| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Richard Wightman Fox. Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession. New York: HarperCollins. 2004. Pp. viii, 488. $27.95. Stephen Prothero. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003. Pp. 364. $25.00.
In 2000, asked to name the philosopher who had influenced him the most, the winning candidate for president of the United States answered, "Jesus Christ" because "he changed my heart." In 2003, one of the bestselling books in America, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, took as its premise that Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and that their descendants survive until today. In 2004, Americans flocked to see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a gory and controversial film of Jesus's last hours. There can be no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth remains a figure of great cultural power for Americans. How many people paid much attention to the Evangelical Environmental Network before they came up with the slogan "What Would Jesus Drive?"	1
Yet if George Bush's invocation of the heart-changing "philosopher" Jesus and the evangelical environmentalists' slogan illustrate the enduring appeal of Jesus as savior and moral exemplar, Brown's book and Gibson's movie exemplify the conflicting strands of American religion and thus of interest in Jesus. The Da Vinci Code is deliberately iconoclastic, suggesting a centuries-old conspiracy to suppress the feminine aspect of the divine, while The Passion of the Christ is defiantly traditionalist, reworking pre-Vatican II stations of the cross spirituality into a form congenial to conservative Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. When it comes to Jesus and religion in general, Americans take strikingly diverse paths.	2
Likewise, although the authors of these two excellent books on Jesus in America both recognize this diversity, they nonethless have approached it differently and so have come up with two very different books. The great Protestant theologians Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr appear several times in Richard Wightman Fox's Jesus in America, where their theologies receive careful expositions of several pages. Together the Niebuhr brothers get about four paragraphs in Stephen Prothero's American Jesus. Prothero devotes an entire thirty-page chapter to the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its legacy in such phenomena as Contemporary Christian Music, while Fox gives the Jesus People only a brief mention as the background to Godspell. Those comparisons give a fair summary of these books' characters: Fox presents a history of mostly mainstream Christianity in America, with Jesus as a unifying theme, while Prothero explores the various Jesuses that Americans have created, with more attention to "outsiders" and popular culture. Both books do what they do very well, and yet their differences mean that neither book alone gives the reader a full picture of what Jesus has meant to Americans. And to be fair, it should be noted that neither author claims to do so.	. . .

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