Evangelicals venerate figures who openly reject traditional Christian virtue

Evidence

John Wayne became an icon of rugged American manhood for generations of conservatives. Pat Buchanan parroted Wayne in his presidential bid. Newt Gingrich called Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima “the formative movie of my life,” and Oliver North echoed slogans from that film in his 1994 Senate campaign. In time, Wayne would also emerge as an icon of Christian masculinity. Evangelicals admired (and still admire) him for his toughness and his swagger; he protected the weak, and he wouldn’t let anything get in the way of his pursuit of justice and order. Wayne was not an evangelical Christian, despite rumors to this effect regularly circulated by evangelicals themselves. He did not live a moral life by the standards of traditional Christian virtue. Yet for many evangelicals, Wayne would come to symbolize a different set of virtues—a nostalgic yearning for a mythical “Christian America,” a return to “traditional” gender roles, and the reassertion of (white) patriarchal authority. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 24

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on literary hero worship and on how communities select symbols regardless of factual accuracy.
• SEED: Angle: how a community’s choice of heroes reveals its actual values better than its stated theology — a test for reading any identity group.