Surely God wanted America to be both blessed and white-majority and white-ruled. Surely God wanted the poor to suffer because suffering might make them work harder. Surely what God wanted in America was conservative politics and capitalistic economics. Surely they must have deeper insight and understanding. I will confess I went along with the change, because the people who were my leaders were going along with it. What happened to you and your free spirit, inquiring mind, and willingness to reach those who are on the margins? You’ve become a thoroughly compliant part of the Christian industrial complex.) (I’m looking at you, Greg Laurie, and it’s hard to explain just how deeply you have disappointed me when I see you at ceremonies “honoring” The Former Guy in the very Rose Garden where he denied the existence of COVID-19 and denied the reality of the 2020 election. And yet, we from the JM gradually succumbed to the white Evangelical industrial complex so completely that some of the leaders of the free spirit of the JM are now fully on board with The Former Guy, serving as his loyal allies in church meetings as easily as in political events.
Now, the JM was not the genesis of this state of white Evangelicalism in fact, to my experience, much of the JM was orthogonal to the beliefs and practices of the white Evangelical world.
I got adopted into the Beloved Community in the late 1960s in the “Jesus Movement” (JM) in Southern California, and many of the people mentioned in this book are familiar to me not only because I know their names but also because I was a recipient of their teaching and ministries.
I was raised in the milieu that Du Mez talks about. That’s the summation after reading this masterful, wonderfully researched book about the peculiarities of white Evangelicalism and the Americanized Jesus who was once Brown and poor and despised, the victim of the oppressive empire, but who has been transformed into the muscular, gun-toting, migrant-hating, welfare-despising, violence-loving, manly man-centered white male gonzo who seeks to rule everyone by force for their own good and for the pleasure and power of white men.
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