A man for all seasons.

Jesus in America

Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession

Richard Wightman Fox

HarperCollins, $27.95, 496 pp.

Jesus has had a distinctively American incarnation, because the overall national obsession with him has been supported by so many independent, subcultural traditions of allegiance to him." So Richard Wightman Fox begins his entertaining, well-researched, and compelling study of Jesus as an American cultural icon.

Fox undertakes his tracking of Jesus as a cultural hero and (in the words of the book's subtitle) "national obsession" for both Christians and non-Christians in the New World to

  document the diversity of American experiences of Christ across time--
  not every one of them, but a fair sample. I want to examine the
  intersection between Christ's multiple identities and certain
  historical events and trends--not all of them, but some of the most
  important ones. I want to analyze how Jesus crossed and helped
  reconstitute the blurry line between "religious" and "secular" in
  American history. Most of all, I want to think about the relation
  between faith and culture without presuming that faith is simply the
  product of culture.

Fox succeeds in his magisterial task. His book is a great read, as well as a superb "ecumenical" overview of how the person of Jesus shaped a serendipitous cast of characters. Thus the index reads like a script from the Saturday morning cartoon series Dr. Peabody's Improbable History, in which figures from various eras of the past jostle each other at a free-for-all lunch: Jane Addams, Orestes Brownson, Dale Carnegie, Eugene V. Debs, Cecil B. DeMille, Jonathan Edwards, Mary Baker Eddy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Godspell, Wequash the Pequot warrior. In this case the improbable jostling not only works, but leads to a number of profound insights into the American character as well as the American soul.

The author comes to his daunting task with an impressive track record, as there are few students of North American religious culture more perceptive (or judicious) than Fox, a professor of American intellectual and cultural history at the University of Southern California. His previous works include a thickly textured (and very smart) study of a largely forgotten event that constituted one of nineteenth-century Protestant America's most traumatic moments--the adultery trial of Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Fox is likewise the author of arguably the best intellectual biography of twentieth-century Protestant America's most influential religious thinker, Reinhold Niebuhr.

The broad contours of Fox's newest work reflect the best postdenominational scholarship on North American religion of the past few decades, providing carefully documented sources for discussing the transinstitutional interactions of ideas about the prophet from Nazareth in U.S. political, public, and popular cultures. Fox is careful to preserve the pluralist nature of those interactions within a strong narrative line:

  In their actual religious experience, Catholics and Protestants,
  Europeans and Indians, and individuals within each group, felt the
  divine Sonship of Jesus in multiple ways. In the European-Indian
  encounter, Jesus was healer, martyr, and civilizer. For Catholics and
  Anglicans, he was the sacrificial lamb consumed in the Eucharist and
  the prime model for human imitation.

As more and more nineteenth-century Americans embraced the seventeenth-century Puritan construct of believing in Jesus as being "born again," Jesus himself was reborn in American culture:

  the ever-available Jesus of the born-again experience was not and is
  not distinctively American. But he has had distinctive staying power
  in American culture. There are many other potent Jesuses in American
  culture too, and the overall American devotion to Christ is a
  function of all the varied Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and secular
  ways of worshiping and praising him.

Fox's expert control of his potentially centrifugal sources comes out most clearly in his discussion of late-nine-teenth- and twentieth-century "takes" on Jesus in the second half of the book: in his masterful narration of "turn of the century" Christologies from Ellen White (foundress of the Seventh Day Adventists) to Charles Sheldon (author of the bestseller The Man Nobody Knows); in his evaluation of popular twentieth-century portrayals of Jesus in films like King of Kings and Ben Hur to the message of evangelists like "Sister" Aimee Semple McPherson; and in his convincing story line of twentieth-century "rebirths" of Jesus from Billy Graham's 1957 New York City "crusade" to Brooklyn artist Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ. The intellectual coherence, clean narrative line, and readability of these discussions offer a template for scholars doing the cultural history of religion in America.

Yet even in a work so solidly constructed on superb scholarly foundations, there are a few fissures. Fox's cultural history largely ignores how religious institutions--like the seminal theological faculties at the University of Chicago and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles--affected popular conceptions of Jesus. Generations of preachers, politicians, and ad executives were shaped in such institutional settings by the likes of Shailer Matthews and Paul Tillich, and it seems highly unlikely that the cultural history so masterfully narrated by Fox is unrelated to ever-newer incarnations of Jesus produced in such seminaries. Likewise, Fox never addresses the complex relationship between denominational belief (usually manifested in official creeds and guidelines for public worship) and the transdenominational popularity of Jesus: the United States is (and has been for some time) the most "devout" industrial democracy on earth in church affiliation and attendance. The role of the retention of the loyalties of working-class people by Christian denominations in the United States (in stark contrast to the institutional religious demographics of, say, Italy and France) in creating the large public "market" for portrayals of Jesus as savior, hero, and obsession needs a sustained examination not found in Fox's treatment.

Nevertheless, these criticisms should not detract from the larger success of Fox's achievement here. Run out and buy this book.

Mark Massa, SJ, is professor of theology and co-director of the Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.