This discovery set her on a lifelong study of Greek and Hebrew biblical texts. Soon after arriving in the Yangtze River port city of Kiukiang, Bushnell discovered in a Chinese translation of the Bible what appeared to be a concerted effort to hide women’s equal participation in the early church, as described in Philippians 4. Despite some resulting unevenness, the book offers a compelling portrait of a reforming whirlwind who left the mission field to campaign for temperance and against the sex trade and the sexual double standard.īushnell’s relatively brief time as a missionary doctor in China, from 1879 to 1882, convinced her that a misshapen Christianity harmed not only women abroad but also women in the United States by subjecting them to unbiblical male authority.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s book includes biographical information about Bushnell-a distant relative of Horace Bushnell, one of liberal Christianity’s primary early exponents-but also provides extensive glosses on her retranslations and exegeses of biblical texts.

She worked to hold feminism and Victorian Christianity together, joining the former’s claim for women’s full humanity to the latter’s message of Christ’s salvation for all people. But a century ago, Katharine Bushnell, a Holiness Methodist missionary doctor, addressed the “challenge of Christian feminism” by attacking mistranslations of the biblical texts that were used to justify women’s submission to men. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets.Conventional wisdom chalks up the estrangement between Christianity and feminism to historical inevitability. Kristin Kobes Du Mez holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Jesus and John Wayne is included on our latest UPR Community Booklist.

Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez says that Donald Trump in fact represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. She joins us today to talk about her most recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, in which she presents a seventy-five-year history of evangelicalism. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University.

Kristin kobes du mez books