Read on Twitter
Spent the last moments of 2020 finishing up @kkdumez's JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE. Everyone already knows how great it is, but I'll go ahead and chime in anyway: Easily one of the best books on US religious history I've ever read.
People have already commented on almost every part of the book, so there's little for me to add. Much of this book is personal for me, and it was hard to read at times as a result. So much of this is part of my upbringing.
I went with my dad to a couple Promise Keepers events in middle school. My mom took me and my brother to a Joshua Harris event at a megachurch in Portland when I was 14. I was openly hostile to it, but my brother thought it was gospel at the time.
In high school, a group of John Piper fanatics popped up at my church. (One of the elders disparagingly called them the "Piperettes.") They would gather every Sunday evening to listen to his latest sermon, as if it were the voice of God.
In 2001, @amyecongdon and I went with my parents to a John Eldredge event based on a mix of material from Sacred Romance and his new book Wild at Heart. The next year, at Wheaton College, I was in a men's small group that read through Wild at Heart.
Despite these (and many other) points of connection to evangelical masculinity culture, I was largely spared. My father modeled the exact opposite of the toxic masculinity recounted in the book, and my mother was always fierce in her leadership—and eventually in her theology too.
After I left for Princeton Seminary in 2005, my parents' commitment to egalitarianism led them to break away from our church. It took them awhile, but they finally found a community that was egalitarian, LGBTQ affirming, and still low church "evangelical" in its liturgy.
For me, I broke with evangelicalism over a mixture of the Iraq War in 2003 and my larger family's reaction to Wheaton College's change in its policy regarding dancing. But it took awhile to fully extricate myself from evangelical culture, which occurred around 2010.
When old friends of ours in Portland latched on to Driscoll's Mars Hill satellite church with enthusiasm, Amy and I did our best to persuade them away from that world. But it wasn't until Driscoll's implosion that they finally left that world.
There are so many people left damaged in the wake of the events recounted in Du Mez's book. Family members and friends are now atheists who won't step in the foot of a church. My own immediate family has been rent asunder by these toxic forces.
There was so much @kkdumez had to leave out, understandably. This book could have been twice as long easily. I wish we had heard about Rob Bell and Rachel Held Evans, for instance. Their rejection by evangelical leaders is relevant to this story.
More than anything, the book is about evangelical grifting and the shady world of evangelical publishing. The number of terrible books @kkdumez had to read is appalling and must have made her eyes bleed. But the money made is remarkable and disturbing.
For me the most eye-opening chapter was on Oliver North, but the chapter on sexual abuse scandals toward the end is probably the heart of the whole story, where it all comes together in brutal fashion.
This is one 2020 book that will live with me throughout 2021 and beyond.
