More and more Americans are trying to understand the influence of Christianity on the country’s politics.

Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez specializes in the intersections of religion, politics and gender. She's also a senior democracy fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute.

Du Mez published her book “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” in 2020.

It traced how some Christians replaced God with cowboys and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.

Her next book, coming September 2026, focuses on evangelical women. It’s about multi-level marketing schemes and how cruelty came to be seen as purity.

Kobes Du Mez visited Whitworth University last week to present some of the work that went into the book.

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