, Weil was working on The Need for Roots, and Eliot had recently finished writing the concluding piece of Four Quartets, “Little Gidding.” By discussing these five thinkers alongside one another, Jacobs highlights the significant questions and concerns that preoccupied Christian intellectuals who witnessed significant cultural shifts of which the twenty-first century academy is an inheritor, particularly those related to learning, morality, politics, and civic life.

The Year of Our Lord 1943 contains seven chapters, a Preface, an Afterward, and two sections not specifically designated as chapters: “Dramatis Personae: September 1, 1939,” which immediately follows the Preface, and “Interlude: Other Pilgrims, Other Paths,” placed between the fifth and sixth chapters. The Preface and “Dramatis Personae” both provide groundwork regarding historical and intellectual context as well as biographical information on the five thinkers around whom the book is centered. The “Interlude” section contains vignettes on additional figures from the Christian tradition who accomplished significant work or notable feats during and near the end of World War II, including Dorothy Day, the founders of the Koinonia Farm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Graham Greene, and Eric Liddell. The first two chapters introduce conversations and establish context for the moral and intellectual issues that became progressively important to Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot as they observed the cultural forces and assumptions that led to the horrific events of their time. The title of Chapter One, “Prosper, O Lord, Our Righteous Cause,” alludes to the pragmatic and patriotic perspectives both in the church and academy that troubled the dramatis personae of the book. It is a phrase from a prayer Lewis heard and subsequently critiqued in a letter to his brother, stating, “I see no hope for the Church of England if it allows itself to become just an echo for the press” (11). Similarly, Auden was taken aback when he went to a movie in New York and heard the audience shouting, “Kill them!” each time Polish people made an appearance (5). Accordingly, Jacobs discusses influential educators of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as John Dewey, Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Karl Mannheim, and how their ideas facilitated and challenged the distressing events Lewis and Auden witnessed in church and at the movies, as well as broader manifestations of these events elsewhere. Chapter Two, “The Humanist Inheritance,” speaks to the book’s subtitle, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. Jacobs concludes the first chapter by arguing that the figures covered in his project insisted on the centrality of literature to education, a move that placed them each in a position to interact with the tradition of Christian humanism. In Chapter Two, then, Jacobs discusses concepts of humanism beginning with the Renaissance and its development over time. He focuses particularly on Maritain’s work, who engaged the concept most directly and published Integral Humanism in 1936, which asserts that twentieth century declensions of humanism were indefensibly anthropocentric, and thus he was critical of the perspective that depicts “human nature as closed in upon itself or absolutely self-sufficient” (42). In this chapter, Jacobs also discusses Weil and Auden, who, unlike Maritain, did not believe humanism could be extricated from “secularization” or “comfortable optimism” (49). Nevertheless, Jacobs states that the subjects of his book “are engaged in projects of thought that arise from the humanist movement” and “share the conviction that this restoration [of Western civilization] will not be accomplished only, or even primarily, through theology as such, but also and more effectively through philosophy, literature, and the arts” (50).

