Christianity in the 20th Century: A Gender-Based Critique

A half full congregation of a Christian church service inside.

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Jesus and John Wayne" by Kristin Kobes du Mez. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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How did Teddy Roosevelt help shape American Christianity? What impact did the wars of the 20th century have on the American church?

As a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University, Kristin Du Mez shares a new perspective on the history of American Christianity. She traces the evolving concept of masculinity within evangelicalism throughout the last century.

Keep reading to get Du Mez’s take on American Christianity in the 20th century.

Christianity in the 20th Century

Du Mez writes that the Victorian model of masculinity began to erode during the late 1890s as the evolving US economy changed the nature of men’s jobs. Rather than working hands-on jobs, men migrated to cities and began working corporate jobs in offices. In turn, for many men who had previously identified their masculinity with their work, this sense of masculinity felt threatened as the new office jobs didn’t require the same manly strength as their previous work.

As a result, Christianity in the 20th century would look quite different. Du Mez says that, under 26th US President Teddy Roosevelt, a new brand of rugged Christian masculinity arose in response to this perceived threat. She notes that Roosevelt’s election in 1901 popularized his conception of masculinity, where men were akin to rough Western cowboys who used violence to protect the innocent. Moreover, she points out that Roosevelt’s rugged conception of masculinity took on a distinctly evangelical flavor through the “muscular Christianity” movement, in which evangelical men rejected pacifism and instead embraced an aggressive view of masculinity that justified violence against one’s enemies in war.

How WWI Undermined Militant Christian Masculinity

Du Mez argues that, while the prospect of WWI stoked the flames of militant masculinity, the war’s reality had the opposite effect: The horrors of WWI cooled the enthusiasm for militant masculinity, causing a shift toward the paradigm of the Christian businessman.

Du Mez explains that, at the end of WWI, Americans recognized the war’s immense cost in bloodshed and carnage with no apparent payoff. Although WWI was billed as the war to end all wars, international conflict and tensions remained high after its conclusion. She points out that, for progressive Protestants in particular—a group that had strongly supported the war before its onset—the destruction wrought by WWI left them disillusioned. Protestant leader Sherwood Eddy, for instance, commented that after WWI, he realized that the alleged goals of the war—to end war for good and make militarism moot—all fell short.

(Shortform note: In American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin report that much like many Protestants believed WWI would end all war, many military officials hoped that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan during WWII would deter any future wars from occurring. In particular, they point out that physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project to design the nuclear bomb, supported bombing Japan for this reason.)

According to Du Mez, the war’s aftermath caused evangelicals to exalt successful business executives as the paradigm of masculinity. For example, she notes that Bruce Barton’s 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, portrayed Jesus as the world’s savviest businessman. Further, Barton emphasized Jesus’ strength—understanding strength in a business context, rather than a militaristic context. Evangelical men, according to Barton, should therefore strive to exemplify Jesus’ decisiveness and charisma in business contexts.

(Shortform note: Experts point out that current critics and historians have nearly unanimously denounced Barton’s work, arguing that it reflects the rampant materialism of the early 20th century and provides an inaccurate depiction of Jesus.)

The Renewal of Militant Christian Masculinity in WWII

Although WWI had robbed evangelicals’ hyper-aggressive conception of masculinity of its allure, Du Mez contends that the onset of WWII allowed this conception to rear its head again. She argues that. in the face of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, evangelical circles once more promoted militant masculinity.

According to Du Mez, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941—which prompted the US to join WWII the following day—was the watershed moment that shifted evangelical thought about the war. Whereas previously, the memory of WWI had kept evangelicals uncertain about the merits of joining WWII, Pearl Harbor convinced them that the Axis forces in WWII were unequivocally evil and worthy of destruction.

(Shortform note: Evangelicals’ support for US involvement in WWII after Pearl Harbor was reflective of a broader trend among Americans, according to polls. Prior to Pearl Harbor, in 1939, only 16% of Americans supported the US joining the war against Germany, but a few days after Pearl Harbor, 97% of Americans supported joining the war as an allied force.)

