More and more Americans are trying to understand the influence of Christianity on the country’s politics.
Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez specializes in the intersections of religion, politics and gender. She's also a senior democracy fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute.
Du Mez published her book “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” in 2020.
It traced how some Christians replaced God with cowboys and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.
Her next book, coming September 2026, focuses on evangelical women. It’s about multi-level marketing schemes and how cruelty came to be seen as purity.
Kobes Du Mez visited Whitworth University last week to present some of the work that went into the book.
The next morning, she sat down with SPR’s Eliza Billingham to discuss how a fringe strain of Christianity has come to dominate the national conversation.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Is this interaction between Christianity, gender ideals, and politics new?
KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: What I can say is what we're seeing now isn't new, in that there is historical precedent for this. And in terms of, kind of, patriarchal visions of masculinity, visions of authority and hierarchy and these sorts of things, if you look particularly in conservative evangelicalism, you can find a much longer history here.
What is different today I think is the more extreme versions of this that we're seeing. So these are no longer fringe movements. They are movements being embraced in ideology, being embraced by those with significant political power.
EB: Yesterday you said something that really interested me. You said that people who can have never set foot in an evangelical church but still be steeped in evangelical culture. Can you explain what you mean by that?
KKDM: Yes, I'm a cultural historian and I am interested in popular culture and things like the Christian publishing industry and Christian radio, Christian music. And now we're seeing it also in terms of podcasts and a wider influencer culture. And so this value system really does spill out of kind of formal religious spaces to influence the wider culture.
EB: What are the hallmarks of evangelical culture?
KKDM: Within evangelicalism you can find a number of different traits, characteristics. There's different kind of theological traditions that come together. It's a pretty expansive subculture and so there is variety within it.
But the dominant strains that we're seeing particularly emerge in recent years is a kind of, you know, what they would call complementarianism, an idea of very separate roles, opposite roles even for men and women, male authority, kind of hierarchical ordering of society, conservative views of gender and sexuality.
And along with that, a sense of wanting to seize cultural power, seize political power, a sense that the rest of culture is against them. But they are God's representatives and are on a mission from God to take back this country, to redeem society. And that's really kind of the emerging dominant strand that we see today.
EB: You introduced me to a term yesterday that I had never heard before–“holiness evangelicalism.” Can you describe what that is and what in the world that has to do with our political conversation right now?
KKDM: So, there are many strands of evangelicalism that come together and “holiness evangelicalism” is one that traces its roots back to the 19th century to evangelical revivalism and what we call a kind of "perfectionist" theology.
The idea that you could become essentially perfect, that if you were able to confess your sins and tap the power of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit could consecrate you and essentially make you perfect—at least all of your intentions would be.
And this helps give rise over the course of the 20th century to some kind of distinctive characteristics of evangelicalism. It contributes to a kind of "us versus them" mentality, that if you are one of the sanctified, then all of your intentions are going to be holy and everything that you do is going to be good.
If you're not, if you're one of the others, if you're on the outside of the system, then you don't have access to that good. You aren't part of what is righteous and holy.
And so that really contributes to an "us versus them" mentality, which we can see in recent years is really at the heart of Christian nationalism—not seeing us all as kind of part of one community in this country, and not seeing that there can be good outside of their own spaces. But the idea of seeing anybody on the outside as a threat or as an enemy.
EB: You mentioned that this way of thinking about Christianity has become so pervasive, that sometimes people assume that's what Christianity is. But are there ways to conceive of the Christian faith, whether you are part of it or not, that's different than “holiness evangelicalism?”
KKDM: I should say that even holiness evangelicalism has a number of different variants, right? And so I'm tracing one that really evolves into a more coercive kind of framework.
But there are many iterations of Christianity. We're talking about evangelicalism, which is part of the Protestant tradition. You've got, you know, Orthodox and Catholic variants. You have in this country, the Black Prophetic tradition. And just so many different approaches to the Scriptures, approaches to how God works in this world.
In many, there is a different understanding of how sin works. The idea that all of us are kind of tainted by sin, which means that we should all be, have a sense of humility. We could be wrong. We might not be getting everything right.
And in many traditions, there's a stronger sense of common grace. The idea that even those who haven't confessed Christ, even those who are outside of the faith, may have, can be in possession of truth, and that Christians can learn from non-Christians, and that, you know, Christians in a particular sect of Christians do not have total access to the truth.
And so certainly, within Christian traditions, there are so many approaches to how to view non-Christians, how to view their public role, how to view their political role.
But what we see happening in recent years, recent decades even, is that the Christian right has worked to restrict kind of the definition of Christianity and true Christianity into kind of ever narrower circles of essentially whatever aligns with their right-wing Christian agenda.
