In January of 2016, a candidate for the presidency of the United States spoke at a small Christian

college in Iowa. He warned about Muslims and immigrants, he called his opponents stupid and

pathetic. He warned the audience that Christianity was under siege, and he boasted that he could

stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and he wouldn't lose any voters.

The crowd applauded. And to the shock of many, Evangelicals went on to vote for him in record numbers.

This is the story of how Evangelicalism became corrupted and fractured a nation.

My name is Skye Jitani, I'm the co-host of the Holypost podcast. In Episode 1, I spoke with Kristen

Dumay about how the Cold War came to define and shape the American Evangelical imagination.

We saw how 19th century revivalism morphed into 20th century militarism,

evangelists that used to preach about hell and brimstone, added nuclear war and socialism to

their warnings, and how many white Evangelicals rejected anything that clouded the moral clarity

that America was good, godly, and righteous all of the time. In this episode, we move forward a

bit into the 1970s and 80s. Here, Dumay focuses on how Evangelicals tried to maintain

clear authority structures both in the home and in society, and how perceived threats to those

authorities gave rise to the religious right. Part 1 of this episode focuses on the tension

between feminism and family values in the 1970s, and part 2 looks at the theology of reconstructionism

and the religious right. Time stamps for each part are in the show notes. Welcome to Episode 2 of Jesus

and John Wayne.

Kristen Dumay, welcome back. Thank you. Good to be here again. I'm looking forward to continuing the

conversation about Jesus and John Wayne and how this applies to what we're experiencing today.

Last time we talked a lot about Cold War Christianity and how this deep fear of communism both inside

the United States and as a foreign threat shaped a lot of 20th century Evangelicalism, but I want

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