Reviews tagging 'Biphobia'

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

2 reviews

fkshg8465's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative sad medium-paced

5.0

This book is full of triggers, so be forewarned before you read it. It filled me with shame for having voted for Reagan the first time I got to vote (I was only mimicking my parents’ votes, but still…). It also makes me wonder why the Islamic culture is the enemy when there are so many parallels in the White evangelical culture that run this country. The book also makes clear to me that everything wrong with the US is perpetuated by this same group.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Religious bigotry, Sexual harassment, Slavery, Xenophobia, Physical abuse, Sexual violence, Antisemitism, Biphobia, Bullying, Child abuse, Misogyny, Rape, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Lesbophobia, Sexual assault, War, Homophobia, Incest, Islamophobia, Pedophilia, Sexism, and Infidelity

elly29's review

challenging informative sad slow-paced

3.25

There was a deluge of information, and I'm unsure I processed or retained a lot of it. I listened, and had to go back again to catch a lot of what Du Mez said. Notably, there were a lot of players -- both individuals and organizations -- that contributed to the coalescence of white conservative evangelicalism and christian nationalism, and it was difficult sometimes to get a picture of how they all fit together. It starts with Billy Graham, and John Wayne, and moves to Oliver North and James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. I think Du Mez did the best she could to make a cohesive narrative out of it, but I'm still reeling and can't express the things I learned from it.

At times, I wanted to breathe fire. For example, with Marabel Morgan's "Total Woman," which set women back by a century, or the purity circles, or Chapters 16 which was on how Christian evangelical patriarchy self-justified abuse (major content warning on that, about victim-blaming). A lot of the tools that crystallized the cultural movement were the same through 1960, 1980, and 2010: a focus on a (fragile! They emphasized that the male ego was fragile and needed assuaging!!) male ego, with a docile/submissive femininity that needed protection (but who will protect women from self-aggrandizing, power-hungry patriarchs?).

Some of it hit close to home, as Du Mez mentioned Mormonism on occasion, and the same scandals in evangelicalism and Catholicism have occurred.

I... I have so much less sympathy for the culture of evangelicalism. It is divorced from any sense of religion. And, it drives home the point that Trump's election was a litmus test of our political and cultural climate: that a swathe of white males are frantic about losing their position in society. (It really is all about racism -- which Du Mez acknowledged briefly, but not enough). Very interesting to read this on the heels of Wilkerson's "Caste" and Haidt's "The Righteous Mind": definitely evangelicals/conservatism appeals to Authority/Order, Sacredness (ish?). 

Like, I still don't know what to do with this book, y'all.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexism and Religious bigotry

Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Biphobia, Bullying, Emotional abuse, Gaslighting, Racism, Violence, War, and Islamophobia

Minor: Homophobia and Abortion

It's a cultural-polticial-historical analysis, so it discusses and analyzes sexism, misogyny, homophobia, abortion, etc, not necessarily graphic detail. However, Chapter 16 was rough on the sheer volume of evidence of sexual abuse, and conservative christians' dismissal of sexual abuse. If you're sensitive to discussion like that, steer clear!