We didn’t listen, and the result is that we have stained our faith for several generations, watching our children see our own shallow Christian behaviors and responding with “I’ll never believe in your faith.” We have done this to ourselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind, and Du Mez tells us why. There were always the voices-often shouted down-saying that we were going off a cliff. It is also a great book for those who were wounded by people like me and the churches that people like me built and evangelized for. This is a great book for people like me, who went through a lot of this and did not know why it was happening. (Lordy, how loud Dobson became about the “danger” to America of a Clinton-both times!-for their assumed “lack of moral behavior” and how quickly he bowed the knee to The Former Guy!) I laughed that sad, rueful laugh as I read, discovering more and more how I’d been had, how I’d been reassured that all was well even as decisions leading to the irruption of The Former Guy were being made behind the scenes. So it was fascinating to see Du Mez uncover the threads that connected these people, from Graham to Bright to Dobson to Graham and Falwell and the rest, along the way losing the holiness and moral behaviors that scripture teaches us about in order to embrace The Former Guy who exemplifies all that they warned about until the chance at power was finally at hand. the churches that abandoned faith and reason, and descended into pure white nationalism. The very churches that told me continuously in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to avoid the antichrist and to avoid post-modernism and post-truth became.
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I couldn’t figure out, though, what had happened to cause people to descend into madness. Surely God wanted white Evangelicals to run America as if all of this nation was a church and the white male Evangelical pastors the only rulers divine appointed for said rule.īut I grew more and more uneasy with this dissolution of my outside-the-camp religion that had become the state religion, and finally broke a decade ago. Surely God wanted America to be both blessed and white-majority and white-ruled. Surely God wanted the poor to suffer because suffering might make them work harder. Surely what God wanted in America was conservative politics and capitalistic economics. Surely they must have deeper insight and understanding. I will confess I went along with the change, because the people who were my leaders were going along with it.
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#Jesus and john wayne country free
What happened to you and your free spirit, inquiring mind, and willingness to reach those who are on the margins? You’ve become a thoroughly compliant part of the Christian industrial complex.) (I’m looking at you, Greg Laurie, and it’s hard to explain just how deeply you have disappointed me when I see you at ceremonies “honoring” The Former Guy in the very Rose Garden where he denied the existence of COVID-19 and denied the reality of the 2020 election. And yet, we from the JM gradually succumbed to the white Evangelical industrial complex so completely that some of the leaders of the free spirit of the JM are now fully on board with The Former Guy, serving as his loyal allies in church meetings as easily as in political events. Now, the JM was not the genesis of this state of white Evangelicalism in fact, to my experience, much of the JM was orthogonal to the beliefs and practices of the white Evangelical world.
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I got adopted into the Beloved Community in the late 1960s in the “Jesus Movement” (JM) in Southern California, and many of the people mentioned in this book are familiar to me not only because I know their names but also because I was a recipient of their teaching and ministries. I was raised in the milieu that Du Mez talks about. That’s the summation after reading this masterful, wonderfully researched book about the peculiarities of white Evangelicalism and the Americanized Jesus who was once Brown and poor and despised, the victim of the oppressive empire, but who has been transformed into the muscular, gun-toting, migrant-hating, welfare-despising, violence-loving, manly man-centered white male gonzo who seeks to rule everyone by force for their own good and for the pleasure and power of white men.