Chapter Three, “Learning in War-Time,” details specific examples of public intellectuals’ approaches to civic life which were colored by war. Jacobs summarizes Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” which has little in common with Christian humanism, while outlining Auden’s response to, and discomfort with, Niebuhr’s perspective, particularly his involvement in politics. This chapter also discusses several of Auden’s poems in order to demonstrate his internal struggle with demonic forces and disparate ideologies available for coping with evil, such as nationalism, individualism, and Freudianism. Lewis also makes an appearance in this chapter along with glosses of various writings that highlight Lewis’s thinking about his role as a Christian public intellectual in a time of crisis. Jacobs notes that “He became expert in using storytelling as a form of cultural critique, and always with the war as a backdrop,” referring to The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and Lewis’s initial work on The Chronicles of Narnia, which would be completed in the decade following the war (61-62). Chapters Four, “Demons,” and Five, “Force,” explore the book’s subjects’ various delineations of moral and intellectual evils in the Western world as well as causes and implications of those evils. In Chapter Four, Jacobs describes contemporary demons that concerned Auden, Eliot, and Lewis, particularly those associated with industrialism, science, technology, power, and force. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, for example, interrogates the Christ Child’s challenge to King Herod’s vision in ways that reflect Auden’s concerns with prevalent assumptions about life, such as “the machine,” “the militaryindustrial complex” and “force” (85). Lewis’s space trilogy, similarly, depicts the morally problematic vision of conquest and control underlying many scientific and technological developments. Chapter Five gives extensive space to Weil’s thinking and her interpretation of force in the Iliad, a story she calls “the purest and the loveliest of mirrors” (93). Jacobs additionally details Weil’s rationale for promoting the teaching of significant literary works of the past as well as her affront of humanism for “thinking that man can get [truth, beauty, liberty, and equality] without grace” (98). The other figure highlighted in this chapter is Eliot, who composed three of the Four Quartets during the war. Jacobs subsequently analyzes “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding” to show how these poems “revise and decenter the typical impulses of patriotism,” which Eliot locates as an impediment to a moral society (108). Jacobs names Chapter Six, “The Year of Our Lord 1943,” and refers to it as “the pinnacle of the narrative,” as he expounds on the projects his five thinkers were undertaking around the time of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 (xix). This chapter most clearly emphasizes the book’s engagement with significant questions about humanism and education, drawing out the subjects’ concern that the Allies would save the West from fascism only to deliver them to a different kind of servitude. This servitude is a technocratic society that values human beings for their economic output and an approach to education that produces technicians, discarding the tradition of liberal learning in Western civilization. As Jacobs puts it, “the argument that entrusting technocracy with our salvation is a recipe for winning the war while losing the peace” (158). Jacobs’s

gloss of Weil’s writing effectively expresses and summarizes what many of his subjects broadly believed was the duty and contribution of education to society. He writes that Weil was “calling for an education that trains the sensibility and affections at least as seriously as it attends to the mind” (164). After “the climactic year 1943,” however, Jacobs notes that Weil was dead and the surviving four figures had turned their intellectual energies elsewhere, ostensibly conceding that their efforts to support Christian humanistic education was a lost cause (xix). In Chapter Seven, “Approaching the End,” the author traces Maritain’s, Auden’s, Lewis’s, and Eliot’s thinking as their focus on education shifted and waned. Though they were still critical of the West’s growing regard for science and technology, their work on the issue became less urgent and pointed. In Eliot’s case, he articulated a vision for education with elitist overtones that many educators have subsequently found distasteful and exclusive. Auden’s account of his introduction to Harvard president James Bryant Conant, who was laboring to develop the university into an institution that would prioritize science and technology, indicates that he was resigned to having an “enemy” relationship with such educators (195). As Jacobs laments, “The coming decade would see, with its increasing emphasis on the scientist as the shaper of human destiny, and the decline in influence of Christian intellectuals such as the ones described in this book, that the postwar world sought and believed in heroism—but not a heroic humanism” (190). The Afterward, “Stunde Null,” discusses Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society, and a figure whom Jacobs considers an intellectual descendant of the conversations Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot engaged during the war. As he concludes the book, Jacobs reiterates what he shows in Chapters Six and Seven, that his subjects’ “prescriptions were never implemented, and could never have been: they came perhaps a century too late, after the reign of technocracy had become so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts,” a harrowing ending indeed (206). The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis is an incredibly creative and compelling project, drawing together prominent figures from the Christian intellectual tradition who barely interacted with one another but nevertheless participated concurrently in articulating significant questions about education and society for both their time and beyond. The book’s weaknesses are primarily stylistic and organizational. Although Jacobs prepares the reader for his organizational scheme by stating that he emulates filmmaker Orson Welles by moving fluidly between figures and subsequently expanding and contracting his focus in each chapter, this approach is less impressive on the page than the screen. Further, Jacobs states that a “full accounting” of his subjects and the pertinent topics at hand “would need to be a thousand pages long,” yet this limitation undoubtedly contributes to the hurried pace and cursory perspective of much of the book (xvi). Freestanding quotations are copious as are quotations that fill the majority of paragraphs while missing explanation and interpretation. Admittedly, Jacobs’s task is to chronicle a specific intellectual history rather than to prove a thesis, but his narration often lacks direction and occasionally appears to be without purpose.

