Jesus of Galilee, American Hero

Richard Wightman Fox’s new book went to press at exactly the wrong time: after the publication of Stephen Prothero’s acclaimed and nearly identically titled “American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon,” but before the release of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

The blockbuster Gibson movie, which has been seen by as many as 50 million Americans to date, overnight changed the nature of discourse about the American conception of Jesus.

As Mr. Prothero, an academic historian of religion like Mr. Fox, pointed out recently in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Gibson’s Jesus, battered and bloodied in the profound theological drama of his crucifixion, is a far cry from the suave wall-oleo or the initial on a WWJD T-shirt that we associate with the American pop Jesus — yet American Christians embraced him.

That suggests a gravitas in the contemporary American conception of Jesus to which cultural scholars have hitherto perhaps paid insufficient attention.

But Mr. Fox, aware that Mr. Gibson’s film was coming out when his book went to press though not having seen it, was restricted to bromides: “Children need to be protected from the graphic violence,” he warns. That’s on page 27. Already, sadly, Mr. Fox’s book is slightly out of date.

Furthermore, “Jesus in America” cannot help but cover ground — the purely human Jesus of Thomas Jefferson’s cut-and-paste Bible (which excised all Jesus’ miracles); the testosterone-pumped Christ of 19th-century “muscular Christianity”; the organization-man Jesus of Bruce Barton’s bestselling “Man Nobody Knows”; the self-absorbed celebrity of “Jesus Christ Superstar” — already traversed in Mr. Prothero’s “American Jesus” and elsewhere.

Also irritating is Mr. Fox’s use of inappropriately informal diction. Christopher Columbus “hit the Bahamas.” Jonathan Edwards’ image of Christ as bridegroom “had to be dropped” when times changed. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1928 movie “King of Kings,” says Mr. Fox, Jesus “deprograms” Mary Magdalene — a word that is not only anachronistic but inaccurate.

Still Mr. Fox, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, offers some fresh perspectives and fine new material. He focuses not so much on images of Jesus themselves but on the role those images played in the making of American religious history and of American religious personalities. He is nothing if not compendious, and his book is chock-full of anecdotes, snippets from hymns, and data about long-forgotten Christological devotions.

Mr. Fox was raised Catholic, and although he seems to have drifted away from the faith, he retains an appreciation for the extent to which Catholicism shaped American religious consciousness.

Many Americans, including professional historians, tend to equate the history of American Christianity with the history of American Protestantism, with Catholics arriving in significant numbers on the American religious scene only in the form of 19th-century immigrants.

As Mr. Fox writes, however, these people “might be surprised to learn that while a few hundred Pilgrims were worshiping Christ in Plymouth, thousands of Native Americans were receiving communion in New Mexico and Florida.”

An early chapter outlines the efforts of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and French missionaries in the Northeast and Southwest to teach the Indian populations to imitate Christ, even though their own languages had no words to describe difficult theological concepts such as the Trinity.

Mr. Fox is in many ways a stereotypical academic liberal in his treatment of European-Native American relations in the New World; he remarks that the missionaries “tethered” Jesus “to the campaign for European control.” Nonetheless, he recognizes that Indian cultures had their flaws as well, sanctioning polygamy, vengeance, wife-beating, cannibalism, and extraordinary cruelty to captured enemies.

He points out that many converted Native Americans took to the new faith with genuine fervor; they were so “extravagant in their piety,” Mr. Fox writes, that they sometimes asked for harsher penances from their priests in confession than the priests were willing to give them.

In a chapter dealing with the early-19th century, Mr. Fox argues that the first Unitarians — in contrast to their latter-day descendants, who have mostly severed their ties with Christianity — were preoccupied with Christian salvation. They demoted Jesus from a person with both divine and human natures to a purely human figure so as not to distract from worship of God the Father, and also to emphasize Jesus’ special saving mission as a figure of quasi-divine “perfect humanity.”

Story Continues →