1/ Im devoted to the works of Paulette Jiles--*News of the World* is as fine a novel as has been written in the last decade--and am enjoying reading her poetry and autobiography. She went N to Canada in the 60s with friends evading drafts during the Vietnam Era and it prompted me

2/ to ask why religious conservatives in the US especially were so devoted to the Vietnam War. So I did a quick reading and discovered that in Britain, foreign wars were routinely denigrated by the bourgeois churchgoing class as adventures cooked up by the Foreign Office. It was

3/ not a "duty" to or mark of patriotism in the 19th Cent to fight in a non-European war. Why did Christianity in the United States impute morality, patriotism, and piety to empire building in a way that Great Britain did not? Why did conservative churchgoers in the mid 20th Cent

4/ embrace the imperialistic program created by Protestant progressives at the turn of the 20th Century? Its en vogue to fault "Evangelicalism" with faults these days but almost all of the perceived societal sins have their roots in intellectual and religious movements that began

5/ in 1880. Jesus and John Wayne is really just a sunbelt aesthetic placed on historic Progressive tropes about liberal democracy and modernity--think Whiggish theory with six shooters--saving traditional societies perceived to be benighted because they remain beholden to customs

6/ and practices that are out of step with the precepts of neoliberal liberation. Evangelicalism in this reading--and I think Im not entirely wrong--is really warmed over late 19th Cent Progressive Protestantism with a more orthodox soteriology. So to bring this back to Jiles

7/ and evading Vietnam, one might propose that anger at draft dodging has as much to do with presumptions about expanding or preserving the liberal order. Any history of "Evangelicalism" that starts in the middle of the 20th Century is incomplete at best. It doesn't mean its

8/ entirely wrong, but it does appear that this doesnt take into account intellectual first causes, and it can lead to intellectual cartoons that are more about socio-intellectual venting than properly understanding the past. Fin.