| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 259 words from this article are provided below; about 388 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to The Passion of the Christ. By Stephen J. Nichols. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008. 237 pp. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-8308-2849-4.)
Within six months of each other in 2003 and 2004 two scholarly studies of Jesus in American history appeared. In American Jesus Stephen Prothero sought to demonstrate, in the words of his subtitle, "how the Son of God became a national icon," while Richard W. Fox, in Jesus in America, set out to study Jesus as, in the words of his subtitle, "personal savior, cultural hero, national obsession." Both historians essentially argued that the second person of the Christian Trinity has over the past two hundred years come to dominate American Christianity, especially American Protestantism, in an unprecedented way, even as he has been appropriated by non-Christian traditions in the culture and as he has become a culture symbol that transcends all specific religious expressions.	1
Now comes Stephen J. Nichols, a self-proclaimed evangelical scholar who sets for himself a twofold task in Jesus Made in America. He wants to go beyond Prothero and Fox to locate and analyze the development of a specifically evangelical American-made Jesus, a project that obviously could be quite useful to scholars. But Nichols's more important goal seems to be a prophetic one: to warn evangelical America of the dangers involved in making Jesus in their own image and in the image of their own culture. Unfortunately, that prophetic stance sharply limits the usefulness of his work to scholars.	. . .

There are about 388 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.