Despite its stylistic and organizational shortcomings, The Year of Our Lord 1943 is an important book for Christian intellectuals, especially educators, to read. As he concludes, Jacobs asserts that “If ever again there arises a body of thinkers eager to renew Christian humanism, they should take great pains to learn from those we have studied here” (206). What Jacobs consequently accomplishes with this project is to provide a starting point for educators to draw upon particular questions, theories, practices, and texts that are not only relevant to Christian learning in the twenty-first century but emerge from a historical context that should inform future work in this vein. The figures covered in this book asked expansive and perceptive questions about the ends of education and the reach of Christianity in ways that will inspire readers, in turn, to reflect on the current state of the liberal arts and the role of core curriculum in various institutions, among other considerations. In this book, Jacobs refers on multiple occasions to St. Augustine’s understanding of virtue as ordo amoris, which is “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it” (137). By bringing his audience into contact with Maritain, Auden, Lewis, Weil, and Eliot, Jacobs offers readers their own opportunity to have their affections ordered and formed as they internalize the ideas and perspectives of thinkers who cared deeply about Christian humanistic learning and their responsibility to a flourishing society.

Byrd, Aimee. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020. 240 pages, $18.99.

Reviewed by Julie Ooms

The intense and largely groundless backlash Aimee Byrd has received for Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is proof enough of the significance of its claims. Byrd’s book, even if one glances at its title alone, is set up as a response and corrective to the biblical manhood and womanhood movement, as theorized in John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (whose title Byrd aptly alludes to in her own), institutionalized in the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, but most importantly as heretically theologized in the novel “Eternal Submission of the Son” trinitarian doctrine put forth by Grudem and others. Not only is her book a strong, well-sourced, and robust critique of this movement, it also provides a fierce, thoroughly biblical defense of every Christian’s need for discipleship and responsibility to be an active, equal participant in and witness to the faith, regardless of gender. Byrd begins her book by analyzing a short story, commonly found in syllabi for American literature courses (it’s in mine) but otherwise not well known, entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper” and written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is “a brilliant and disturbing exploration of the effects patriarchal attitudes and constrictions have on female psychosynthesis” (Byrd 15) in which the narrator, suffering from postpartum depression, is prescribed a “rest cure” by her doctor (and husband) that utterly fails to cure her and instead drives her mad. The narrator hallucinates a woman creeping behind the bars of the yellow wallpaper in the room where she is confined, gradually losing her mind. Byrd takes this image, used in the story as a symbol of confining gender stereotypes that trap us, confuse us, and madden us, and uses it herself to “appeal to the reader to look at the yellow wallpaper of the church and do something about it” (19). She describes “the church’s yellow wallpaper” as “much of the current teaching on so-called ‘biblical manhood and womanhood’” that is “stifling the force of the biblical message and strangling the church’s witness and growth” (19). Throughout the rest of the book, she revisits this metaphor repeatedly to “peel and reveal” the church’s yellow wallpaper to uncover extra- and unbiblical teachings about gender and to articulate new (and, often, old) patterns for flourishing. That these patterns for flourishing are not twenty-first century developments but based in robust understanding of both biblical and traditional texts is evident in Byrd’s organization of the book: the book’s three sections all focus on recovery. Byrd begins with “Recovering the Way We Read Scripture,” continues with “Recovering Our Mission” as the Church, and closes with “Recovering the Responsibility of Every Believer.”

