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OldSpeak

Book Review: American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon

By Joshua Anderson
January 14, 2004

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.

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.

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