Been thinking about the "who is a representative evangelical" Q that seems central to debates about @kkdumez 's #Jesus&JohnWayne. Du Mez argues that evangelical support for Trump can be traced thru years of cultural formation that baptized the rugged, individualist, warrior male.

I read the book a while back & appreciated how it made connections. Other readers saw those connections as strained, that Du Mex had focused too much on outliers. Here are two paradoxes that might help the conversation:

1. Outside mainstream =/= countercultural.

I do think some of names in book are outside mainstream but I'm not convinced they're swimming against tide. They may be marginalized or ignored by mainstream, but they weren't rejected. That seems significant.

2. Celebrity =/= influence

We tend to package these together but when we do, we can miss how someone might be tremendously influential & not be well-known, rich, or visible to person in pew.

(I think of the *influence* of someone like Wayne Grudem. Writing a widely popular accessible systematic & being editor of new Bible translation is *massive* amount of influence especially when these things are used to train next generation of pastors & teachers.)

So I wonder if perhaps our categories are too small to explore the very idea of representation. When we ask about whether a particular person can speak for evangelicals, we've got to think in multiple layers. The truth is that many people speak for evangelicalism.

That's part of what makes it so messy & so loud. Evangelicals don't have clear ecclesiastical imprimatur. We have gatekeepers & power brokers, for sure, but it is harder to determine "official" stance.

That doesn't mean we can't draw conclusions, challenge, or defend them. It's just that we have to work in multiple categories at once. We have to recognize the myriad ways that culture is formed in an inherently populist tradition.