Jesus in America : Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession

Rating:
Summary: HOW JESUS LIVES IN AMERICA
Review: If you are interested in Jesus, whether or not you believe that he is the son of God, a great philosopher, or simply a cultural phenomenon, I highly recommend Richard Fox's JESUS IN AMERICA. This a wonderful book, one that compliments the reader's intelligence even as it generates its argument, subtly and brilliantly, through a straightforward structure and generous, accommodating style. It is a book that invites you to think deeply, without telling you what you ought to conclude.

Richard Fox, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, takes as his subject the multiple ecumenical and secular versions of Jesus-worship and Jesus-theorizing that have grown and prospered on America soil over the past four hundred years. His is the only existing history that does so. What distinguishes Fox's approach is his conviction that the history of Jesus is not simply a story of progress. It may be tempting to believe that suffering- servant-Jesus gave way to philosopher-Jesus who competed with and ceded the ground to a more muscular savior-Jesus and a sweet feminine-Jesus who has been co-opted by an advertiser's-dream-Jesus. But to streamline the Jesus story in such a manner is to misrepresent the complexity of the many incarnations of Jesus in America.

No matter how popular they may be at any given time, successive interpretations of Jesus do not necessarily oust previous ones. As far as Jesus is concerned, the past is never "over." The American landscape is crowded with multiple Jesuses who remain perpetually accessible, and crowded with individuals, believers and non-believers alike, who simultaneously avail themselves of every Jesus manifestation.

Instead of mastering the abundant historical material by submitting it to his own rigorous, discipline-bound interpretation, Fox leads the reader directly into the American past. Immersed in that distant and not-so-distant world, held in the presence of the lives and minds of those who came before, the reader is suspended in the text, listening as these predecessors contemplate, argue over, and promote their own versions of Jesus. The story that emerges is rich, multi-vocal, immediate, bristling with diversity and with controversy. His method allows us to appreciate the profusion of beliefs that has created both our religious and our secular heritage.

And what a vibrant heritage it is! We get to linger with Franciscan missionaries in seventeenth century New Mexico who, like early-day Mel Gibsons, find salvific force in the terrible punishment of Christ's body. We overhear the spiritual agony of Puritan Thomas Shepard as he struggles with the moral dilemma posed by familial love; is his love for his wife in competition with his love of Christ? We feel the lucid working of Ralph Waldo Emerson's mind as he demotes Jesus from divine status in order to use his teachings as philosophies. We mount a wooden cross in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1898 along with the photographer F. Holland Day in order to resurrect an aesthetic of suffering. We stride alongside the reformers Jane Addams and Dorothy Day, attend to the mesmerizing shows put on by preachers such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham, listen to the eloquence of African-Americans: old Elizabeth, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr. Countless others animate the pages of this history. Filmmakers, academicians, politicians. The notes alone are worth reading. The superb images, both color and black and white, both leaven and illuminate the text.

Fox's authority lies in this generous approach. What emerges is at once startling and simple: to be an American is to live in relation to Jesus all the time, regardless of one's conscious belief. It's not simply that America's founding fathers were Christian and created a Christian country. America's "Jesus-ness" is subtler, more pervasive. The accessibility of the personhood of Jesus, in his role as eloquent speaker, dutiful son, original thinker, suffering victim, misunderstood leader, compassionate yet just individual, makes him a desirable candidate for appropriation in a nation that, at least theoretically, treasures tolerance and wishes to celebrate diversity and is always on the lookout for a spokesperson who can command an audience. Jesus may be worshipped only by devout Christians, but he is "used" by nearly everyone. And it is this through such common and familiar use that Jesus is constantly resurrected in American life.

This is particularly tricky common ground for Americans to occupy comfortably, because it is hard to recognize exactly where its "commonness" lies. When Americans all sit at the same table arguing, it is easy for them to overlook two encouraging facts; they are sitting together at a table; they are free to argue. Jesus, and the multiple values associated with him, socially, politically, and religiously, is often the topic of that table talk.

