Evangelicals linked the erosion of patriarchy to the nation’s political decline

Evidence

For Metaxas, the decline of heroic masculinity undermined Christian nationalism and eroded patriarchal authority. Just compare the 1950s television show Father Knows Best with the way the mainstream media had come to depict fathers, “either as dunces or as overbearing fools.” But the country was paying the bitter price for their rejection of authority. Young men especially needed heroes and role models to see “what it means to be a real man, a good man, a heroic and brave man.” Metaxas wasn’t saying anything evangelicals hadn’t been saying for fifty years. But with Barack Obama in the White House, and with evidence abounding that evangelicals were losing the culture wars, the message resonated widely. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the book’s central claim that militant masculinity functions as the organizing center of white evangelical identity; note the fifty-year continuity claim dovetails with the continuity-not-hypocrisy thesis. — connects to: Christian nationalist worship frames national decline as divine punishment for apostasy from God’s laws — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 37