Evangelical Trump support culminated from an embrace of militant masculinity.

Evidence

But evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice. It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 8

Eric Metaxas’s change of heart is a case in point. Early on, when Trump’s candidacy still seemed like a joke, Metaxas had issued a number of satirical tweets mocking Trump’s deficient faith formation. Only after Trump secured the nomination did Metaxas publicly express his support: “With all his foibles, peccadilloes, and metaphorical warts, he is nonetheless the last best hope of keeping America from sliding into oblivion, the tank, the abyss, the dustbin of history, if you will.” Metaxas never looked back. If Hillary Clinton were to be elected, he wagered the country had less than two years before it would cease to exist. “Not only can we vote for Trump, we must vote for Trump.” Metaxas’s endorsement shocked many conservatives who knew him. How could Bonhoeffer’s biographer support a man like Trump? In his own book, after all, he had described Hitler’s rise to power in words that rang eerily familiar: “The German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling.” Metaxas agreed that his Bonhoeffer biography invited “some unpleasant parallels w/ the current election,” but not those one might expect. He saw no connection between Trump and Hitler, but he did refer to Trump’s opponent as “Hitlery Clinton.” He suggested, too, that his critics bore a striking resemblance to Nazis. It wasn’t Trump and his followers who were guilty of racism and xenophobia; it was the “Beltway and Manhattan elites” who practiced a “new and accepted tribalism and xenophobia” against “white European ‘Christian’ varieties.” … What Metaxas admired in Trump appeared to be precisely the fact that he was no great man of virtue, traditionally defined. But he was the perfect embodiment of a different set of masculine “virtues” that evangelical men had been touting for nearly half a century. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 591

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines ‘militant masculinity’ as patriarchal authority plus callous display of power — the organizing concept of the book.
• XREF: Militant masculinity here echoes the gender/identity framing in Sally Kitch and other feminist political theory. — connects to: Trump’s conduct consecrates the white male supremacy entrenched in traditional values — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 293; Trump won white Christian support through explicit appeals to white supremacy. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 53
• DEEPTHINKING: The move — a Bonhoeffer biographer dismissing any Hitler-Trump parallel while calling Clinton ‘Hitlery’ and his critics Nazis, entirely inverting the framework — is a dense, multilayered demonstration of how the masculinity apparatus re-codes moral categories. The final two sentences crystallize the book’s whole thesis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 8; Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 591