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

The author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a historian. She is a native of the town of Sioux Center in northwest Iowa, where she also attended Dordt College (now Dordt University), an evangelical Christian university, as an undergraduate. She received a BA in history and Germany and then earned a MA and a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame. Currently, she is a professor of History at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion. She specializes in the recent history of women, religion, and political movements in the US. Her other publication is A Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism, a biography of female doctor, Christian theologian, and social activist Katharine Bushnell published in 2015. Also, she has written articles on religion and politics for the BBC, Religion News Service, and the New York Times, among other outfits.

Du Mez has been outspoken about the influence that conservative evangelical culture has had over US politics, arguing that this influence has been detrimental to American democracy in general.