Mistaking "Shadows for Gods": Apotheosis and Political Theology in the Progressive Era

During the Progressive Era, fiction served as a potent form of mass media that allowed for the dissemination of antagonistic political theologies in a time of rapid social change. Much of the period's print culture consisted of ideological texts that authors deployed in order to legitimate opposing positions in the conflict of capital and labor. By way of apotheosis—that is, by transforming the mundane into the metaphysical through a process of abstraction and sacralization—both camps in the class war projected their defining attributes and objectives onto a reimagined concept of God, thereby divinizing their projects and values. The period's novels in particular served as the vehicle of this apotheotic process. In the generation after the Civil War, a new form of hagiographical literature—one focused on the life of Christ—became the most popular genre of American fiction. These works functioned as religious propaganda aimed at reframing Americans' conception of authentic Christian values and practices in light of a changing economic culture. The nation's most celebrated authors, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, contributed to this genre. However, it was Jack London who most self-consciously recognized the ideological power of god-making and its historical role in social development. By examining illustrative works of Christological fiction we can observe the integral role of apotheosis in machine-age class conflict.

Post-Civil War Hagiography: Competing Christologies in Fin de Siècle America

The development of a proletarian Christology was the cornerstone of the socialist movement's effort to sacralize its ethos and economics. Walter Ride-out aptly summarizes the Christology imparted in early-twentieth-century radical fiction, writing that Jesus is depicted "as the 'first Socialist'" by "authors who emphasize, not his divinity, but his carpentry. To them he is a revolutionary worker."¹ A brief look at three novels by Upton Sinclair will confirm Rideout's account. Like that of his mentor, Jack London, "the core of Sinclair's Christian doctrine was the image of Jesus as a revolutionary leader."² In Samuel the Seeker (1910), the young hero of the novel presents Jesus as a poor proletarian who was executed for being a revolutionary agitator:

I don't believe that [Jesus] was God. … He was a man, like you and me! He was a poor man, who suffered and starved! And the rich men of His time despised Him and spit upon Him and crucified Him! … The church cast out Jesus! … And it was the rich and powerful in the church who did it. … And if he were here tonight He would be on my side—and the rich evil-doers who sit on this board would cast Him out again!³

Not only does Sinclair argue that the leading lights of the modern church are the progeny of Jesus' moneyed executioners but, most importantly, that Jesus is on the side of the socialists. Their economic and political doctrines, he argues, are sanctioned by God and are sanctified.

In The Jungle, Reverend Lucas insists that the bourgeois church has perverted the true image of Jesus. "Our society churches," he argues, have transformed Jesus, "the man of sorrow and pain, the outcast, despised of the world … this class-conscious working-man! This union carpenter! This agitator, law-breaker, firebrand, anarchist!" into an "elegant prince," a "jewelled idol," "a divinity of the respectable inane."⁴ By way of apotheosis, socialists like Sinclair reassign the predicates attributed to modern radicals—"outcast," "working-man," unionist, "agitator," "anarchist"—to God, thus indirectly divinizing their projects and values, even as they criticize the bourgeoisie for doing very same thing. The same blind spot is evident in Lucas' claim that Jesus

was the world's first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for—for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth; who was Himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an associate of saloon-keepers and women of the town...