Kristen Kobes Du Mez Archives

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The Weekly Wrap: September 13-19

Consenting to Read

“Say ‘Yes’ to reading!” Sounds like the slogan for a literacy campaign. But do you realize that every time you pick up a book, you are saying “yes”? You are saying “yes” to another voice speaking into your thoughts. It means opening your mind to the world they have built in a story or the argument they are making. Your “yes” doesn’t mean “I agree.” But it does mean that you have decided to listen, to pay more or less attention to what they are saying.

That’s an insight I came across in Marilyn McIntyre’s Starting with a Word, a book on writing. She is a wise writer who cares about words. For McIntyre, the work of writing and the joy of reading begins with words. She reminds me of how different reading is from watching a video. Books call upon me to actively engage with the words, to think about what is written, and to discern the intent of the writer. Books also invite me to turn on the screen of my imagination and visualize the story in my mind. We say “yes” to all these things when we read.

We also consent to give an author our time. For a long book, that can be fifteen hours or more of your life. Our “yes” means no, for at least the present, to another book. And we can decide to withdraw our consent if the book isn’t worth the precious hours of our lives. I’ve also given up on series. After the first, very long book, I gave up on The Wheel of Time. Too many very long books, and I wasn’t crazy about this world.

To what books will you say “yes” this week? Our “yes” is actually a precious gift both to ourselves and to those who write books. It is, in the words of poet Mary Oliver one of the things you will “do with your one wild and precious life.”

Five Articles Worth Reading

Dónal Gill believes Jonathan Swift anticipated the dangers of AI, particular the sacrifice of human intellect to our machines. In “Jonathan Swift v. AI” he argues for our moral responsibility of self-cultivation.

In Live Laugh Love, Kristin Kobes Du Mez turns her attention to Christian women after taking on masculinity in Jesus and John Wayne. Caroline Fraser considers her argument that women have embraced materialism as a sign of divine favor in “Like My Jesus Sweatshirt? How Christianity Went Consumerist.”

Cormac McCarthy was a struggling author when he turned 40 in 1973. He took his truck, set out on a cross-country journey. Finally, he settle in El Paso and began work on Blood Meridian. Michael O’Donnell explores this turning point in “Cormac McCarthy’s Midlife Crisis.”

When I read “Laurie Anderson’s next manuscript to be locked away for 88 years in Future Library,” I discovered that since 2014, authors have contributed a work, revealing nothing more than the title, to be opened in 2114. “Future Library opens secret archive of unseen texts in Oslo” describes the project and some of the other authors who have contributed works.

Lastly, haven’t you wished to say more with fewer words? That’s what minimalist fiction strives for. JSTOR posted “Minimalist Fiction in Six Short Stories” with stories by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Ann Beattie.

Quote of the Week

Queen of Crime Agatha Christie was born on September 15, 1890. She made this wise observation about money:

“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.“

Miscellaneous Musings

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ” I haven’t read much of any Dillard, never finishing Pilgrim at Tinkers’ Creek. But I’ve used this quote in several talks. We lost her this week, when she joined another recently passed pilgrim, Wendell Berry.

I’ve always enjoyed Barack Obama’s reading lists and have been baffled by readers who pan these simply because of his political associations. He’s doing it again with a six part podcast series, “A Great Book.” In “Tom Hanks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and More Join Barack Obama’s ‘A Great Book’ Podcast at Au dible” you can read about the books he will be discussing and the guests who will be joining them. A great lineup all around.

I’ve always wished I could be paid for reading. The closest I’ve gotten is some free books for review. So I thought it was interesting to learn that “Singapore pays people to pick up a book in battle against doomscrolling.” But readers need to put in 50 sessions of at least 15 minutes to earn S$1 (one Singaporean dollar, currently 78 U.S. cents). Somehow, that doesn’t seem much of an incentive.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: James F. McGrath, Beyond Deconstruction

Tuesday: William Kent Krueger, Lightning Strike

Wednesday: Patricia Allen, The Strain of Other Blood

Thursday: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Friday: Douglas Groothuis and Lindsey Medenwaldt, What if Jesus is Right?

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for September 13-19.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Jesus and John Wayne, Kristen Kobes Du Mez. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.

Summary: A historical study of how the ideal of rugged masculinity typified by John Wayne influenced the evangelical embrace of authority, gender roles, and conservative, nationalist politics.

This is one of the most intensely discussed books in religious publishing over the past year. Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a Calvin University historian, offers a carefully documented account of the development of authoritarian, patriarchal and “muscular” models of masculinity which have invaded evangelical religious subculture and played a vital role in evangelical political engagement.

Her title is drawn from “Jesus and John Wayne,” a 1980’s Christian hit of the Gaither Vocal Band. She traces how Wayne’s muscular and sometimes violent form of masculinity supplanted the Jesus of the gospels as the evangelical model of masculinity. She traces the fascination with the square-jawed, passionate Billy Graham and the youth leader become family guru Bill Gothard as early figures in this trend, teachers like James Dobson and Tim LaHaye, media figures as diverse as Mel Gibson and Duck Dynasty, and military figures like Oliver North.

This is a movement not only about masculinity but patriarchal gender roles, supported oddly enough by women like Elizabeth Eliot, Phyllis Schlafly, and Marabel Morgan (remember The Total Woman?). Kobes Du Mez traces the influence of the Promise Keepers movement, John Eldredge’s books, Pastor Douglas Wilson, Mark Driscoll, and John Piper in upholding militant masculinity and male control of families. More troubling yet are the connections between this culture, purity teaching, and sexual abuse.

The book also traces the exploitation of this vision of masculinity by the conservative political movement from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. The author challenges the argument advanced by some that only “unchurched” embrace these values. She shows studies that demonstrate high numbers of the most faithful have been equally supportive. She argues that Trump’s rough masculinity appealed to a subculture schooled for seventy years on “John Wayne” models of masculinity and helped explain their willingness to overlook his moral flaws and failings.

This is a deeply troubling account, especially since I’ve witnessed the damage of women abused and not protected by the church, and the thwarting of the gifts of women eager to use them to follow Christ. This is an important but uncomfortable book for men in church leadership to read and wrestle with. Many of us have been troubled by the political allegiance of large swaths of evangelicalism with one political party. What this book connected for me is the connection between these allegiances and flawed masculine and gender role ideals. I also found troubling the complicity of much of the Christian bookselling industry in promoting these views.

If I would have any objection, it is that the narrative does not offer counter-examples, including the Christian institution at which the author holds tenure. We hear of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood but there is no mention of the Council of Biblical Equality. We hear of scholars like Wayne Grudem and John Piper but not of Craig Keener and Aida Besancon Spencer and many others supportive of equal partnership between men and women in marriage and ministry. Nor do we hear of egalitarian churches and ministries, except a passing reference to Beth Moore. Although these movements have not achieved the political influence nor the rank and file embrace of many evangelicals, they offer a counter-narrative that may point the way forward. Many of these operate in what Ross Douthat calls “the evangelical penumbra” and may be increasingly uncomfortable with the identifier “evangelical” for reasons this book makes abundantly clear.

The challenge these groups face, underscored by this book, is to articulate a compelling vision for men and women following Christ, of Christian character and the fruit of the Spirit, lived out in both marriage and ministry partnerships, committed to pursuing the missio dei rather than political influence. Neither the culture of the 1950’s or the 2020’s can help us. Only the real Jesus of the Gospels.