In her first section, Byrd addresses the question of whether or not the Bible is a patriarchal text whose aim is the subjugation of women, a question posed with hostility by many feminists and answered with a mostly unreserved “yes!” by patriarchal Christians. Byrd addresses both responses to this question by first critiquing the ways the Bible is packaged and sold (at least in the Western world) and next revealing the Bible as a cohesive story containing both “gynocentric” (female-centered) and “androcentric” (male-centered) texts and voices. She argues, first, that attempts to package the Bible in “woman-friendly” ways—wrapping Scripture in pink or teal or floral covers, including different articles and devotional aides in “men’s” and “women’s” Bibles that disciple men and women into gender stereotypes more than into imitating Christ, among others—only reinforces the belief that the Bible does not speak to all people, but that “there is a men’s version and a woman’s version [of God’s Word] to read” (41). “Offering two versions of Scripture,” though it may be a lucrative marketing strategy, “separates and isolates our devotion time, ignores our likenesses, and misses all the important nuances in our distinctions” (41). These nuances are already evident in the words of Scripture itself, Byrd goes on to argue. She proposes—with ample biblical and scholarly evidence—that female (gynocentric) voices are interwoven with male (androcentric) voices through Scripture, often challenging and/or making fuller the male-centered stories we would expect from a text whose books, though divinely inspired, were all written by men living in deeply patriarchal cultures where women’s voices were often silenced. The books of Esther and Ruth; the story of the Hebrew midwives’ resistance in Exodus; Hannah’s prayers and Mary’s Magnificat; Deborah’s work as a judge and the testimony of the women at Christ’s tomb: these and other gynocentric texts, Byrd argues, interact with androcentric ones in Scripture to show “the coactivity of men and women serving together as servants of God,” which should “fortify our congregations in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God’s household” (92). Byrd is adamant about the “true complementarity of the sexes” but equally adamant that this complementarity requires not strict hierarchy but mutual influence between men and women, a mutual influence that provides a fuller picture of Scripture and of the Church. Byrd’s second section addresses the discipling work of the Church more specifically. The first chapter of this section is a direct critique of the brand of complementarianism taught by the CBMW, with particular focus on the Eternal Submission of the Son (ESS) trinitarian doctrine, largely regarded outside CBMW as heretical. Byrd critiques the foundation of CBMW’s complementarianism, the “factioned and fractioned discipleship” that makes authority and submission the ontological centers of maleness and femaleness, respectfully (116), and shows how this myopic definition of gender leads logically to an eschatology whose primary question about the new heavens and the new earth is whether and how these gender-specific roles will persist into eternity (117). Instead, Byrd argues that there is robust biblical defense for a “reciprocity of male and female contributions” in the Church, and that the focus of Scripture from Genesis to Paul is “unity and reciprocity. There are no implications of male/female distinction

being authority and submission” (116). This “unity and reciprocity,” Byrd goes on to argue, should shape how the Church disciples men and women to learn with and from each other as co-laborers for the Gospel. Failure to emphasize reciprocal, mutually influencing and influenced femininity and masculinity in the Church, Byrd writes in this section’s concluding chapter, has and will continue to result in women’s discipleship being farmed out to parachurch organizations instead of it being rightly embedded in church life and within the framework of shared creeds, confessions, liturgy, and church governance. In her final section, Byrd moves from a discussion to the Church at large to a discussion of every believer’s responsibility in the Body of Christ, and she begins with a searing discussion of how the myopic, role-based view of gender she critiqued in the second section actually misreads the biblical narrative, particularly the ways in which Jesus and Paul elevated and worked with women. Byrd walks a thin line between CBMW’s brand of complementarianism and what she names an “egalitarian error” of denying distinctions between male and female, arguing that both fall into similar traps: “[L]ists [of acceptable church roles] promoting complementarian hierarchy also fall into the egalitarian error they are trying to prevent—they fail to demonstrate what is distinctly valuable and meaningful about the woman’s contribution” (204). Such “fractional complementarity” “fails to address the dynamic of communion between the sexes or where we are headed” (205). She closes the book with examples of women in the early Church (among them Phoebe, who delivered Paul’s letter to the Romans, and Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa’s sister) whose work as co-laborers with men displayed “the common mission of handing down the faith to the next generation and the active traditioning that involves,” entreating readers to promote the same commitment to common mission in their churches. I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Byrd received considerable (and considerably misogynistic) backlash for this book, and that the strength of the backlash emphasizes the significance of her argument. This book’s significance and relevance, however, is not defined by the negative response to it: the book stands as a thorough, robust, theologically rigorous, profoundly convincing and (I hope) convicting argument about the excesses of the most well-known and influential source of complementarianism, at least within white American evangelicalism. Byrd, herself convicted of a robustly biblical complementarianism (though she actually rejects the term in the text of her book because of its associations), deftly critiques the excesses of complementarianism while avoiding the excesses of egalitarianism. This critique, among many other things, leads to one of the most impactful points of the entire book: that the contemporary Church, in an effort to resist second-wave feminism, retreated not to Scripture but to the errors of both the recent past and the centuries’ old past, when the early Church fathers allowed their views of women to be influenced not first by Scripture but by Aristotle. Beyond the substance of Byrd’s argument, however, there is the evident depth and breadth of her theological knowledge. Byrd herself is a laywoman whose theological training is the result of the investment and encouragement of her church, and her book is clear fruit of this training. In addition to her analysis

