They understood that their role was to defend American Christianity, and that required a military defense, because the threat of communism was a military threat.<\/q><\/aside>\nBut historians of evangelicalism have long argued that is not the case. Where did these people go? They started their own institutions, their own denominations, their own bible colleges, their own newsletters, their own publishing houses, and they were doing quite well.<\/p>\n
In the late 1920s and 1930s, you see a lot of these smaller institutions being established. And then, in the early 1940s, they get together and say, “You know what, we’re doing a lot of really good work across the country, but imagine what we could do if we came together.” In 1942, they form the National Association of Evangelicals. It’s their explicit plan to exercise strength in numbers and to assert their influence over American culture and society.<\/p>\n
They say, “We need magazines with subscribers in the tens of thousands or the hundreds of thousands. We need to take to the radio. We need to embrace Christian publishing. We need bookstores in every town and city across this country.” What’s really remarkable is that within fifteen years, they’ve accomplished all this and then some.<\/p>\n
They believed that they were the most faithful Christians, the “faithful remnant,” the ones that held God’s truth, and so it was their duty to make sure that they exerted their influence widely over American society. This was during World War II, and we see patriotism also infusing this sense of evangelical purpose. They were the true Christians and <\/em>the true Americans.<\/p>\nThis sense of special purpose is only sharpened after the Second World War, with the arrival of the Cold War. Suddenly there was this great threat to both the nation and to Christians in the form of communism. Communism was anti-God, anti-family, and anti-American \u2014 all of the things they held most dear. They understood that their role was to defend American Christianity, and that required a military defense, because the threat of communism was a military threat.<\/p>\n
The thing is, these values that conservative evangelicals held dear in the late \u201940s were not all that different from the values held by many Americans, particularly white middle-class Americans.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n That’s why they don’t, in retrospect, stand out so much, and people can think they weren’t there at all.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Exactly. This was the postwar baby boom, so traditional family values were all the rage and supported by government spending through the GI bill, for white middle-class Americans in particular. Given the Cold War consensus, they weren’t that distinctive. But what that meant is that they very much felt at the center of things, which they continued to be throughout the \u201950s with the rise of their key popular figure Billy Graham.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n The Cold War allowed evangelicals to map the holy war between the forces of Christ and the Devil onto America’s terrestrial geopolitical conflict with communism. How did it also play this key role in taking evangelicalism in a more thoroughly patriarchal direction as well?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n The US government was really trying to emphasize the threat of communism and mobilize opposition to it. But a lot of Americans, especially coming out of World War II, didn’t really care that much at first. So there was a conscious effort on the part of the government to ratchet up a sense of urgency and crisis, and evangelicals helped in that effort. They added their own spin, which was that the fight against communism was synonymous with the fight against the Devil.<\/p>\n
As that fight moves to the battlefields of Vietnam, things don\u2019t go as planned. People start to ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with American manhood that we can\u2019t defeat this enemy?\u201d And there\u2019s also the opposite reaction, which is you start to see a rise in antiwar activism.<\/p>\n
The other thing that’s going on at the same time, in the 1960s and early 1970s, is dramatic social change in terms of feminism challenging “traditional” gender roles. As a historian, you always have to use scare quotes around the word traditional<\/em>. In this case, we’re really talking about this breadwinner economy that only applied to certain white middle-class Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s.<\/p>\nBoth feminism and what\u2019s happening in Vietnam are raising some fundamental questions about gender: about what it means to be a man, what kind of men we need, what it means to be a woman. They\u2019re also raising questions about authority.<\/p>\n
You have student protesters disobeying university authorities. You have the antiwar movement challenging state authority. You not only have hippies who are challenging US military action but men growing their hair out and wearing flowered shirts. All of these things seemed to strike at the God-given, God-ordained social order.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when evangelical values shift from being consensus values to being oppositional values in the broader culture, and also develop a particular emphasis on authority.<\/p>\n
