Vietnam polarized evangelicals against mainstream America toward greater militarism

Evidence

The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public. … Aware of their outlier status, many evangelicals understood themselves to be a faithful remnant, America’s last great hope. With the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, conservative evangelicals “assumed the role of church militant.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis about continuity: the militant-remnant self-understanding formed here carries directly into Trump-era politics.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much did polls showing near-universal evangelical Vietnam hawkishness depend on Southern Baptist/Lutheran survey design?
• DEFINE: The ‘faithful remnant’ and ‘church militant’ framing previews the core of Du Mez’s identity argument.