The Jesus and John Wayne Podcast with Kristin Kobes Du Mez!

by | Jun 10, 2021 | Theology of Marriage and Sex, Uncategorized | 10 comments

Jesus and John Wayne Podcast

We’re so excited to have Kristin Kobes Du Mez join the podcast today!

Kristin is the author of a book that is getting a ton of buzz–Jesus and John Wayne. Interestingly, The Great Sex Rescue is often recommended by Amazon to people who buy Jesus and John Wayne, so I guess people are buying both of our books together!

Kristin looks at the history of evangelical culture, specifically in the United States, where militaristic, chauvinistic, and cutthroat male behavior became the standard for evangelicalism, rather than love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

Plus Becca and I talk about how to find a church when you’re disillusioned, and Katie joins us for something funny!

So listen in:

See the Last “Start Your Engines” (Men’s) Podcast

Or, as always, you can watch on YouTube:

 

Timeline of the Podcast:

0:45 Kristin Kobes Du Mez joins us to talk Jesus and John Wayne
40:15 Rebecca and I tackle a reader question about finding a mentor
45:50 Katie joins us for something lighthearted!
53:45 Some encouragement for The Great Sex Rescue

Main Segment: Jesus and John Wayne

Kristin and I have gotten to know each other well on Twitter, and she was kind enough to write a review for The Great Sex Rescue (It’s on the back of our book!). And this week Jesus and John Wayne is available in paperback–so it’s a great week to order it!

Rebecca and I fan girled a bit in this interview. We really love Kristin and what she’s doing, and she’s so fearless when people come after her on Twitter and she doesn’t let it get to her. So we have a lot to learn from her!

Jesus and John Wayne

Many of you have been asking me to have Kristin on the podcast, and we did record this a few weeks ago (before my hair got way too long. But we’re still locked down and I can’t get a haircut!). Kristin’s been on a ton of podcasts, and we decided to focus in our interview on her chapter on sex, and talk with her about some of the things that we saw as well. That doesn’t get mentioned in most of the podcasts she does, so we thought this may be a little different!

Reader Question: How do I find a mentor when my church is crazy?

A young woman wrote in with this question:

As someone who grew up with horrendously abusive parents and has cut them off from any future opportunity to harm me (best decision of my life), I need an older man/woman in my life that I can lean on.

However, I find myself TERRIFIED to trust any “Christian” who is also spiritually abusive. And I also haven’t been impressed with the selection of psychologists I’ve been to, either. My parents were high-profile “Christians” and had every person fooled, on the outside. I don’t attend church (though I’d love to feel like I am loved and belong!), as I’ve been to many different Evangelical churches (all different denominations) and have been completely discouraged by the terrible examples of Christ’s love I’ve witnessed. Even at “Christian” university. It happens time and again, even though I’m trying to be gracious and hope for the best.

I certainly don’t aim for perfection in others, but do expect myself and all who call themselves followers of Jesus to take up our cross and die to self, demonstrating active love for others.

I love that your family recently spoke about your year of church homelessness and Becca’s righteous indignation (LOVED IT!!!:) about the people in the pews being the ones to follow Christ, instead of the leaders.

I am asking this question in light of your personal experience (as a family) – not being able to trust most leaders, backlash from “churches,” lack of Christ-like love, covering up and diminishing sin.

I genuinely feel alone like Job, Noah, and Elijah (when he was in the cave, feeling rejected). Jesus certainly experienced SO much more rejection. So what should I do?? Where can I turn to find mature believers?

Becca and I tackle this one!

And as an aside, you may remember Lexi, the woman who recorded Mark Gungor when she confronted him about mishandling her sexual abuse. She just graduated from college, and she doesn’t have very much family support since she turned on Mark Gungor’s church. If you want to support her by sending her a graduation gift or contributing to Paypal, I know she’d appreciate it.

Katie joins us for some behind the scenes look at our family!

Katie just made what I think is her funniest video living our her “dream” of becoming a model on the cover of a Christian romance novel. The photo shoot with David is hilarious, but then, halfway through this video, she gets on Facetime with Rebecca and me as we brainstorm titles and plots for all of these books, and then create the covers.

It’s fabulous.

And this is honestly what our family is like in the evenings!

