BU educator studies US views of Jesus
`Who do people say that I am?" Jesus asked in Scripture. He'd have to clear his calendar to sit through the long, diverse answers he'd get in the United States.
Appropriating Jesus for their own agendas, Americans have variously portrayed him as a capitalist, a countercultural hippie, a tenderly feminine savior, a manly soldier for Christianity, a driver of hybrid cars, and a fan of sport utility vehicles, among other guises, said Stephen Prothero, author of the new "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Even non-Christians in America have embraced Jesus, writes Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University.
You write that we're "somehow the most Christian and the most religiously diverse [nation] on Earth." How is that possible?
We are by law a secular country, but we are by practice a Christian country. We have freedom of religion, which allows for a wide spiritual marketplace, but we have all kinds of religious products in it. The consumers overwhelmingly make their choices for forms of Christianity.
Are we more Christian today than in the past?
The trend line is pretty consistently up throughout American history. And we also have a trend line toward more Jesus-centered piety among Christians. Today, the poll data run between 79 percent to 85 percent Christian. Church attendance is also consistently up; church membership is consistently up. So the old saw about secularization is just not tenable anymore.
Is America's molding of Jesus in our image unique? Didn't medieval European artists depict him as a white European?
People have been shaping Jesus in their own image ever since Jesus was alive. There are a couple things that are distinctive [in America]. One is the lack of fear in doing so. Christians traditionally, as they've shaped Jesus, have been worried about getting it wrong, including the Puritans. Americans today are not so worried. There isn't the sense that this is a life-and-death matter, that you don't mess with divinity. There's a freedom and even a playfulness that Americans have.
The second is the liberties we've taken. The flexibility our Jesus exhibits is unprecedented. There's a Gumbylike quality to Jesus in the United States. Even turning Jesus into a friend among born-again Christians -- that kind of chutzpah is something that was unknown even to Americans in the Colonial period.
Is there something positive about it, in that the fearlessness stems from the view of a loving God as opposed to the old fire-and-brimstone God?
It is a good thing and a bad thing. The liberties we've taken bring religion to a lot more people. We have this wild freedom of religion -- we can have a gay Jesus and a straight Jesus, a black Jesus and a white Jesus, a Spanish-speaking Jesus and an English-speaking Jesus -- [that] allows our citizens to approach Jesus. But it also can have the effect of cheapening the prophetic side of Jesus, the ability of Jesus to call a culture to account. Religion has been the most powerful force for social and political change historically. That power of Jesus is diminished by his tendency in the United States to take his marching orders from the public. Jesus was important in the civil rights movement, in abolitionism. It's not that he can't do anything right. But it's increasingly difficult to call on his name in the service of social transformation. He seems to be worried now more about what we drive and eat than why so many black people are in prison and why poverty is so unevenly distributed across the country.
To the extent [Christians who address those issues] are countercultural, wasn't Jesus countercultural and Christianity a countercultural fringe for centuries?
That's the hopeful way of looking at it. We have people invoking Jesus for important, prophetic reasons. It's just that overwhelmingly, Americans seem to be using him to pat themselves on the back rather than to put a burr under their saddle. I think non-Christians are keeping alive more of that original spirit of Christianity. You find Jews or Hindus or Buddhists saying Jesus isn't the person that Christians are saying he is. I admire those people using Jesus to keep alive that prophetic element.
What did you think about the lawsuit by the atheist who challenged the Pledge of Allegiance?
I'm a signer of an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on this issue, "under God." I think it should go. It inscribes a Judeo-Christian view of America. It coerces school kids who are not monotheists to either be made outsiders in their own classroom or to lie about their religious beliefs.
Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum.dartmouth.org.
