Wayne’s on-screen military persona, though he never served, became the lexicon of Christian manhood

Evidence

The next year Wayne starred as Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, a role modeled after the character he’d played in Red River. In this way, Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker—and Wayne himself—combined the mythology of the American cowboy with that of the freedom-fighting soldier. Wayne never actually served in the military. When the Second World War broke out, he’d been reluctant to put his budding film career on hold to enlist. (As a minor film star he did undertake an OSS-sponsored “inspection tour” of the Pacific, but his contributions to the war effort were minimal.) Yet Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker stood as a symbol of American toughness, and phrases Wayne uttered onscreen—“Saddle up!” and “Lock and load!”—entered the lexicon of American conservatism. In time, too, Wayne’s embodiment of heroic masculinity would come to serve as the touchstone for authentic Christian manhood. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 78

Categorization

• XREF: The irony — a fake soldier becoming the icon of authentic masculine Christianity — directly supports Du Mez’s core point that this masculinity strand is constructed through media, not lived practice.
• SEED: Essay angle: how manufactured film personas, not genuine service, became the standard of ‘authentic’ manhood in a religious subculture — the performative at the center of identity construction.