Consequently, Du Mez says, the militant evangelical conception of masculinity came into vogue again, as this type of masculinity was deemed necessary to win WWII. In part to promote this masculine ideal, fundamentalist Christians—evangelicals who interpret the Bible as literal truth—created the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942. Du Mez relates that the NAE’s cofounder Harold John Ockenga called for evangelical men to go on the offensive, both in the war but also domestically to evangelize the nation.

(Shortform note: Since 1942, the NAE’s influence has only grown: As of 2023, it includes 45,000 local churches as members throughout the US that span 40 Protestant denominations. In addition, it sponsors a wide array of nonprofits, such as World Relief, a resettlement agency that provides humanitarian aid to refugees worldwide.)

The Rise of Billy Graham Leading Into the Cold War

Du Mez argues that the NAE wasn’t the most powerful evangelical force promoting a tough, militaristic masculinity. That title belonged to Billy Graham, an evangelist and minister who started leading evangelical revival movements during WWII. Du Mez writes that Graham employed war and sports metaphors in his portrayals of Jesus to mass audiences—Graham likened Jesus to a “star athlete,” calling him “our great Commander” and emphasizing his immense physical strength. And, by the end of WWII, Graham had established himself as a preeminent defender of “manly evangelicalism.”

According to Du Mez, Graham’s emphasis on militaristic masculinity stretched beyond WWII and into the Cold War—the tension between the US and the communist Soviet Union that began in the late 1940s. She notes that, in Graham’s rallies, he portrayed communism as an evil force driven by Satan that threatened to annihilate the world via nuclear weapons. In turn, Graham exhorted evangelical men to protect their nation by fighting the Soviets in battle if necessary but also by maintaining righteous homes to defeat the moral evils of communism.

Evangelical Masculinity During the 1960s and 1970s

While the threat of communism during the Cold War sustained evangelicals’ militant masculinity in the wake of WWII, Du Mez explains that additional international and domestic threats strengthened this conception of masculinity throughout the 1960s and ’70s. We’ll first examine how the US military’s failure in the Vietnam War caused evangelicals to adopt a more hostile view of masculinity, then discuss how the perceived threat of feminism led evangelicals to double down on traditional gender roles in the home.

The Impact of the Vietnam War

According to Du Mez, US participation in the Vietnam War—in which the US faced guerrilla warfare from the communist Viet Cong, which controlled Northern Vietnam—further entrenched the militant evangelical conception of masculinity.

First, Du Mez argues, that during the Vietnam War, evangelicals made excuses for atrocities perpetrated by US soldiers. For example, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of murdering 22 innocent Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre—an episode in which US soldiers murdered around 500 Vietnamese villagers during the war. However, Du Mez notes that Billy Graham, for example, downplayed these atrocities. Graham commented that the Viet Cong had likely also committed war crimes, and even noted in The New York Times that “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”

(Shortform note: Despite the fact that the Charlie Company of the 11th Brigade massacred hundreds of civilians, only Calley was convicted of murder. According to experts, this was because of insufficient photographic evidence—photographs clearly showed Calley committing war crimes, but no photographs showed exactly which additional members of the Charlie Company murdered civilians. For this reason, prosecutors couldn’t prove the guilt of any additional soldiers beyond a reasonable doubt.)

Further, Du Mez observes that as the Vietnam War dragged on and the US failed to defeat the Viet Cong, many Americans grew disillusioned with US involvement in the war. Evangelicals, by contrast, drew a different conclusion, arguing that the US’s inability to defeat the Vietnamese stemmed from a dearth of masculinity among US soldiers. Du Mez reports that, to remedy this problem, evangelicals maintained that fathers needed to raise their sons to become rugged defenders of freedom—for instance, fundamentalist pastor Jack Hyles exhorted evangelicals to raise boys who weren’t afraid to use violence to defend their families.

Christianity in the 20th Century: A Gender-Based Critique