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So what I try to do as well as I can is to resist some of that and say, okay, can I humble myself? Is there areas where my people have gone wrong? What do we need to learn? So when I pick up a book like this is just human nature to get defensive. But she says she grew up in kind of the evangelical subculture with the speakers and books and products and is well aware of it. Sean McDowell: I don't know if it's disaffected, I think it was just a tradition that saw evangelicals differently and a very kind of an intellectual tradition is where she came from. Scott Rae: So disaffected evangelical would be a fair term for it. Now, Kristin Du Mez, who's the author, actually, I heard in a different interview, said that she grew up in a tradition church that she's not evangelical and almost had a sense of disdain against evangelicals, that word might be too strong, I don't want to put that on her. I'm looking at this going, I'm a white evangelical, right. In other words, the reason the faith is corrupted religiously and the nation is fractured is because of white evangelicals. The title is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. I can just tell you how I approach a book like this. So maybe the first thing that we want to talk about was how should we approach such a controversial book like this? Because there are a couple different ways to look at this and I want to make sure that we're reading this through the right set of lenses. Scott Rae: So Sean, really delighted to be able to talk about this just together with the two of us. She's a very respected historian, but has come out with a very controversial topic that we want to explore, we want to see, we want to look both at the merits and the demerits of the book and take an honest and we hope fair assessment of it to recognize this contributions, what she got right and where we would take issue with it. And has published in a variety of national publications as well.
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She's widely published, has written a number of other things having to do with women and the gospel. The author's Kristin Kobes Du Mez, she's a historian at Calvin University. And the subtitle I think is particularly revealing How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The book is titled very provocatively Jesus and John Wayne. We don't have a particular guest in mind though, we are going to talk about a controversial and provocative new book that's getting a lot of traction in circles, not in evangelical Christian circles, but in broader cultural circles as well. Scott Rae: Hey, welcome to our conversation today with Sean and me.
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