Flat readings of the David story often turn him into a sort of John Wayne character. A gunslinger, a good-bad guy that has to do what no one is willing to do in order to get the job done so that everyone lives happily ever after.

The western is sort of the quintessential American myth. These are the stories we tell ourselves to understand who we are. They are told to characterize something essentially American. Historian Kristen Kobes du Mez recently wrote a book called Jesus and John Wayne in which she chronicles ways that American evangelicals have sort of reimagined Jesus in the image of John Wayne. The result is that these evangelicals see John Wayne as the perfect image of Christian masculinity, which is pretty obviously problematic.

But these flat readings of David that identify him as a John Wayne character are not only bad readings of the David story (as I hope we’ve already seen), but they are equally bad readings of the John Wayne movies.

Chris Green makes just this argument in his book All Things Beautiful. Not only are we not careful readers of Scripture, but we don’t even pay much attention to the stories Americans tell about themselves.

Neither the “David” nor the “John Wayne” of popular imagination bear much resemblance to the actual characters we meet in the telling of the stories. Both are deeply tragic figures whose lives end tragically; torn apart from the community, in exile, not able to participate in the communities they’ve built.

As Green points out, the problem is with the way we’ve been conditioned to read anything and everything. The result is that we end up not only reading Scripture in a superficial way, but we even end up reading our own stories superficially. And if this is true of us, we will have almost no chance of understanding the world around us faithfully.

Here are the two movie clips we watched in class. You can see in both the often tragic endings to the “hunter-hero” stories.

If you want to think more about this take on “Jesus and John Wayne” I highly recommend you read Chris Green’s book All Things Beautiful and watch this great interview (both are the key resources I used for the class):

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