Through its patient examination of centuries of such talk, Fox's book allows us to experience a sense of unity that underlies American divisiveness, and to anguish over the divisiveness that obscures American unity. To have created a book that permits us to feel and to think, to contemplate and to conclude, without asserting his authorial right to supervise and instruct, constitutes Fox's striking intellectual, and spiritual, achievement. His willingness to resist the temptation to appropriate Jesus for the advancement of his own personal beliefs, or for the promotion of a trendy political or social argument, should help make this book a classic.

Rating:
Summary: A Worthwhile Read From a Distinguished Historian
Review: Straight to the point --- I really like this book, and for a lot of reasons. But I think I actually fell in love with it halfway through page 304, where Richard Wightman Fox quotes from a 1910 hymnal I had never heard of before: Manly Songs for Christian Men. How can you not love a book that opens your world to such a wonderful tidbit as that?

In fact, JESUS IN AMERICA is loaded with wonderful tidbits, and that may be a problem for some readers. It's hard to get a sense of unity out of all this. That didn't particularly bother me --- I can do without a full view of the forest as long as the trees are interesting --- but anyone who approaches this book with the expectation of getting a clear, overall perspective on the ever-evolving roles Jesus has played in the life of America, ever since the very first Christian landed on its shores, is likely to be disappointed.

Fox sees Jesus as the quintessential symbol of American society, but hardly a symbol that means the same thing to each person. "In all likelihood, Jesus is permanently layered into the American cultural soil. Yet his identity is elastic. There is no single Jesus, in America or anywhere else," he writes. What many American Christians --- and non-Christians --- may be surprised to learn is that so much of what we attribute to our contemporary view of Jesus actually has its roots in Puritan and colonial America. The Puritans, of course, saw the settling of the New World as a significant part of God's plan of redemption for humanity, but it was the renowned colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards who applied the "born-again" imagery to the mission of Christians in the colonies. America, he believed, utterly exemplified spiritual rebirth.

Readers may also be surprised to discover how often throughout U.S. history Jesus has been adopted as something of a mascot by partisans all along the political spectrum. The "Jesus is on our side" mentality, as it turns out, isn't just a conservative mentality; liberals have been equally guilty of claiming him to be among their celebrity supporters.

According to Fox, as early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Christianity was what kept the self-absorbed individuals of America together as a nation. As Fox writes, "Jesus is a transferable loyalty: people move around the social arena and take him along. People use him for psychological cushioning when they feel anxious or alone. They offer him as proof of respectability when they need a job, a spouse, or a reputation. And they sometimes take him as a personal moral challenge to give more to others and take less for themselves."

And here's a parting tidbit: The first feature-length film depicting the life of Christ, the violent and disturbing From the Manger to the Cross, was released in 1912, much to the dismay of one movie reviewer who considered the crucifixion scene "almost too ghastly in its strict realism." Lo and behold, Mel Gibson seems to have had an equally scorned predecessor.

Bottom line here is that with regard to wordsmithing and research, Fox does an excellent job; with regard to structure, not so much. But JESUS IN AMERICA is still worth reading. If nothing else, you may learn a new song to teach to your manly choir.

--- Reviewed by Marcia Ford

Rating:
Summary: Jesus never existed
Review: This book might be an interesting read for sci-fi fans, but it's fatally flawed as history because Jesus never existed. As historians are making clear, there's no evidence for the historical Jesus outside the gospels, which are unreliable documents meant to convert people, not teach history. There's the further problem that there is no God, any more than there is an Easter bunny or Santa Claus, so there can't really be a son of God, can there? Christianity is a primitive and silly belief system, and it's really not worth reading about.

Rating:
Summary: For the most part, just plain old American Christian history
Review: This would have been a much better read if the author had focused in on the image of Jesus as presented in literature and on stage and screen in American culture. As it is, the early parts of the book pretty much drag along as we get the history of missions to the Native Americans, with all the ins and outs of Puritanism, and later liberal theology, Unitarianism, and the type of stuff that you can read in your typical church history textbook.

The parts I found interesting were the discussions of the controversies over 19th-century passion plays and early movie portrayals of the life of Christ. This makes it clear that the brouhaha over Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" is nothing new whatsoever. To get to this part of the book, you really have to slog through a lot. Still, I give it a marginal recommendation.