In “The Real Pronoun Problem,” I argued that dividing the American people into “they” (the bad guys) and “us” (the good guys) is an early sign of totalitarianism—or some new form of it.

After recently reading Kristin Kobe du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne, a history of the Evangelical movement, I am convinced that a rigid approach to gender is just as portentous. While Kobe du Mez’s book is a linear history of the Evangelical movement, she also describes a historical back formation—the way that Evangelicals used militant male role models, like John Wayne, to transform the meek and peaceful Jesus into a muscular and aggressive warrior.

In this worldview, the male and female roles form a clear binary with males as the head of the household. This is not Jungian New Age hippie shit. Males do not have an Anima. There’s no “getting in touch with your female side.” Jesus, like John Wayne, is all male.

This worldview is also essentialist. The binary should be preserved, not blurred or resolved as one matures or as history unfolds. The essence of the male is testosterone, that is, manly aggression and sexual desire. The male should be allowed to express his essence. The stability of the world depends on it. The essence of women is to be pretty and satisfy their husband’s desires.

As Kobe du Mez recounts, this family structure leads to all kinds of moral failings (financial and sexual) and bizarre rituals (such as, Purity Proms, where fathers take their virgin daughters to a formal dance, a public commitment to premarital chastity). In you want more detail, you can find it in Jesus and John Wayne or in the lecture below.

This world is hard for me to understand. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church that was conservative enough, but not Evangelical. I was never told that I had a right to express my essence, that is, my testosterone. Quite the contrary. I was warned to avoid “heavy petting.” We—all the prepubescent males in my Sunday School class—were supposed to intuitively grasp what “heavy petting” was. It was never defined. No instruction manual was provided. I tried to imagine running my hand across the head of a young woman (petting) with ample pressure (heavy), but it just didn’t do anything for me. It also seems fairly harmless. I just didn’t get it. I was totally clueless.

My own religious upbringing taught me that religion was about controlling sexual urges, so I was unprepared for Kobe du Mez’s long chapters on preachers who celebrated the male sexual drive, justified it by resorting to a crude biology (that is, the male essence of testosterone), and even argued that the survival of the United States of America depended on Christian wives satisfying their husbands. I never heard anything like this in my church.

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The inverted world revealed in Kobe du Mez’s history is an odd amalgam of incompatible ideas—maybe not fully formed concepts, more like reactions to threats. It is post-Freudian (it recognizes the primacy of the sex drive without recognizing its inevitable conflict with cultural norms), anti-Freudian (it does not recognize the need to analyze the sex drive or the trauma it often creates, including rape), anti-Feminist (Evangelicals were relatively unconcerned about abortion until Feminists adopted it as a cause célèbres), and post-hippie (the failure of the Vietnam War is a failure of American manhood). In this sense, the history of the Evangelical movement is a long string of refusals to change during a period of serial cultural revolutions. This view aligns with research and theory about the Authoritarian Personality, and it makes the merger between Evangelicals and Trump understandable, perhaps, inevitable.

In Kobe du Mez’s history, the core of Evangelical theology, if it could be called that, is the need to preserve the patriarchal family, as if it were the biblical, biological, and historical truth—a reality they believe they are expressing rather than inventing. This means militaristic men, subservient women, and docile children.

For the rest of this post, I want to add some reactions and analysis to Kobe du Mez’s history.

I was struck by how consistently Evangelicals preached and wrote about the importance of satisfying male sexual desire and how seldom they discussed sin. If we were to look at the history of Christianity at large, we would find a wide range of views on sexuality (see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, 2025; reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Erin Maglaque, April 24, 2025), but sex is often associated with sin, shame, and Grace—a pattern that humans, men more so than women, have been cycling through since the manifestation of original sin, not in the Garden of Eden, but in the writings of Saint Augustine.

If Kobe du Mez is right, Evangelicals focus more on the expression of desire (certainly, within marriage, although prominent Evangelicals are remarkably creative about finding new ways to violate the marriage bond), than on sin. She discusses this as a reaction to the first wave of feminism. Perhaps, you remember the meme with the following caption: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” I wonder if it is also related to a suppression of shame.

Freud and the psychoanalyst who followed him argued that the more you try to suppress a traumatic event or a basic drive, the more it controls you. I don’t think that Kobe du Mez mentions “shame” once in her book. If she does, it is in passing. Shame may, however, explain some of the sexual perversions that are revealed when Evangelical scandals hit the press. I don’t often use the phrase “sexual perversion,” but it seems apt here.

The life and times of Jerry Falwell Jr. provides a good example. I am not going to go into detail (praise the Lord), but basically Junior arranged for a pool boy to have sex with his wife while he watched and masturbated in a dark corner of the hotel room. This behavior in the context of the strict moral code at Liberty University (Falwell, at the time, was the president of the university) is hypocritical at a level that must have registered even in Falwell’s alcoholic brain.

