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The Charioteer and the Christ
Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded Age to the Culture Wars
HOWARD MILLER
| Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was published in 1880, the second novel by Civil War general Lew Wallace. Millions of Americans in the late Victorian period purchased the story of betrayal and revenge, and attended pantomime, tableaux vivants, and stereopticon performances of it. Through the first two decades of the twentieth century, as many as ten million people on three continents attended performances of a staged version of the novel. The 1925 film adaptation remains a landmark of the silent cinema, while the 1959 screen version won a record number of Oscars and influenced a generation of directors, musicians, and special effects engineers. Today, the novel continues to resonate in American popular culture. For all of its effect, few scholars have used Wallace's novel and its subsequent incarnations as a lens through which to view American culture.1 Yet, as I hope to demonstrate, the "Ben-Hur tradition" can illustrate and explain the peculiar way in which the United States became "modern" in the century-and-a-quarter since the book's publication. |
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We are accustomed to linking modernization to secularization.2 As a society becomes modern, scholars tell us, the sacred—religion and its institutions—loses its traditional place at the center of society. This notion does not, however, fit the case of the United States, where religion has remained remarkably vital even as society has become increasingly secular. Through a complex process of negotiation, Americans in the late Victorian era and well into the twentieth century embraced many aspects of modernity without rejecting religion. They maintained their religious identities while feeling free to take part in the emerging marketplace of American consumer culture.3 The growing gap that has since developed between those Americans who hold to traditional religious beliefs and those who reject them outright has been a key element of the culture wars that have dominated American society over the past two decades. To understand that gap, scholars of secularization insist, we need to focus on the different ways in which societies become secular. Lew Wallace's great novel, published just as this process was beginning in the U.S., can help us understand the peculiar way in which Americans resolved, for a time, the tensions of secular and sacred. |
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I would like to suggest two reasons for the remarkable persistence of religion as a vital force in American culture. First, religion in America over the past century-and-a-half has developed a remarkable, possibly unique, symbiotic relationship with popular culture. Second, American Christianity has become dominated by Jesus to an extent that sets it apart from the rest of Christianity.4 Living in a democratic society uncontrolled by established churches and finally free of Calvinist determinism, American Christians found in Jesus a God who was a virtual pantheon in himself, one who could be many things to many people. And they did all this just as scholars embarked on "the quest for the historical Jesus"—a person whose life and ministry they could actually study and know. |
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