Evangelical culture had long valued rugged, ruthless male leadership like Trump’s

Evidence

Since the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals had championed discipline and authority. To obey God was to obey patriarchal authorities within a rigid chain of command, and God had equipped men to exercise this authority in the home and in society at large. Testosterone made men dangerous, but it also made them heroes. Within their own churches and organizations, evangelicals had elevated and revered men who exhibited the same traits of rugged and even ruthless leadership that President Trump now paraded on the national stage. Too often, they had also turned a blind eye to abuses of power in the interest of propping up patriarchal authority. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 617

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the causal engine of the whole book — the mechanism by which a consumer culture of militant masculinity rendered Trump’s behavior familiar rather than anomalous. The compressed sentence ‘Testosterone made men dangerous, but it also made them heroes’ captures the double-edged valorization central to the argument.
• XREF: connects to: Evangelical leaders defended Trump’s moral scandals as a political trade-off for cultural power. — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 230; Leading evangelical figures framed Trump’s presidency as divinely ordained kingship — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 212