Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Jesus and John Wayne reveals that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. This cultural history of American evangelicalism explains why evangelicals rallied behind the least-Christian president in American history and how they have transformed their faith in the process, with enduring consequences for all of us.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and Christian Century, and her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, CNN, and many other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.

The United States is recognized as the most religiously diverse country in the world, and yet its laws and customs, which many have come to see as normal features of American life, actually keep the Constitutional ideal of “religious freedom for all” from becoming a reality. Christian beliefs, norms, and practices infuse our society; they are embedded in our institutions, creating the structures and expectations that define the idea of “Americanness.” Religious minorities still struggle for recognition and for the opportunity to be treated as fully and equally legitimate members of American society. From the courtroom to the classroom, their scriptures and practices are viewed with suspicion, and bias embedded in centuries of Supreme Court rulings create structural disadvantages that endure today.

Through the voices of Christians and religious minorities, Joshi explores how Christian privilege and White racial norms affect the lives of all Americans, often in subtle ways that society overlooks. By shining a light on the inequalities these privileges create, Joshi points the way forward, urging readers to help remake America as a diverse democracy with a commitment to true religious freedom.

This discussion will consider how we can think about white supremacy via various parts of culture ... in this case, yoga. How has yoga been raced, classed, and gendered to serve a particular community in the United States? And how can examining this history give us some understanding about how white supremacy works in our cultural lives?

Shreena Niketa Gandhi is a multi-faceted cultural historian of religion with expertise in religion, race, the Americas and Hinduism. Trained at Swarthmore, Harvard, and the University of Florida, Professor Gandhi currently teaches at Michigan State University. In all of her classes, she starts the first few weeks by introducing students to the concept of structural white supremacy and why that is important for a better understanding of religion in the U.S. Her research and public scholarship are on the history of yoga, and she is revising a manuscript on this using the framework of white supremacy and cultural appropriation. Through her scholarship, she hopes to make all Americans from all backgrounds better understand how we have all benefited and suffered because of systematic white supremacy and racism. Her scholarship on yoga is one illustration of this system.

Professor Gandhi is also a part of a multi-year collaborative project on intersectional Hinduism, which is supported through the American Academy of Religion and partially funded through the Wabash Center.