“Do you know where we are?” I asked my 16-year-old son as we turned onto the main road that goes near my parents’ house.
“No,” he replied. “My awareness of the city is like disconnected bubbles. Gramma’s neighborhood is one bubble. School is another. Home or the store are other bubbles. When I’m in each bubble, I know where I’m at. But once we leave the bubble, I have no idea how to get to the next bubble or how they’re connected.”
It struck me in that moment how similar this experience is to the disconnection between many lay evangelicals and the historians, sociologists and biblical scholars who make the connections for Christians between the bubbles or spheres of society.
Perhaps the most influential historian of this decade who helps us understand how these contexts connect is Kristin Kobes Du Mez. In her New York Times bestselling book Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez detailed the history of rugged masculinity in the development of Christian nationalism through the 20th century to the rise of Donald Trump.
On Sept. 15, her new book, Live Laugh Love, releases, in which she traces the history of how Christian womanhood was shaped toward Christian nationalism, connecting such spheres as “Christian bookstores and radio, Hallmark movies, multilevel marketing companies, and contemporary lifestyle brands.”
Like my teenage son’s awareness of our city, many evangelical women have experienced those contexts. They listen to the radio on their way to a book study, at which the group decides to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie the following month, where one of the women will gift everyone a Tupperware sample from her collection, in hopes to remind them to sign up as a distributor. But how do all these seemingly disparate experiences connect and how are they shaping the individuals and society as a whole?
For those who can read Live Laugh Love as an opportunity for self and neighbor awareness, coming to terms with the dynamics of these various worlds can be a blend of humbling, disheartening, enlightening or freeing. As Karen Swallow Prior put it on Threads after she read Du Mez’s manuscript, “The biggest thing I’m left with is how Kristin connects so many dots across history, denominations, secular influences and political interests.”
But unfortunately, not everyone in evangelicalism receives Du Mez’s scholarship with such openness.
An unexpected critic
Because Du Mez exposes the harm caused by hierarchies of male headship and female submission paired with theologies of sovereignty and dominion, it’s to be expected that her work would get criticized by complementarian men, especially of the Southern Baptist variety.
In response to a BNG column by David Gushee following Du Mez’s first book, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate and 9 Marks editor Jonathan Leeman pointed to such authors as Du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, Jemar Tisby, Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry and Jacob Alan Cook and warned of “wolves” who “take a wicked delight in posturing as protectors of the hurt,” … “have managed to frame the conversation for the group,” … and “exploit these experiences to lead people into false teaching and church division.”
That men like Leeman would hurl such accusations toward Christian scholars who expose the fruit of male headship entitlement isn’t surprising. These men have power to protect, and they wield theology to do so. But with Du Mez’s new book set to release, the men of conservative evangelical Calvinist complementarianism are turning to an unexpected critic to defend them — an egalitarian female pacifist.
In a piece for The Gospel Coalition, Steve Bateman promotes Bonnie Kristian’s new book, In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. While naming the usual suspects that include Du Mez, Bateman calls these scholars “cultural elites,” which is a rather hilarious accusation for anyone who knows Du Mez personally.
Bateman identifies as a “complementarian, just-war theorist, nondenominational pastor of a local evangelical church living in a red state of the Deep South.” He describes Kristian as “an egalitarian, pacifist, Anglican editor for a flagship evangelical publication living in a purple state in the North.” But since Kristian is willing to defend evangelicalism by attacking Du Mez’s scholarship, Bateman and TGC will endorse her work.
Bonnie Kristian
To be fair, Kristian isn’t like the complementarian trad wife or the administrative assistant whom Christian patriarchs occasionally give permission to write articles defending them. She’s the deputy editor at Christianity Today and is a graduate of Bethel Seminary. And as an egalitarian pacifist, she doesn’t share the theological priorities these Christian patriarchs depend on.
But do her criticisms of Du Mez hold up?
Accusing Du Mez of a double standard
According to TGC, “Kristian shows how critics tend to hold evangelicalism to a standard they don’t require of other groups or even themselves.” One example they give is how Kristian points out that Du Mez says white evangelicals are Islamophobic but praises Obama for speaking out against “the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
TGC says this is a “double standard fallacy” and refers to Proverbs 20:10, using the authority of Scripture to accuse Du Mez of “using unequal weights and measures.”
But this is simply dishonest. As we have documented at Baptist News Global, Republican politicians are publishing thousands of Islamophobic posts on social media, worship leaders like Sean Feucht are invading peaceful Muslim worship gatherings, pastors are teaming up with violent insurrectionists like Jake Lang to self-identify as Christian Crusaders who use the n word and call Muslims “third world mongrels” while ripping up Qurans.
There’s a huge difference between that entire culture and a comment from Obama about radical Islam.
Accusing Du Mez of ‘nutpicking’
Because scholars like Du Mez critique white evangelicalism as Islamophobic, TGC highlights Kristian’s claim that Du Mez and company use the “nutpicking fallacy, where they find examples on the fringe of the movement to characterize as normative.”
