Book Review:
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
By Stephen Prothero
Reviewed by Joshua Anderson
01/15/04
In the winter of 1804, President Thomas Jefferson,
in between purchasing the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon and monitoring
England’s war with France, sent off for two identical copies of the
New Testament from a Philadelphia bookseller. For years Jefferson had been
appalled at how the Christians had, in his opinion, mangled the words of
Jesus, “sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught
by engrafting on the mysticisms of a Grecian Sophist, frittering them into
subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good
men to reject the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an imposter.”
Now, Jefferson sat in his White House study, two copies of the New Testament
and razor in hand, and began to set right what 18 centuries of Christian
perversion had created. The finished product contained only a tenth of the
original gospels and its main character was a Jesus who made no claims to
divinity, performed no miracles, but simply wandered the countryside delivering
pithy morals. And so Jefferson found his American Jesus.
The story of Jefferson’s bible
begins Stephen Prothero’s rollicking American Jesus,
an expansive exploration of our nation’s 250-year-long interaction
with the Son of God. Touching on phenomena as varied as the Jesus
Seminar (which Prothero compares to Jefferson’s project), the
Great Awakenings, the Jesus Movement and the “seeker-sensitive”
movement, American Jesus examines the unique ways that Americans
have interpreted, marketed and worshiped Jesus. For while all Americans
have seen Christ through the lens of their own diversity, what they
usually have seen is a reflection of themselves.
After the Revolutionary War, Americans
joined together in rejecting the high-church flavor of their English
fathers and flocked to the new Methodist and Baptist denominations.
In the heady days of the early 19th century, when Americans were straining
west and finding religion as well as land in the revival termed the
Second Great Awakening, Jesus moved to the forefront of the godhead;
as the Rev. Nataniel Bouton wrote in his autobiography about Christianity
in 1815, “Very little is said at the present day of the condemning
power of the law. God’s mercy is magnified, while his adorable
justice is kept out of view. Sinners were [once] called upon to ‘submit
to God’. Now ‘Come to Jesus’ is the song —
‘Come just now, Jesus loves you.’” This new Protestantism
was dominated by women, and the Jesus they imagined was almost feminine
himself; concerned more with relating to his followers than judging
them.
As Prothero notes, when a hymn such
as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1855) gained in popularity
against “Before Jehovah’s Awful Throne” (1719),
it signaled more than just a shift in prosodic sensibility, but rather
a deliberate change in theology. As Prothero writes, “while
sola scriptura had been the mantra of the Protestant Reformation
for nearly three centuries, Americans seemed to be gravitating toward
a new slogan: solus Jesus.”
Prothero argues that this Jesus,
who is more Savior than Lord, is the quintessential American version,
and the author draws on contemporary trends like the “Jesus
knick-knack industry” to make his case. And truly, when one
can put Jesus on their key-chain, how can they really take his eternal
lordship seriously?
Also examined in detail is the current
“seeker-sensitive” church movement, which purports to
put the comfort of the churchgoer at the forefront of the liturgy,
with on-site Starbucks, theater-style seating, short sermons and flashy
drama skits and movie clips. As Prothero notes, “none of the
venom of Jonathan Edwards’ notorious fire and brimstone sermon,
‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,’ passes the lips
of these positive pastors, who focus on offering to their congregants
authentic experience rather than correct doctrine ... these are sinners
in the hands of a friendly God.” But in reality, these modern-day
evangelists are not all that different from their 19th-century predecessors,
who rejected what they saw as the cold and distant Calvinistic God
of their Puritan forefathers for the more personal and friendly God,
who they portrayed primarily in the person of Jesus.
Prothero’s book is helpful and
interesting on two levels. For the generally secular (or interested
religious) reader, it functions as an insightful and fairly thorough
history of the wandering journey of American religion, how, as Prothero
writes, “the United States developed from a Protestant country
into a nation, secular by law and religious by preference, that is
somehow the most Christian and religiously diverse on earth.”
However, if the reader holds to a traditionally orthodox Christian
view of Jesus, the book is a withering, though perhaps unintentional,
record of the appalling condescension Americans of every religious
stripe—but especially Christians—have directed toward
Jesus over our nation’s young history, constantly subverting
his character and life to fit their own particular biases and needs.
And Prothero saves his harshest words for the book’s end. In
the concluding pages, he writes:
Jesus’ popularity
has come at a cost. ... He has been buffeted about by the
skepticism of the Enlightenment, the enthusiasm of revivalism,
and the therapeutic culture of consumer capitalism. When
Americans demanded a feminized hero, he became sweet and
submissive. When they demanded a manly warrior, he muscled
up and charged into battle. As feminism and the civil rights
movement gained momentum and baby boomers turned into the
New Age, he became a black androgyne as comfortable with
his yin as his yang ... but it is a strange sort of sovereign
who is so slavishly responsive to his subjects.
And so, while Prothero’s focus
is Jesus, his theme is undeniably America—and while President
Jefferson’s act of taking a razor to the pages of scripture
was radical, his pick-and-choose attitude toward Jesus foreshadowed
perfectly the historical view of the nation he helped found: a land
where Jesus is friend to all, and lord of none; the land of the American
Jesus.