of Scripture (and of various CBMW publications), Byrd brings in Church fathers, biblical scholars and commentators, sermons, and Pope John Paul II, among others, to support her arguments. The overall impression is of someone who crafts her theological arguments with careful study and a net cast both widely and with discernment. To deny such a student of the Word and the tradition influence in the Church beyond “casseroles and babysitting skills” (70) is at best foolish, and at worst a denial of the “coed endeavor” of “testifying to and passing down the faith” (70). My quibbles with Byrd’s book are relatively few. One of them lies less with her argument and more with her overreliance on rhetorical questions as a rhetorical strategy. Whole paragraphs at times are made up of such questions— for example, the paragraph on pages 204-205 is made up of nine questions and two statements, and it is not an isolated incident of this strategy. Her questions often pierce to the heart of the issue under consideration, but the flood of questions rather than a more balanced stream of questions and argumentative statements detracts from her argument’s strength. To the reader more inclined to disregard Byrd (or to mock her in a comment thread on a social media site), this rhetorical strategy could look like petulance. My other quibble is with the (necessarily, I think) limitedness of the book’s scope. Because it is a response to and critique of another book and the movement it symbolizes, Byrd must spend much of her time peeling away the “church’s yellow wallpaper” and has less space to reveal the better pattern for the Church she proposes here. Overall, however, Byrd’s book is a strong and necessary critique of the excesses of complementarianism and the harm they have done in the Church. Though aimed more at an educated popular audience than an academic audience, Byrd’s book is robustly sourced enough to be included in a theology course at the college or seminary level. I regard this book as necessary reading for both male and female students in biblical studies or theology, particularly if their goal is to work in some capacity as church leaders in the churches (largely those in white, conservative American evangelicalism) most impacted by the theology Byrd critiques. A Church that is not fully appraised of the dynamic “unity and reciprocity” between the two sexes God created as co-laborers and necessary allies is one that stifles half her members and severely weakens them all.

Kobes Du Mez, Kristin. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020. 356 pages, $28.95.

Reviewed by Matthew Bardowell

Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne is a challenging read. It is challenging not because it is hard to follow; on the contrary it is a remarkably lucid and compelling account of American evangelicalism. It is challenging because the story Du Mez tells is deeply convicting to anyone who has spent time in evangelical circles. Central to the efficacy of Du Mez’s thesis is the narrow scope she sets for her historical analysis. Her sights are squarely set on American evangelicalism, which Du Mez defines perhaps more narrowly than those who associate themselves with that group would assume. Evangelical culture, for Du Mez’s purposes, describes those within the protestant movement in the U.S. that arose out of the 1940s and 1950s revival of “muscular Christianity” (11). Du Mez urges readers to reckon with the corrupting influences that American culture has upon Christianity as it is embodied by evangelicals. Du Mez describes this manifestation of Christianity as “a historical and cultural movement, forged over time by individuals and organizations with varied motivations—the desire to discern God’s will, to bring order to uncertain times, and, for many, to extend their own power” (14). Focusing on this group of American Christians yields subtle insights into the movement’s compromises, frailties, and failures. As Du Mez moves from the 1950s to the present, her account is animated by an uncanny ability to identify a series of representative moments that characterize particular periods within evangelicalism. In each chapter, Du Mez shows, with stunning coherence, that for American evangelicalism “the ‘good news’ of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these intertwined with white racial authority” (6-7). This is likely to be a rather troubling claim, and yet Du Mez’s historical analysis makes it hard to dispute. One of the insidious attitudes that has woven its way into American evangelicalism, according to Du Mez, is the notion of the culture war. Within this martial framework, Christians adopt an oppositional posture toward the secular world. Secularism is contrasted with the church with respect to certain cultural issues that trigger contempt or disdain. In the hands of various personalities within the evangelical movement, these cultural issues can be wielded to galvanize the fear of evangelicals as a group. The result is something akin to a cult a personality that coalesces around individuals who have proven to be thought leaders in the culture war. Often, these thought leaders are rather remote from evangelicals’ personal lives. This analysis leads to one of Du Mez’s foundational propositions. Namely, that American evangelicals are shaped to a greater degree by the liturgies of cable news, talk radio, and Christian media than they are by the congregants of their local church and their own pastors. Indeed, Du Mez observes that “a few words preached on Sunday morning [do] little to

