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Kristin Kobes Du Mez: What We Believe About History
KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ is a writer and a professor of history at Calvin University. (CREDIT: Deborah Hoag)
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Beliefs have a history. As a historian of religion, I take this for granted. I’d forgotten how foreign this notion is to many evangelicals in the United States.
Evangelicals identify as “Bible-believing” Christians: Evangelical pastors preach “biblical values,” and evangelical leaders promote “traditional” values in the secular, public sphere, weighing in on issues ranging from tax policy to gun control. All of these beliefs are packaged and sold as biblical, timeless and eternal.
Evangelicals are not alone in considering that their beliefs are eternal and unchanging. For believers of all stripes, the very notion of truth assumes an aura of timelessness, but historical knowledge has a way of complicating such certainty. By revealing not only continuity but also considerable change over time, history demonstrates that much of what passes for traditional is, in fact, of relatively recent origin. By situating historical subjects within broader contexts, history also reveals how economic, political and cultural factors influence what people believe to be true at any given time.
However, to an unusual degree, evangelicals have remained oblivious to how their own stories map onto larger histories. It’s not that evangelicals disregard history entirely, but they tend to prefer their own versions of events. At a popular level, pseudo-historians have played fast and loose with historical evidence to spin fanciful tales of America’s Christian origins. Within academic circles, some evangelical historians have produced narratives that tend to downplay the darker sides of their religious tradition.
For those who have only ever encountered whitewashed portrayals of their own past, a more complex account of evangelical history is enormously disruptive. Evangelicals are shocked, for example, to learn that the Rev. 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. This was not the Graham they knew and loved.
History also disrupts simply by showing that things have not always been as they are now. 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.
Evangelicals have also created a vast consumer culture that reinforces an uncomplicated and uncritical self-perception. Christian radio, Christian publishing and Christian school textbooks and home-school curriculums reinforce narratives depicting evangelicals as the good guys, bravely doing God’s work in the world. The nation’s sins — racism, sexism, xenophobia, white nationalism — are depicted not as problems endemic to the tradition, but rather as departures from “true evangelicalism.” Critical outsider accounts are either ignored or discounted as attacks, reinforcing an evangelical persecution complex. Because enormous profits are at stake in this evangelical consumer culture, both financial and ideological motivations play into efforts to keep evangelical consumers within the fold.
Understanding that beliefs have a history does not preclude a commitment to truths outside of history, nor does it prevent believers from bringing sacred texts and theological insights to bear on personal choices or political values. But it does prompt believers to consider how historical forces and cultural allegiances may have shaped their own deeply held convictions, even in ways that run counter to the core teachings of their faith.
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. The book traces how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood came to pervade evangelical popular culture in America. 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.
Within days after my book was released, I began receiving letters and messages from readers. Nearly a year later, they still flood my inbox, several a day, most written by evangelicals. I had been warned to brace myself for vicious trolling, but this wasn’t hate mail. Almost every message contained some version of the same realization: “This is the story of my life. Thank you for helping me to see.”
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. They had shopped at Christian bookstores and attended Promise Keepers rallies as part of the evangelical men’s movement. They had embraced the teachings of purity culture and structured their own marriages around male authority and female submission. They had proudly voted for Ronald Reagan and attended weekend warrior boot camps sponsored by their churches.
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. 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.
While evangelicals are not alone in preferring flattering accounts of their own past, they have clung to these narratives for distinctly evangelical reasons. Not long ago, I gave an interview about my book to a Christian radio station. Both hosts were respectful and engaging, but one was clearly more skeptical than the other. Only after we had gone off the air did he ask the question that had been troubling him. Knowing that I was a Christian, he pressed me on how I thought anyone would want to become a Christian after reading my book.
The question didn’t surprise me. I’d weighed a similar concern when I’d first embarked on the project. But history isn’t a marketing campaign to win converts. More important, my own research into the history of evangelicalism made clear to me the perils of covering up harsh truths in the interest of protecting the brand — or, in the words of evangelicals themselves, “the witness of the church.”
Near the end of my book, I quote the words of the abuse survivor and advocate Rachael Denhollander. 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. Denhollander rebuked Mr. Nassar for seeking forgiveness without repentance. A conservative evangelical, Ms. Denhollander also turned her attention to abuse within evangelicalism, confronting those who sought to cover up abuse in order to protect the church’s witness. “The gospel of Jesus Christ does not need your protection,” she said in an interview. Jesus asked only for obedience, which means telling the truth and pursuing justice, Ms. Denhollander said.
Nearly every letter I receive from evangelical readers contains words of gratitude for the painful truths they have only now come to see. Many also acknowledge their own complicity in the story I tell. And they understand that it is only by reckoning with this past that they can realign their witness with the pursuit of truth and justice that their faith demands..
