Steve Inskeep

What does it mean to be a Christian man?

The scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez says the answer matters a lot. It influences how millions of Americans shape their lives and their politics. It even affects why so many white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.

Her book — Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — which explores the past and present of Christian manhood, takes its title from a Christian song by the Gaither Vocal Band called "Jesus and John Wayne."

Once again this weekend, protesters filled the streets in cities nationwide, rallying against police violence and chanting the name of George Floyd.

Jesse Jackson and Josie Johnson have a surprising perspective on those protests. He has been a prominent civil rights leader since 1960, she even longer. Both know the unrest of earlier times; Jackson was an aide to Martin Luther King, whose assassination in 1968 set off riots nationwide. And both know the despair many felt after Floyd's death, which followed the deaths of so many others at the hands of police.

In rare public comments, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Ret. Gen. Martin Dempsey condemned Trump's threat to use military force to suppress nationwide protests as "dangerous" and "very troubling," in an interview with NPR on Thursday.

"The idea that the president would take charge of the situation using the military was troubling to me," Gen. Dempsey said.