disrupt the steady diet of religious products evangelicals consumed day in, day out” (8). The evangelicalism Du Mez treats in this book, therefore, represents “a potent mix of ‘gender traditionalism,’ militarism, and Christian nationalism” (11). As I have already mentioned, one prominent trait of this brand of evangelicalism its attachment to personalities. In today’s parlance, we might call these personalities “celebrity pastors,” but, while celebrities are something of a common denominator throughout the seventy-year period Du Mez examines, they are not always pastors. Indeed, the one recurring personality that wields a particular influence in Du Mez’s account is the actor after whom she names part of this book: John Wayne. Wayne, the star of such films as The Searchers and The Green Berets, represents the figure of American masculinity that has woven its way into American culture so completely that there has been almost no sector of American life that it has not touched. The “embodiment of rugged, allAmerican masculinity,” John Wayne cast a shadow over popular culture, foreign policy, and the church as well (56). It is perhaps unsurprising that the boundaries between Wayne the man and Wayne the fictional character became blurred. Du Mez illustrates one notable instance of this blurring in Ron Kovic’s memoir Born on the Fourth of July. Du Mez observes the disconnect between the many people who, like Kovic, enlisted to fight in the Vietnam War because of John Wayne’s heroic film characters. This influence stands in stark contrast to Wayne the man who “secured a deferment in order to avoid serving” (56). It was this fictional representation of male heroism that made its way into the church and into the hearts of generations of its leaders. One of the striking things Du Mez observes is how Wayne’s symbolic masculinity pervaded the culture of American evangelicalism to such a degree that it led to shifting views about authority and the role of America in God’s sovereign plan for the Church. Thus, patriarchal authority and nationalism combined to enshrine a distinctly American set of Christian values. These values gave rise to various figures within the evangelical movement who propagated them across the nation. Du Mez understands the rise of the Christian right within this framework and shows how people such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell wielded their power in politics to become political kingmakers, thus aggregating more political power for evangelicals who would become a voting bloc future politicians must court if they are to have electoral success. This observation is not new it itself, but Du Mez’s achievement in rehearsing the history of the Christian right is to explain some of its puzzling developments within a framework that draws them all together. The reader will see, for instance, the common thread that runs between the martial metaphors so often deployed in evangelical circles and the socially conditioned metaphors for patriarchal authority and feminine submission. Du Mez’s analysis impresses upon the reader a sense of how our modern understanding and application of those ideas has been circumscribed by cultural attitudes that adulterate them. In subsequent chapters, such as “Tender Warriors,” “No More Christian Nice Guy,” and “Holy Balls,” Du Mez presents case after case of Christian celebrity pastor advancing an account of the gospel steeped in the bravado and