When I try to imagine Falwell’s need to watch his wife have sex with another man (a boy, actually), I only come up with this: That he felt so much sexual shame (manifested in the voice of his earthly father) that he not only needed to humiliate himself; he also needed to eroticize his shame. Can you imagine a Freudian case study of this guy? That would be a fun read.

Kobe du Mez writes about the enormous power that the patriarchal family structure grants to the father and, by implication, to church leaders. She catalogs the abuse of power by church leaders. Appropriately, because her focus is on the Evangelical movement. If, however, we look within the family, we often find unresolved trauma.

A man with unchecked power, not surprisingly, often abuses that power. If I am the head of a patriarchal family, I believe that I should be obeyed and respected. My needs should be met. I might think that my masculinity is muscular, but it is actually rather fragile. Any challenge to my authority, which has the potential of unraveling my entire identity, is a threat. When threatened, maybe by some guy expressing New Age ideas, I react like an out-of-control adolescent. My moral compass is lost. One scandal, then another, then another. All that remains is shame-fueled rage.

Before going further, a qualification. The history of the patriarchal family covers a lot of ground, and the ground can easily shift, depending on one’s perspective. And all perspectives are, in the end, limited.

So, let me see if I can annoy some people in the next few paragraphs. Of course, I mean those other people. Not you, valued reader.

From growing up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, I am very familiar with patriarchal families, which are not always toxic. The patriarchy can take the form of the father being the breadwinner, and the wife raising the kids. The father sits at the head of the dinner table, but he doesn’t scream at the kids.

These families can be nurturing and loving. Do they limit options, especially for women? Sometimes. But all families limit options in some way.

Yes, patriarchal families are conservative, religious, and traditional, but many of them adapt and change. I have seen it happen. If the son announces that he is gay, many patriarchal families shift their view of homosexuality, maybe not immediately, but over time. If a daughter wants to be a doctor or lawyer, she is often supported, even encouraged.

I have also known my share of crazy “egalitarian” families. The mom and dad speak of “social justice,” and they apply the concept everywhere—except within their own family.

The political right and the patriarchal family have not managed to corner dysfunction.

The only thing that conservative and liberal families have in common is that they all claim to be “normal.” And maybe they are right, considering that most families are dysfunctional.

End of extended qualification.

To continue, within a patriarchal family, within a structure that says the father is the head of the house, that the father should be obeyed, pathology is hard to check. The wife is not going to say, “Honey, maybe you need a little therapy.”

The father can become domineering and abusive. When this leads to trauma—sexual, physical, or emotional abuse—the children learn that they must conform to be loved. This sets them up to follow and even adore a strong leader, as if the strong leader has no faults. They were never allowed to criticize or joke with their own father; they never learned how to criticize a leader. As children, they learned to ignore the faults of the father and father figures. But it even goes beyond this. Their very identity depends on a father figure who promises to eliminate external threats.

If the children believe that parental love is conditional, they struggle to develop into adults. Their inner lives are chaotic, which they attempt to control by controlling their environment. This makes them more vulnerable to cults, which create an isolated and predictable world. Erik Erickson, the German psychologist who wrote about Hitler’s childhood, explains all this in more depth.

Part of the problem with the Evangelical glorification of the patriarchal family is that it is ahistorical—or selectively historical, as it is selectively biblical. We can define a cult by the few passages of the Bible that the charismatic leader chooses to read literally. If he reads Mark 16:18 literally (“they shall take up serpents”), the congregation handles rattlesnakes. Most Christians have enough sense to read this passage metaphorically or to ignore it completely.

I never excelled in Vacation Bible School, but I do know that there is an Old Testament and a New Testament. I know that the red letter sections of the New Testament are the words of Jesus. If we are going to read any section of the Bible literally, it should be the red letter sections. Evangelicals, however, talk about Jesus as they quote the Old Testament. They tend to be Old Testament Christians.

Similarly, Evangelicals select historical events to justify their beliefs. As Kobe du Mez explains, Evangelicals focus on the Vietnam War (the war that America lost) and reduce its complexity until they find a moral lesson (we, as a nation, lacked the will of real men). Instead of looking inward, they blame the national failure on Feminists and hippies. They seem to reveal history. They never leave the present moment.

The ultimate problem with any family structure, in my opinion, is reification. We, as a society, shouldn’t settle on a particular family structure, whatever it is, as if it were the only way for us to live together. And we don’t need to. If we view families through the long lens of history, we will see that the structure was never entirely uniform, and the structure of families is always adapting. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2023) is a good source to open up our understanding of variations in families and communities, in history and prehistory.

Whatever family structure we adopt, books like Kobe du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne should teach us that we need to develop better parenting skills. Life can be difficult, and developing the skills to cope with life—maturing into adulthood—is a long and fraught process. We need parents who are more like mentors and less like dictators.

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