This first became clear to me when I looked at the writings of James Dobson. I’m not sure how familiar James Dobson is.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n He’s pretty famous.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n James Dobson was a household name for generations, and I would argue that if you’re going to understand the history of white evangelicalism in the last half century, he’s your guy. He’s at the center of things. He comes to prominence in the early 1970s as a child psychologist writing about how to discipline your children.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n He’s like the anti\u2013Doctor Spock.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Spock was the nurturer. Dobson looked at Spock and said, “This is exactly what’s wrong<\/em> with American society. By coddling your children, you’re setting them up to become hippies.” In fact, Doctor Spock himself did become an antiwar activist, so there might be something there.<\/p>\nDobson said the exact opposite of Spock. He said you need to discipline your children; you need to spank your children; you need to assert your dominance so that they learn to submit to parental authority, because the fate of the nation depends on submitting to proper God-ordained authorities. He wrote a book called Dare to Discipline.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n What a title.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n James Dobson is mainstream white evangelicalism, family values evangelicalism. But he was drawing from and had a lot in common with more fringe figures.<\/p>\n
There’s another person I write about in tandem with James Dobson named Bill Gothard. Bill Gothard is this kind of shadowy figure. When I initially set out to write this book, I had no interest in writing about him because he seemed too fringe. He’s an ultra-authoritarian advice giver who also has a lot of views on how to raise and discipline children. Unlike Dobson, who was on the radio and very outward facing, Gothard did his thing through these not quite secretive, but not super open, seminars.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of conservative evangelicals attended these Gothard seminars. In the course of my research, many mainstream evangelicals pulled me aside to ask if I\u2019d be discussing Bill Gothard. Over time I realized just how deep his influence ran and how broad it was, just beneath the surface. You’ve heard of James Dobson, but most of your listeners probably haven\u2019t heard of Bill Gothard.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n He was drawing on the teachings of a Christian Reconstructionist theologian named Rousas Rushdoony? What is Christian Reconstructionism and how does its vision compare to the relatively more vanilla model put forward by someone like Dobson? How did that model, which is really far-right reactionary \u2014 Rushdoony was an apologist for chattel slavery \u2014 spread so far and wide throughout American evangelical Christianity?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Rushdoony was an apologist for chattel slavery, white supremacy, and misogyny. He espoused a harsh chauvinism: women shouldn’t vote, women shouldn’t go into college, women shouldn’t work outside of the home, the husband has absolute authority over every single aspect of his wife\u2019s life. He was very far right, very extreme, very fringe. But this is part of the problem. It’s tempting to write off some of these fringe figures like Rushdoony, or even Gothard, as irrelevant extremists.<\/p>\n
But when you start to look at the networks and start to look at the teachings and beliefs of ordinary evangelicals, you realize that it’s really difficult to distinguish the fringe from the mainstream. That actually became a theme of my research. When you look at somebody like Dobson, who is emphasizing patriarchal authority, a hierarchical authority structure, the need to submit to the God-ordained authorities, and the idea that the fate of the nation hangs on our ability to achieve proper submission to authority, and then you look at somebody like Gothard, there is not a lot of distance between the two. One is, yes, harsher and taken to the extreme, but there’s a lot of overlap.<\/p>\n
A lot of scholars before me wouldn\u2019t touch somebody like Rushdoony, because really quickly you can get accused of making a mountain out of a molehill. Who’s ever heard of Rushdoony, even in evangelical spaces? It’s very much, like Gothard, kind of under the surface. But if you look at popular writings on family life and child-rearing, if you look at textbooks in the homeschool network and in Christian school networks, what are they saying about chattel slavery? What are they saying about Christian America? What are they saying about gender roles? That’s where you can see the fingerprints of this Christian Reconstructionism, this very hierarchical and patriarchal structure to all of society.<\/p>\n