nationalism of the John Wayne figure. The picture she paints is deeply unpleasant. It is a picture of American evangelicalism fashioned in our own image—a portrait of self-worship. In the concluding chapters, Du Mez presents the inexorable consequence of such self-worship: destruction. The chapter titled “Evangelical Mulligans: A History,” details the long, sad account of the way such culturally compromised visions of Christian authority wreak havoc on the lives of its adherents and inflict pain upon the flock entrusted to their care. The examples are numerous, and I will not name them here, but the conclusion, as Du Mez presents it, is that “a ‘cultlike culture’ led to a culture of corruption, including ‘pedophilia, violence, defamation of the innocent to protect the guilty . . . [and] defiance against lawful authority” (288). While it would be easy to understand individual instances of such abuse as one person’s moral failing, the evidence Du Mez articulates makes it difficult for the reader to accept this conclusion. She has laid the groundwork too well and the cases fit within the framework so tidily. Certainly, these cases represent individual moral failures, but such failures were exacerbated by a culture that enabled them. Godly sorrow and true repentance run counter to the adulterated, John Wayne version of masculinity, and, as a result, the failure to restore the sinner and care for those sinned against perpetuates the abuse. One of Du Mez’s more controversial claims is that the distortions of the gospel presented in the book are motivated by a desire to protect the conservative view of patriarchal authority. Readers may resist this claim. They may believe that the traditional gender difference that leads to conservative patriarchal authority is simply Biblical manhood and womanhood. Additionally, Du Mez’s argument does not rule out the option that such a flawed understanding of patriarchal authority is the effect of the distortion rather that its cause. For those who identify with either of these concerns, chapter 9—“Tender Warriors”—will prove instructive. Here Du Mez explores the emergence of complementarianism and egalitarianism as critical theories that enter into the evangelical sub-culture. In this chapter, the reader sees Du Mez’s skill at demystifying terms that so often seem hallowed within evangelicalism. She shows how such concepts react to and are conditioned by their own historical and rhetorical circumstances. One notable instance of this is Du Mez’s analysis of the claim Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware make in their 2016 statement issued from The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood about the relationship between the second and the first person of the Trinity. According to Du Mez, Grudem and Ware claim that the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father, and they do this for the purpose of propping up their argument for complementarianism (298). In this example, Du Mez shows that some prominent figures within evangelicalism are all too ready to disregard centuries of Christian orthodoxy concerning the relations of the Trinity to buttress a contemporary argument about gender relations. In light of such evidence, it is difficult to maintain one’s skepticism about Du Mez’s claim that such ideas are set forth to advance a particular view of patriarchal authority. This theological innovation—the assertion that the Son is subordinate to rather than coequal with the Father—certainly seems to have been motivated by the narrow interests of the culture war.

What is most impressive about Du Mez’s argument is its explanatory power. Everything—the abuses by leaders, the metaphors we have embraced, the willingness to jettison principles for proximity to power—all of it is of a piece. This cohesiveness is in large part the appeal of Du Mez’s analysis. It was particularly fascinating to read this book contemporaneously with the campaigns for the U.S. general election. Many of the positions evangelical thought leaders took in various publications leading to the presidential election aligned so completely with Du Mez’s cultural critique that it made Jesus and John Wayne seem less like analysis than prognostication. The statements issued in recent months by Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and others reveal the same pattern of logic and the same metaphorical framework that Du Mez presents here, gleaned from her study of the past seven decades. I began by saying that the book is a challenging read. I would like to end by noting that those who accept the challenge will be rewarded with a clear-eyed and coherent account of the way American culture has influenced the evangelical movement over the past seventy years. While readers may be dismayed to realize the ways American culture has influenced our faith rather than the other way around, Du Mez’s account is illuminating and reveals avenues for reform and repentance.

Notes on Contributors

Matthew R. Bardowell <Matthew.Bardowell@mobap.edu> is Assistant Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University, where he teaches British literature, world literature, and composition. His research centers on Old Norse and Old English literature as well as the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and his recent scholarship engages questions concerning emotion and aesthetics. His work appears in Renascence, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Mythlore, and The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters. Bardowell holds a Ph.D. in English from Saint Louis University.

Zachary Beck <zbeck@etbu.edu> was born and raised in Cocoa, Florida, right across the Indian River Estuary from Kennedy Space Center. He attended the University of Florida for his Undergraduate and Master’s Programs, and he received his Ph.D. from Baylor University with a specialty in American Modernism. His research interests lie in American literature, modernism, and Christian literary theory. For his dissertation, he examined the decline of virtuous friendship in the novels of Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. He has presented papers that treat the theories of Roland Barthes, Ngugi wa Thiango, and Jean Baudrillard from a Christian standpoint.

Glenn Butner <Glenn.Butner@sterling.edu> is Assistant Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry at Sterling College (KS), where he also directs the honors program. He specializes in social ethics and systematic theology, the subject of his studies during his PhD at Marquette University. His first book, The Son who Learned Obedience: A Theological Case Against the Eternal Submission of the Son (Pickwick, 2018), will soon be followed by Trinitarian Dogmatics (Baker, 2022). He and his wife have two children and are expecting a third.