Things Mentioned in This Podcast:

Jesus and John Wayne podcast with Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Sheila Wray Gregoire

Sheila Wray Gregoire

Founder of Bare Marriage

Sheila is determined to help Christians find biblical, healthy, evidence-based help for their marriages. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8

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Sheila Wray Gregoire

Author at Bare Marriage

Sheila is determined to help Christians find biblical, healthy, evidence-based help for their marriages. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8

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10 Comments

  1. Dorthea

    I have to confess that I’ve been putting off reading Jesus and John Wayne as both my husband and I are fans of John Wayne and westerns. I don’t love everything about his movies but I’m afraid her book is going to bash a genre I do love. So I’m looking forward to listening to this podcast, hoping it will dispel my fears.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      John Wayne doesn’t actually come to play in the book that much! It’s more just an example. And it’s less about his movies and more about equating the idea of John Wayne with the idea of Jesus. One can enjoy John Wayne and still feel like Jesus was nothing like John Wayne! At least, that’s what I got from it anyway.

      Reply
      • Dorthea

        That sounds good! I’ll have to check it out.

        Reply
  2. Jo

    Oy, just do everything to serve him and he’ll turn right around and do the same. Yeah, that’s great in theory, but this expects men to notice things. Maybe some men do, but too many men don’t. They only notice discomfort and problems that happen to THEM. If a wife wants her husband to notice something, she has to do, or, much more likely, NOT do, something that he then experiences as pain or inconvenience. Like, no more clean underwear as a trivial example, and, let’s be honest, lots less sex than he might like as a fairly serious one.
    If women are to defer to their husbands as a major way to show them respect, then women really are going to wind up silenced in every attempt at conversation, until the wives feel like they can only be heard if they yell and scream, or if they simply stop doing whatever it is that allows the husbands to take their wives for granted.
    And “seducing their husbands” only gives the guys more of what they want, making their lives easier and better. How is an easier life with everything they want going to motivate men to do that giving that these theorists, both male and female, seem to think will magically happen? When are boys, growing up with mothers who catered to their every whim and who seldom made them do anything unpleasant, going to learn this skill of noticing once they become men??? If they’ve never had to do it, when are they going to learn that they even need to do it when their wives just do all those little and big tasks for them?
    Wives who are treated as housekeeper-nannies with a side of prostitute are completely right to be depressed with regard to their husbands and the content of their marriages.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      I think this is likely why so many women were quite depressed in the 1950s-1980s. This advice does create a dynamic where her needs don’t matter and he is consistently enabled to be even worse.

      Reply
  3. Jane Eyre

    The Golden Rule applies to everyone, including men. One of the many reasons that I dislike complementarianism is that it provides a justification for people to NOT follow the Golden Rule: “I don’t have to treat my wife like I want to be treated; she does need sexual gratification,” or what-have-you. The whole thing j’s designed to get people to treat their spouses (usually, wives) in a way that they would never tolerate being treated.

    Reply
    • Sheila Wray Gregoire

      Jane, this is a big thing that Keith and I talk about a lot. If men and women are so very different, then men have an excuse to treat women badly, because they’re a different species. And even if men wouldn’t want something, it doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t be satisfied with it. It is a problem.

      Reply
  4. Lisa M

    This podcast was EXCELLENT! husband watched it with me and he ordered the book right away.

    Reply
    • Amy

      Hey everyone! I’m SO glad I learned about this podcast! I hear such refreshing takes on challenging topics from you and your guests.
      I was amused today to learn that the book Wild at Heart was upsetting for almost the same reasons (received very differently) that my husband and I found it to be the beginning of some really great transformation in our lives. It just goes to show that God speaks to some people in the way that THEY need to hear it.
      My husband is the least aggressive man I know, and he has really struggled with some identity issues because the world has had one narrow idea of what it means to be a man and the more “alpha” the better.
      When we read WAH, it gave my husband the expanded view he needed to hear because (in our perception), it framed the most significant aspect of the “warrior nature” thing as spiritual warfare — essentially removing the pressure from the material world to be some other, more aggressive, way. In fact, often the best way to fight for someone is to de-escalate. In that spiritual realm, we *are* always under assault by God’s adversary, and my husband loved that he could fight for his family against what drags us emotionally and spiritually down. In other words, the answer is neither aggression not passivity – it’s seeing a problem and joining God in doing something about it. 😉
      It did also help him connect with his heart by helping him remember that his soul needs to step away from business and commercialism sometimes and get out into the wilds of nature, and he longs to develop some of those largely lost skills of self-sufficiency.
      We both knew the gender categories were very generalized and often cross-applicable (that I believe that was acknowledged), but were used to structure some good points . After all, I would be considered the more athletic and mechanically-inclined one, for example. But we’ve learned it’s good to rely on each other’s rescue and to see ourselves as a team on a great life adventure, and see our problems in the bigger context of God’s higher, more spiritual view.

      Reply

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