Evangelicals read Carter’s political failures as masculine deficiency, not policy error.

Evidence

To conservative evangelicals, Reagan was a godsend. In the face of Carter’s “wimp factor,” Reagan projected the rugged, masculine leadership they believed the country so desperately needed. (It was much easier to chalk up Carter’s failures to deficient masculinity than to blame US policy stretching back decades.) Reagan’s irrefutable masculinity also reassured conservatives unsettled by the gay rights movement. It wasn’t lost on conservative Christians that Carter’s own masculinity seemed lacking, even as “the homosexual movement reached its maximum level of influence” under his watch. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Directly advances the book’s central mechanism: political judgments filtered through a militant-masculinity lens; supports the reader’s contestation of whether this strand defines white evangelicalism.