Some people will only ever dabble in the mainstream version. Some people will be hardcore homeschool far right. Many people are going to be somewhere in between, and they’re going to be promiscuous consumers. If you shop in a Christian bookstore or go to your church library, or now if you go online, chances are that you’re going to have sources available to you across the spectrum. And if you venture into the more extreme articulations, they’re not going to be super shocking to you, perhaps, because you’ve already been introduced to the slightly less extreme versions of these teachings.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n Phyllis Schlafly’s emergence as an evangelical star is a particularly striking illustration of theology’s fading importance as unity on these cultural principles comes into focus. Schlafly, of course, was Catholic. Evangelicals traditionally held some pretty strongly negative views about Catholics and Catholicism in the United States. What did it mean for evangelicals to unite behind a Catholic in the culture war?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Throughout much of American history, evangelicals and Catholics were not good friends. Catholics were seen as the enemy. They were not true Christians. If we look at abortion, conservative evangelicals were not<\/em> lockstep pro-life, not by any stretch in the 1960s, in part because that was seen as a Catholic issue, and who wants to be like the Catholics?<\/p>\nBut Schlafly and the evangelical movement had a lot in common. Schlafly started out as an anti-communist, rising to fame with her book A Choice Not an Echo.<\/em> It wasn’t until the early \u201970s that she started to care about gender and feminism. A friend brought the Equal Rights Amendment to her attention and she initially thought, “I have bigger fish to fry here. I’m focused on anti-communism and foreign policy. Don’t waste my time.” Then she took a closer look and realized, just as evangelicals did, just how gender was linked to foreign policy \u2014 the idea that this strength of the American nation needs strong men and rugged men.<\/p>\nThe counterpoint to that is that you need submissive, domesticated, very feminine women to play their proper role. And you need both together in the form of the nuclear family to strengthen the nation and act as a bulwark against communism, among other things, by raising boys to be strong men to fight the communists on the field of battle.<\/p>\n
Anti-communism and gender conservatism fit so neatly together in Schlafly’s work, and this is inspiring for evangelicals. She articulates their own nascent ideas for them and puts the pieces together in a way that just makes perfect sense. Very soon they start offering their own versions of this.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n From the nuclear family to the nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Exactly. And ultimately it didn\u2019t matter so much that she was a Catholic, as she was clearly on their side where it mattered \u2014 again, not theology but cultural and political values. The traditional theological distinctions and cultural distinctions between Catholics and Protestants start to recede as we start to see these conservative values unite conservative white Catholics with conservative white evangelicals.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n Later on, followed by more unity with conservative Jews and conservative Mormons.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n Yes. With conservative Mormons, at this point already as well, we can see a parallel story, particularly around the issues of gender. You have conservative Mormon women also advocating these same values and they come together.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Daniel Denvir<\/dt>\n \n The end of the Cold War posed a problem for militarized American evangelicalism. You write, “For decades anti-Communism had been a lynchpin in the evangelical worldview, justifying militarism abroad and a militant pursuit of moral purity at home. The victory of the free world was something to celebrate. But it was also disorienting. Without a common enemy, it would be more difficult to sustain militant expressions of faith.”<\/p>\n
Evangelicals, you write, initially found their new enemy in a so-called New World Order, which I didn’t realize was such a thoroughly evangelical idea. What was this new evil, the New World Order, that evangelicals discovered?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kristin Kobes Du Mez<\/dt>\n \n In the \u201990s, evangelicalism was thrown into disarray. You had Pat Buchanan and the old guard saying, \u201cWe need to double down. There\u2019s a war on. It\u2019s not the Cold War, but it\u2019s a war for the soul of America.\u201d But you also had people casting about for something new and saying, \u201cLet\u2019s focus on global poverty. Let’s focus on global persecution of Christians. Let’s engage in anti-trafficking activism. Let’s put the old ways behind us.”<\/p>\n
The New World Order emerged as a candidate for the new threat. There’s a longer history here too, in twentieth-century conservative fundamentalism, of different interpretations of the scriptures as prophesying an evil global order. This pops up in theology and also in Christian fiction, the idea of a totalizing force that presents itself as standing for world harmony but is not of God and therefore can only be evil. The idea is, \u201cThis is Antichrist so don’t be fooled. We have to stand against them.\u201d<\/p>\n