Personal Jesus

SANDWICH -- If America is the land of the free and the brave, it's also the land of the celebrity, the sort of person we increasingly call an "icon" nowadays. Considering our obsession with such icons as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, or John F. Kennedy, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would get around to Jesus.

That someone is Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University and author of the just-published "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon." Reviews of the book are cropping up everywhere, and while so far it's not selling like "The Da Vinci Code," publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux says the book is into its second printing.

Prothero's premise is that, in America, Jesus is everywhere.

"We have a common conversation about Jesus," he says, "and we don't have that about that many things in America anymore. And it's not totally dominated by Christians: Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are having a say in it, as are people who aren't religious."

Jesus is a hot commodity in art, rock music, publishing, movies, and politics. The "Left Behind" Christian novels have sold more than 30 million books. The film world is buzzing about actor Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of the Christ," set to open Feb. 25. The Anti-Defamation League has complained that the film "portrays the Jewish authorities and the Jewish mob as the ones responsible for the decision to crucify Jesus." In politics, past presidents seldom talked about their religion, but since Jimmy Carter they feel they have to come clean. President George W. Bush has called Jesus his favorite philosopher, and even presidential candidate Howard Dean, who admits he hasn't been much of a churchgoer, has begun to mention his Christianity in campaign interviews.

Prothero, 43, looks more like an athlete than the chairman of the religion department at a major university. He grew up in Barnstable and was active in the Episcopal church. He now attends a Lutheran church sometimes and describes himself as "a confused Christian." After majoring in American studies at Yale, he earned a doctorate in religion from Harvard in 1990 (Arts and Sciences, not the Divinity School), with a dissertation on American Buddhism.

He taught for five years at Georgia State University, then moved to BU in 1996, delighted to come home to the Cape, even with a 120-mile round-trip commute. He and his wife, Edye Nesmith, have two daughters. Though his teaching is primarily in Eastern religions, "American Jesus" began for him while reading a book that portrayed Jesus as a sort of Jack Kerouac beatnik.

"He's this guy who leaves his mom and dad, goes on the road and favors a radically egalitarian society, befriends outcasts," Prothero says during an interview at his home. "It made me realize how American this preoccupation with Jesus is -- Europeans don't care about it -- and I started thinking about how Americans have seen Jesus, rather than about who Jesus is.

"There's an element of the celebrity in Jesus," Prothero says, "that puts him alongside Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, looking for face time on NBC." That may sound flippant to some, but Prothero's subject isn't the doctrinal Jesus or the historical Jesus but the familiar figure Americans more than any others have made into a protean being, with more different looks, personalities, and natures than any real man could have.

Starting with the Puritans, who virtually ignored Jesus, "American Jesus" sketches the history of American models of Jesus. The great evangelical revivals of the 19th century partly detached Jesus from complex doctrine, using preaching and music to portray him as an intimate friend, almost a lover. "He walks with me, and talks with me, and tells me I am his own," as C.A. Miles's classic hymn "In the Garden" has it. Later in the century came a feminized Jesus popularized by writings of Henry Ward Beecher, Currier & Ives prints, and a celebrated New York exhibition of paintings by the French artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot.

In the 20th century, the pendulum swung back, with evangelist Billy Sunday fulminating against a sissified Jesus. He was "no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition," Sunday proclaimed, but "the greatest scrapper who ever lived." The cult of manhood and the outdoors cultivated by Theodore Roosevelt likewise led to tougher versions of Jesus, most famously Bruce Barton's 1925 novel, "The Man Nobody Knows."

Prothero jumps ahead to the 1960s and the present: the androgynous hippie Jesus of the 1960s Jesus Movement; the primarily Jewish Jesus of recent scholarship; the daily-life Jesus of some born-again Christians ("What would Jesus eat? What would Jesus drive?"); the Dalai Lama's Jesus as a Buddhist bodhisattva, or enlightened being; the Vedantist Jesus as an avatar of the god Vishnu. It seems all major religions have some version.

Prothero focuses mainly on American Protestantism, with its fissile history and freedom of interpretation. The reader pictures Jesus at the center of a tug of war, his arms being yanked in different directions. "In Catholic tradition," Prothero says, "you have someone pulling back: the tradition or the pope. In the Protestant tradition, you can pull in a certain direction at will and go off and start your own church. There's more of a license to freelance."

Nowhere is Jesus' elasticity clearer than in art. The most famous American image is Warner Sallman's virile 1941 "Head of Christ," with flowing brown tresses and and luminous tanned skin, which Prothero says has sold more than 500 million copies. But there are also African and Asiatic images; there's Jesus looking pensive or stern and Jesus laughing; "Christ the Yogi," sitting cross-legged in a painting at the San Francisco Vedanta Society. There's Jesus in a business suit, on a wanted poster, decked out in boxing gloves in the ring, and Jesus the 110-foot-tall hot-air balloon, ascending periodically above Northern California.

The Greek root of "icon" originally meant a "likeness," but Prothero says he means primarily that "Jesus has moved from being a person to being a celebrity, and that is intriguing and troubling." It's intriguing because everyone recognizes Jesus' cultural importance. Other American icons include Lincoln and Jefferson, both continually reinterpreted. Prothero says: "The fact that we debate Lincoln and Jefferson so much is evidence of a cultural conversation. We don't have endless books about William McKinley because we don't care about McKinley -- he's not an important figure."

The troubling part, says Prothero, is that an iconic status in America can have a diminishing effect. "Celebrities are obsessed with being celebrities," he says. "Celebrities are always having to redefine themselves to meet the needs of a fickle public. There is this sad quality, that a person has to reinvent herself every few years. And Jesus has to do that too. He can't just be who he is and retain his status."

Some Christian thinkers say this has been true thoughout history, though Americans undoubtedly carry diversity of interpretation to extremes. "America is a more spiritual and religiously vibrant and crazy society, with a lot of people who have their own shticks on Jesus," says the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest, former Lutheran minister, and editor in chief of First Things, the journal of religion and politics. He adds: "It's also true of African and Chinese and Latin American Christianity. It's part of the heritage of the faith to be constantly in a state of new imaginings to fit new circumstances."

It's also inevitable, Prothero says. "Christians believe that God chose to take on this human body. As soon as you do that, you are in this big mess, this world of human culture, of economics and politics and human desire. Jesus has no choice but to operate through radio and TV and popular fiction. This is what happens to a religion that chooses to put its god in the world."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.