Jesus and American Evangelicals
In recent years, Jesus has suddenly garnered a relative outburst of attention from religious historians. Most notably, Stephen Prothero and Richard Fox have provided invaluable and complementary studies tracing the ever-evolving identity of Jesus as an American cultural icon. But as helpful as they are, such studies are broad and sweeping, unable to linger within any one religious movement.
Stephen Nichols new book is one attempt to do just that. In Jesus Made In America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to “The Passion of the Christ” Nichols devotes over 200 pages to telling the story of Jesus in the history of American evangelicalism. The book is clearly written by an evangelical for evangelicals and will thus be of limited scholarly appeal. But it will be of immense value to a segment of American Christians who are remarkably prone to lacking in self-criticism and analysis. But even outsiders, those scholars and readers who do not identify with evangelical religion, will benefit from Nichols’ work and for the insight it gives into the oft-studied evangelical movement.
The first four chapters of Jesus Made in America are a fair overview of the cultural history of Jesus from the time of the Puritans up to the twentieth century. For those unfamiliar with Prothero and Fox, Nichols provides an adequate introduction to the very fluid role Jesus has played in American culture. Some will take issue with his clear lack of objectivity–he clearly admires the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, and Gresham Machen–but, frankly, it is also somewhat refreshing. The idea of objective history is now largely understood as something of an intellectual unicorn, so Nichols’ own honesty about his sympathies and convictions is often helpful.
It is the final four chapters of the book that are the most fascinating, however. Analyzing the place of Jesus in contemporary Christian music (CCM), American film, mass marketing, and American politics, Nichols provides an account that is captivating and painful. The chapters are captivating due both to Nichols’ clear and flowing prose as well as by the sheer oddity and inherent paradox that seems to pervade much of evangelical subculture. Perhaps this is what makes it also rather painful. As Nichols is keen to point out, American evangelicals are generally well intentioned in their efforts to brand Jesus on everything from CDs and t-shirts to political platforms. But the results of the commodification of Jesus have generally not produced the sort of cultural renewal that evangelicals have hoped for. For example, I recall one evangelical marketing group who touted Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as “perhaps the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years.” And while Gibson’s film certainly did a lot of reaching out and cashing in at the box office, it seems hard to believe that American churches received any significant or sustained bump in attendance/membership.
The final chapter is sure to be the most provocative of the book. There will be many conservative evangelicals who will share Nichols’ discomfort with seeing Jesus branded on t-shirts and “Jesus is my girlfriend” Christian pop tunes. But Nichols argues that the Religious Right has just as easily appropriated (co-opted?) an “American Jesus” that suits its commitments to fiscal conservatism and a particular brand of neocon foreign policy. Here he commends Darryl Hart’s proposal in A Secular State: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State, one that has a lot of merit to it. As Nichols notes (following Hart), evangelicals on both the right and the left have exhibited a tendency to co-opt Jesus as a medium for their political ideologies and policies. In the end, however, the otherworldly nature of historic Protestantism is largely subsumed.
One suspects that evangelicals of every stripe will find something that makes them squeamish. But then again, perhaps that’s just what Nichols is going for here. If American evangelicals are to recover any cultural capital and religious credibility, they will likely have to dispense with their penchant for sentimentalized caricatures of Jesus and mass-marketed religion. Whether or not that will happen is hard to say. After all, America is a religious marketplace where supply and demand are in play just as strongly as on Wall Street.