Jesus: Made in America (review)

The new millennium has brought with it much attention to the cultural production and reproduction of the historical Jesus. In 2004, Stephen Prothero's American Jesus (a trade book) and Richard Wrightman Fox's Jesus in America (a work of cultural history) shared the unfortunate timing of having their works come out in the same year. To this is now added Stephen Nichol's 2008 contribution. Nichols, an evangelical insider, seeks to add to this genre by focusing sharply on the American Evangelical Jesus, and, as a theologian, to provide an assessment of what he perceives to be abuses of Jesus by those within his tradition (13-14, 17). The addition of a theological perspective to the genre is what makes Nichols's work unique, and the reader should approach the book with this in mind.

Relative to the contributions in Wrightman Fox and Prothero the strength of Nichols's book lies in two specific areas: the career expertise of Nichols as a scholar of Puritanism and a strong critique of the commercialization of Christianity. Often this critique includes a focus on how economic decisions—such as the inclusion of an advertisement for the decidedly unorthodox Jefferson Bible as a Christian devotional resource in The Moody Monthly (68)—lead to (apparent) capitulation on critical theological issues. The work of moving Jesus products does not, Nichols demonstrates, involve a test of product orthodoxy prior to hitting the shelves. Such a dollars-over-theological-sense approach, not surprisingly, has increased dramatically in the last half-century, as is evident in Nichols's chapter on the development of Christian Contemporary Music (CCM). In the 1990s, when ad agencies were preaching that marketing was really about evangelism (the secular side of the phenomenon, leveraging religious references, is popularly called "cult branding"; see D. Atkin's The Culting of Brands [2004] for one of many examples), mega-churches (Willow Creek, most famously) were bursting onto the scene, trumpeting the idea that evangelism was all about marketing. Nichols reminds us that this conversation is not over and warns us to look behind "biblical" and "bible-based" descriptors of Christian products, as these phrases have become (have always been?) little more than branding monikers (79).

There are a number of specific cultural appeasements to which Nichols takes offence, from Stone and Campbell allowing the Western frontier to shape their theology, to Max Lucado's hyper-familiar, golfing-buddy Jesus doing the same in our time, to the parallel institutionalism of the mass Christian culture industry exemplified in CCM and Christian t-shirt and bumper-sticker companies. These discussions are not at all superficial. For instance, Nichols explores the effects on the message of the biblical text as he sees it, of a culture that requires participation through "consumptive behavior" (184). His analysis is quite helpful in posing important questions to Evangelical Christianity about its own identity. The solution he advocates, implied throughout the book, is twofold: predictably, a self-limiting of authors and preachers to the pages of the bible, and a return to the creeds as a source of theological grounding. While this is probably all that really can be done to minimize (not eliminate) the effects American culture has on Christian theology—everyone stands from somewhere and no one truly escapes his or her culture, particularly in theology—Nichols fails to note that creedal formations require just as much interpretation as do the scriptures they aim to distil. And his promotion of his particular understanding of Biblicism—a return to the biblical text, which simultaneously renounces modernity's rejection of the word and its corresponding embrace of the image (88ff)—does not take into account what Christian Smith (The Bible Made Impossible, 2011) has called "pervasive interpretive pluralism," even among those with the strongest sola scriptura principles.

Other of the book's weaknesses include duplication of material covered by the two other major works on the topic already mentioned, including the history of CCM, periods of dominance by an American muscular...