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  • American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon
  • Kristy Nabhan-Warren
American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. By Stephen Prothero . (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2003. Pp. 364. $25.00 clothbound; $14.00 paperback.)

American Jesus is a delightful, engaging read, geared toward a wide audience. Stephen Prothero has written a book that will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists in American religions. American Jesus is both broad in its aims and detailed in its descriptions. Prothero's account of how Jesus has become a national symbol, if not the icon in the United States, is a highly accessible cultural history, one that examines how Jesus has been imagined and reimagined by Americans. He takes the pulse of a wide range of personalities and groups, including Thomas Jefferson, nineteenth-century Protestant Evan-gelicals, 1960's "Jesus Freaks," Black Power advocates, Mormons, Jews, and Hindus, offering a fascinating survey of the different relationships Americans have formed with Jesus.

Prothero's main thesis is that Americans have always made Jesus in their own image and have molded him to their world, and to American culture more broadly—all the while mixing the sacred with the secular. Moreover, Jesus, though a Christian symbol and icon, has been taken up by non-Christian and marginalized groups who have "embraced a Jesus disentangled from Christian dogmatism" (p. 253). According to Prothero, Americans have always made Jesus their own, and have personalized him. Whether he be Victorian Protestants' sweet Jesus or Renee Cox's "Yo Mama," Jesus reflects what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls individuals' "moods and motivations." As Prothero shows, there have been many, many moods and motivations in American religious history, which makes for a Jesus who is anything but one-dimensional.

As a result of his popularity and appeal, Jesus has been and continues to be a multifaceted symbol in America, one we see morphing from Jefferson's "enlightened sage" to Albert B. Cleage, Jr.'s Black nationalist, to Swami Vivekananda's [End Page 816] avatar. What Prothero shows, in this tour of cultural "Jesuses," is that different groups in America, in making Jesus their own, have employed a hermeneutics of suspicion that rejects a dogmatic view of Jesus. Using a comparative approach, Prothero shows us that a clear distinction has been made by Americans between a religion of Jesus from a religion about Jesus (p. 264). And it is because of our diverse and ever-changing population, Prothero argues, that Jesus will continue to have new incarnations that reflect the hopes and dreams of different groups of Americans.

Although Prothero examines a diversity of views on Jesus, he glosses over Catholics, who are mentioned, but whose relationship with Jesus is underdeveloped. In "Part One: Resurrections," Prothero devotes three of the four chapters to an overview of evangelical Protestants and to their evolving relationship with Jesus. It would have been useful, for comparative purposes, to examine the kind of Jesus Catholics imagined. Along with Protestants, American Catholics also had copies of Warner Sallman's Head of Christ hanging on their walls and they, too, had intense personal devotions to Jesus. Prothero's use of "Christian" is not as inclusive as it could be, which is ironic, given the diversity of Jesus symbolism and rich meanings that he explores in this otherwise excellent book.

Kristy Nabhan-Warren
Augustana College
Rock Island, Illinois
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