Evangelicals presented Trump’s cinematic moral clarity as authentic masculinity

Evidence

Trump believed “in a black-and-white world of right and wrong, good and evil.” It was like in the movies, where you always knew the good guys from the bad guys, and you knew America was on the side of the righteous. Trump, in other words, was a real man, a man whose rugged masculinity was forged in 1950s America, a time when all was right with the world. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 613

Categorization

• XREF: The movie-hero framing links to the book’s argument that evangelicals formed their moral imagination through Westerns and action films, a thread running across earlier chapters. — 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