My students wanted me to read the book because Roosevelt was one of Eldredge’s heroes, for the very reasons that Bederman had deconstructed in Manliness and Civilization. It wasn’t long before my own church was hosting a men’s Bible study on it, and soon after a women’s Bible study on the book’s feminine counterpart, Captivated. I can’t remember now if they had a book in hand, or only told me I needed to read it: John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart.Įldredge’s book was all the rage at that time on Christian college campuses and in evangelical churches. One day after class, some of my (white, male) students approached me. Like me, my students were shocked by how attention to race, gender, and power challenged their received narratives, how the old stories about Teddy Roosevelt suddenly seemed insufficient. In my own classroom I wanted to open my students’ eyes in similar ways. Coming from a small Christian undergraduate institution where I hadn’t even had a female professor, I was fascinated with how ideas of femininity and masculinity not only changed over time, but were connected to economics, religion, race, and even foreign policy.
Bederman had been one of my graduate mentors, and she was the professor who first introduced me to gender as a category of analysis. For a course on US history from 1877-1920, this looked like a unit on Teddy Roosevelt, a unit largely based on Gail Bederman’s analysis of Roosevelt through the lens of race, gender, and power in her masterful book Manliness and Civilization. Struggling as I was to keep up with new course preps, I looked for every opportunity to bring my own expertise to bear on survey material. The project’s origins go back to around 2004 or 2005, my first years teaching at Calvin University (then College). Now, with the release date quickly approaching, I thought I’d take some time to reflect on the winding history of the book itself.
When I started the project, I couldn’t have imagined the world it would be launching into. In a little over a week, my new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nationwill find its way into the world.
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