Vietnam’s failure was read by evangelicals as a crisis of American manhood

Evidence

THE VIETNAM WAR was a foreign policy crisis, and a domestic one. Young men dodged the draft, shirking their duty to protect American interests in the face of global communism. Antiwar protesters shunned authority, advising their generation to make love, not war. Sporting long hair and flowered shirts, the young men and women of this generation seemed nearly indistinguishable, at least according to conservative critics. The failure of American soldiers to defeat a ragtag enemy testified to serious problems of American manhood, and no group felt this crisis more keenly than American evangelicals. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 122

Categorization

• XREF: The androgyny/indistinguishability panic directly parallels the reader’s own ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article on cross-cultural moral panics over gender-blurring dress. — connects to: Evangelical abolitionism collapsed when the Civil War’s carnage discredited perfectionist optimism — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 50
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece: here the immodesty panic is inverted into a military defeat narrative tied to effeminized appearance.