For example, in an interview with Vox, Kristian points to “one pastor in Tennessee, Greg Locke, who shows up in story after story and book after book.”
But while it’s true that men like Locke, Feucht or Lang may come across as the extreme fringe, their fundamental understanding of gendered authority, submission and spiritual warfare is the same logic as those in the center. It’s similar to the way Bill Gothard’s extremism was exposed in season one of Shiny Happy People.
When the docuseries was released, TGC claimed it painted with “too broad a brush,” gave “a free platform to people eager to throw stones at a faith they’ve left behind,” and failed to mention all the positive experiences in evangelicalism.
Du Mez shares these connections as well in Live Laugh Love, mapping out such influencers as Bill Bright, Billy Graham and Henrietta Mears. The problem isn’t a few on the fringe. It lies in the hierarchies at the heart of the movement.
Their defensiveness shows they recognized how similar their theology is to Gothard’s theology. Now they’re using the same tactics to defend against Du Mez’s critiques today.
Accusing Du Mez of spreading scorn
Perhaps Kristian’s biggest concern about Du Mez’s work is that it causes people to view evangelicals as a movement worthy of scorn. In an interview with the Washington Post, Kristian linked to Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne and said, “One book after another treats them as dangers to democracy.”
As part of her counter-narrative, Kristian claims: “Research shows that practicing evangelicals are markedly more likely than those who leave the church to ‘avoid discrimination based on race,’ to provide ‘financially and/or practically for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, stealing and greed. Evangelicals donate 12 times as much to disaster relief and missions as they spend on politics.”
But as Hemant Mehta pointed out at Friendly Atheist, the research Kristian links to “doesn’t measure whether practicing evangelicals actually avoid racial discrimination or help oppressed people. The link she provides — to a book written by two conservative Christians — asks which standards respondents say they ‘seek to follow in good faith.’ In other words, the authors are measuring aspiration, not conduct. Kristian quietly converts ‘I want to be this kind of person’ into ‘research shows I behave this way.’”
“White evangelicals are more concerned about perception than about people, about image than about image bearers.”
In other words, white evangelicals are more concerned about perception than about people, about image than about image bearers. That should be no surprise, given how much energy they spend warning against the “sin” of empathy. Their faith is shown by their works. And their works bear the fruit of attacking their neighbors.
Kristian wants to defend white evangelicals from accusations that they’re dangers to democracy. But as Robert P. Jones demonstrates in his new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, the reality is that their disproportionate, overwhelming support for authoritarianism and for the violent policies of the Trump administration means they are dangers to democracy.
It’s stunning how an egalitarian pacifist such as Kristian would give these violent authoritarians such cover, despite her own opposition to Trump.
The disconnection between accusation and experience
But for many white evangelicals, the dark proclamations of scholars like Du Mez and Jones feels over the top and disconnected from their lived experience. After all, they don’t feel like they’re extremists. They simply went to their friend’s house to watch a Hallmark movie. They’re singing songs of joy about being free in Christ. They’re selling Tupperware. And they voted for the Republican candidate as always. How is that being complicit in promoting a movement that may take down democracy as we know it?
Their lack of self-awareness is what Kristian is tapping into. By accusing Du Mez of holding a double standard, of broad brushing based on a few extremists, and of demonizing evangelicals as a whole, Kristian ignores the reality that white evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for a violent authoritarian three times and are the group most excited to support his policies.
As David French said on a recent interview on Holy Post Media: “In 2024, Trump won the white evangelical vote 82% to 17%. He lost everybody else 58% to 40%. Sit with those numbers for a minute. And then you realize that we gave this to America. That’s what the white evangelical church did.”
Bonnie Kristian and the men at The Gospel Coalition don’t want to sit with that reality. And the masses of everyday white evangelicals don’t see what the big deal is.
“The masses of everyday white evangelicals don’t see what the big deal is.”
At this year’s Wild Goose Festival, Du Mez proposed one reason why everyday evangelicals seem shocked and defensive over accusations of extremism.
“There is an inner circle of leaders, of the strategizers,” Du Mez began. “And they know exactly what is going on. And you can think Project 2025, Heritage, the heads of the SBC Executive Committee, those kind of folks. But then you have concentric circles around it. And the further from that center you get, the less you know about what’s really going on and what the motivations and what the end game actually is. And the way these systems work is they draw people in through reward, community, belonging, all the lovely things, the smiles that greet you in the face when you walk in your neighborhood megachurch, and then they hold people in. But many of those people that are drawn in are beautiful people, well-intentioned people, lovely people who are then complicit in these very harmful projects.”
She concluded: “But they don’t feel complicit because their experience on the edges is mostly lovely and beautiful. So one of the tricky things I wrestle with is how do you address those. And the movement doesn’t work without the masses. But then when you attack the center, and you call out this harm, the defenders are primarily those around the edges. They say, ‘How dare you! We are good people. We are not racist. We are not authoritarian.’ And that is a problem I want to give you to grapple with because that’s what keeps me up at night.”
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.