American Religious Liberalism

Two: The Christology of Niceness: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Jesus Novel, and Sacred Trivialities

t w o The Christology of Niceness Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Jesus Novel, and Sacred Trivialities Ca r r i e T i r a d o B r a m e n It is taken for granted today that niceness is one of Jesus’ defining traits; but not everyone is happy about this fact. Paul Coughlin recounts in his self-­ help book, No More Christian Nice Guy (2005), how he grew up with the iconic image of “Jesus [as] the Supreme Nice Guy,” an image that he blames for creating passive and spineless Christian men. “We choke on a Victorian Jesus, a caricature that has turned men into mice.” Instead, he calls for a dissident Jesus, one who loves a “good fight.”1 This dismissal of niceness is not unique to the evangelical Christian press. The literary critic Terry Eagleton, in his introduction to the Verso edition of The Gospels, insists that Jesus is “no mild-­ eyed plaster saint but a relentless, fiercely uncompromising activist,” who “is interested in what people do, not in what they feel.”2 Where Eagleton and Coughlin want a more virile Jesus, one more invested in action than feeling, the Pauline turn in recent continental theory finds Jesus a rather pathetic figure, not worthy of serious analysis. Giorgio Agamben, for instance, begins his study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans by quoting Jacob Taubes’s wry observation that “Hebrew literature on Jesus presents him in benevolent terms—as ‘a nice guy.’”3 Jesus’ niceness serves a productive function: it creates Paul’s complexity as a messianic thinker within a Jewish tradition. As an iconic figure of niceness, Jesus still sacrifices for the sake of others: in this case, for the sake of Paul’s theological depth. 39 40 Carrie Tirado Bramen I want to situate the banality of the nice Jesus and its historical origins in the nineteenth century in the context of the rise of liberal Christianity. The story of the change from an understanding of God as a wrathful, authoritarian Calvinist God—full of fire and brimstone—to a perception of the gentle benevolence of a liberal Christian God is a familiar one. Whether it is Ann Douglas bemoaning the decline of Calvinism and the rise of vacuous sentimentalism or religious historians’ comprehensive overviews of Ameri­ can Christianity, the claim that the nineteenth century witnessed a significant transformation of religious authority has become something of a historiographic cliché. Not only is the nice Jesus banal, but so is the historical narrative that underwrites him. My objective is to take banality seriously by describing the formation of this cliché as well as unpacking it. Banality tends to be overlooked as an analytic term precisely because it appears to be so obvious. Working against this tendency, however, several thinkers have attempted to give depth to their explorations ofthebanal.“Banality?”asksHenriLefebvre.“Whyshould the study of the banal itself be banal?”4 Maurice Blanchot similarly recognizes that “the everyday is platitude, but this banality is also what is most important, if it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived—in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.”5 This romantic understanding of the everyday, where boredom and repetition can yield utopian and po­liti­cal aspirations, justifies the study of­ banality by showing its capacity for what Lefebvre describes as “the surreal, the extraordinary, the surprising.” But what about the banality of the everyday that remains resolutely ordinary , defined against attempts to redeem it through spectacular variations? This banal form of banality, which lacks the dimension of the magical or the mysterious, is more complex than it appears at first glance, and this complexity emerges more clearly when we study the similarities between banality and two closely related concepts: niceness and triviality. As I will demonstrate shortly, in the nineteenth century, both banality and niceness are seen as ways to infuse everyday encounters and associations with a habitual ease so as to minimize conflict and awkwardness. Moreover, both concepts are deemed to be little more than clichés, hackneyed formations not worthy of serious study. Not surprisingly, there is a close relation between banality and niceness on the one hand and triviality on the other, a concept that is treated in a similarly dismissive fashion. The Christology of Niceness 41 Significantly, the meaning of “nice,” as given in dictionaries...