America's Passion for Jesus

Stephen Prothero. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. 364 pp. Illustrations, timeline, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

Richard Wightman Fox. Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. 488 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95 (cloth); $19.95 (digital).

Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ rivaled the most successful Hollywood blockbusters, raking in nearly $370 million in domestic, gross box-office revenue. This controversial film, which graphically portrays the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is the latest effort to bring Jesus into the center of American cultural life. Pollsters report that 80 percent of Americans consider themselves Christians. Nearly three-quarters of those polled affirm that Jesus is God or the Son of God, and that he was resurrected from the dead. Americans have even ranked Jesus as the thirteenth "greatest American of all time."¹ But how did Americans come to adopt Jesus as their own? And what difference does it make?

Two new books explain the resilience of Jesus as a subject of history, imagination, religious devotion, and cultural infatuation: Stephen Prothero's American Jesus and Richard Wightman Fox's Jesus in America. Despite their apparent overlap, the books could scarcely be more different. Prothero offers a popularly written, breezy survey that ranges from Thomas Jefferson's de-supernaturalized sage through Jewish and Hindu adaptations of Jesus. Fox presents a more academically rigorous, denser investigation of how Protestant and Catholic beliefs and representations of Jesus have shaped the course of American history. These two authors have identified and successfully filled a surprising lacuna. Even though the Library of Congress owns more than seventeen thousand books about Jesus—the greatest number devoted to any single subject—few scholars have portrayed Jesus as a central figure in American cultural history. Former colleagues at Boston University, Prothero and Fox have produced complementary volumes that invite new readings of familiar historical figures and events in light of America's most enduring religious and cultural hero.

Both Prothero and Fox are more interested in the Jesus of American culture than in the historical Jesus who preached and healed around the tiny fishing villages of first-century Palestine. Both books are profusely and beautifully illustrated with American representations. Prothero entices readers with ten black-and-white glossy photographs; twenty-six full-color and nine black-and-white glossy pictures adorn Fox's text. An apparently subtle difference in terminology reveals a fundamental disjunction between the twin studies' assumptions. Prothero writes almost exclusively about Jesus rather than Christ, while Fox uses the terms interchangeably. Prothero identifies his interest in Jesus as cultural instead of religious, while Fox believes it impossible to disentangle Jesus' cultural meanings from the religious idea that he is Messiah or Savior. As Fox points out, certain Christians, such as seventeenth-century Puritans, have themselves preferred to speak of Christ, Christ Jesus, or Lord Jesus, because they considered "Jesus" too familiar a form of address for the one they worshipped as God incarnate.

As Prothero narrates Jesus' transformation from deity to celebrity and national icon, theology recedes into the background in preference for a dazzling array of popular cultural artifacts from literature, music, painting, and film. The cultural flexibility of Jesus provides evidence, in Prothero's view, that America is simultaneously a predominantly Christian and a remarkably pluralistic nation, steeped in overlapping secular and sacred values. While not neglecting mass culture, Fox deftly balances attention to theology with an astute investigation of how people's statements of belief affect the creation of material icons and ritual performances. In depicting how Americans have used Jesus to serve political and cultural ends, Fox is keenly aware that most Americans view Jesus as much more than a cultural icon: they view him as a divine person who transcends both history and culture. By contrast, relatively few...