RaveThe Boston Globe... impressive ... Du Mez more than adequately substantiates her thesis that evangelical Trump support represents \'the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad\' ... Du Mez leads us with apparent ease, as only a seasoned historian can, from the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday, through the early Cold War mainstreaming of Christian nationalism and the subsequent white evangelical backlash against the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protesters, into the rise of the Christian Right as a powerful voting bloc that crystallized in the 1980 election, and finally on to the present. While I occasionally found myself wanting more primary source illustrations of a particular point, for the most part, Du Mez holds her abstract narrative and concrete examples in expert balance, keeping the reader engaged through her lively, colorful prose ... Du Mez’s theological position is established subtly in a book that cannot be called polemical, even if it indulges in the occasional delicious bit of academic snark ... It is impossible to do justice to the richness of Jesus and John Wayne in a short review ... a book that America needs now. I hope it will be widely read.
