Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

By the 1980s, conservative evangelical political activism coalesced in the movement called the “Religious Right.” For the Religious Right, family values meant “the enforcement of women’s sexual and social subordination in the domestic realm and the promotion of American militarism on the national stage” (88). One leader of the Religious Right was Tim LaHaye, who later authored the Left Behind series of books about the Apocalypse and the return of Jesus Christ.

LaHaye and other evangelical writers were concerned about the effects of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the consequences of birth control pills becoming commercially available. A cultural shift in attitudes toward dating and marriage, described in books like Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl, meant that sexually active monogamous relationships outside marriage had become socially acceptable. In light of such changes, LaHaye felt he had to address the contradiction whereby evangelical women were raised to be chaste while evangelicals believed that men naturally had “voracious sexual appetites” (91). LaHaye and his wife, Beverly, tried to address this through their book The Act of Marriage, which “offered a vision of sexuality securely confined within the structures of patriarchal authority” (92).