Rachel B. Griffis <Rachel.Griffis@sterling.edu> is an Assistant Professor of English at Sterling College. She teaches writing and literature courses and serves as Director for the Integration of Faith and Learning. Additionally, she is a book review editor at International Journal of Christianity & Education, and she is on the editorial board for Kansas English. She is also a contributor at The Liberating Arts, an online platform that hosts conversations on the significance of the liberal arts. Her writing has appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Christianity & Literature, Christian Scholar’s Review, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Teaching American Literature, and elsewhere.

Julie Ooms <Julie.Ooms@mobap.edu> is Associate Professor of English at Missouri Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2014, focusing on twentieth century war literature. Her current research focuses on Christian practices for teaching reading and the crossroads of religion and secularism in 20th century American fiction. She has published articles on the writing of Tim O’Brien, J.D. Salinger, and Sylvia Plath in

Renascence, Journal of the Short Story in English, Christian Scholar’s Review, and Plath Profiles.

Steven A. Petersheim <Steven.Petersheim@gordon.edu> is an adjunct professor of English at Gordon College on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His most recent book is Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Pastoral Experiments and Environmentality (Lexington Books, 2020). He has also published numerous articles on teaching and learning, nineteenth-century and ethnic American literature, and more. Since 2008, he has taught a variety of firstyear seminars and other courses at Baylor University, Indiana University East, and Gordon College. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Baylor University in 2012. Currently, he is pursuing his M.Div. at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in preparation for further work in the church as well as the academy.

Kyle A. Schenkewitz <Kyle.Schenkewitz@msj.edu> is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Mount St. Joseph University. He earned a Ph.D. in Historical Theology at Saint Louis University, a Master of Theological Studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the University of Southern Mississippi. He specializes in the ascetical and spiritual traditions of early Christian monasticism with particular interest in conceptions of health and healing in late antiquity. He has previously published Dorotheos of Gaza and the Discourse of Healing in the Monastic School of Gaza and “Encountering the ‘Saracen’ Other: Anastasios of Sinai and the Arab Conquest.” His interest in building community and fostering discipleship shapes his scholarship, teaching, and work in the church.

Call for Papers and Book Reviews

Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal

Published Semiannually by the Faith & Learning Committee and the Humanities Division of Missouri Baptist University St. Louis, Missouri 63141-8698

Intégrité (pronounced IN tay gri tay) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on the integration of Christian faith and higher learning. Founded in the fall of 2002 with the Institutional Renewal Grant from the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College, it is published both online and in print copy. Interested Christian scholars are encouraged to submit academic articles and book reviews for consideration. Manuscripts should be sent as e-mail attachments (Microsoft Word format) to the editor, John J. Han, at john.han@mobap.edu. Articles must be 15-25 pages, and book reviews must be 4-8 pages, both double-spaced. Articles should examine historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, and/or pedagogical issues related to faith-learning integration. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• the current state and/or future of the church-related college • history of Christian liberal arts education • Christianity and contemporary culture • a Christian perspective on multiculturalism and diversity • service learning • academic freedom in a Christian context • implementation of Christian truths in academic disciplines • Christian education in the non-Western world • global Christianity.

Articles must engage in faith-learning issues or controversies in a scholarly, critical manner. We generally do not consider manuscripts that are merely factual, devotional, or sermonic. Due dates are March 1 for inclusion in the spring issue and September 1 for the fall issue. Articles are expected to be research-based but must focus on the author’s original thought. We typically do not consider articles that use more than twentyfive secondary sources; merely present other scholars’ opinions without

developing extended, thoughtful analysis; and/or use excessive endnotes. Direct quotations, especially lengthy ones, should be used sparingly. Considering that most Intégrité readers are Christian scholars and educators not necessarily having expertise on multiple disciplines, articles and book reviews must be written in concise, precise, and easy-to-understand style. Writers are recommended to follow what William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White suggest in The Elements of Style: use definite, specific, concrete language; omit needless words; avoid a succession of loose sentences; write in a way that comes naturally; and avoid fancy words. For citation style, refer to the current edition of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Articles should include in-text citations in parentheses, a list of endnotes (if applicable), and an alphabetical listing of works cited at the end of the article. Book reviews need only page numbers in parentheses after direct quotations.