Jesus in America

Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (Feb. 20, 2004):

... the broad features of Christ's identity were passed along from one culture to another. At different times greater or lesser weight was assigned to his roles as divine king, sacrificial redeemer, holy child, apocalyptic prophet, miracle worker and healer, wisdom teacher, social critic and reformer, luminous personality. Jesus assumed regional and national shapes as those perennial features of his identity were adapted to local conditions. In 19th-century America, for example, urban and rural working-class Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists all appealed to Jesus for support as they sought leverage against mostly Anglo-American cultural, political, and economic establishments. They made Jesus a democrat, a man of the people, a crucified carpenter. That did not mean they stopped regarding him as "Lord" and "King." Those patriarchal labels were vital supports for working-class Protestant men as they eased women out of the few positions of authority they had managed to obtain during the hectic early-19th-century years of evangelical expansion. Hierarchical labels for Jesus were also important supports for the episcopal structures (bishops) of the Catholics, Episcopalians, and Methodists. Jesus was reborn again and again in 19th-century America, as one group after another construed his divinity or his humanity in novel ways.

In retrospect we might imagine that Jesus helped unite 19th-century Catholic and Protestant Americans. When they jointly encountered Native Americans or Asian immigrants, he probably did. But as they confronted each other in the 19th and even 20th centuries, Catholics and Protestants used Christ mainly to emphasize their differences. Each group tried to protect him from contamination by the other. Occasionally ethnic and religious animosity turned violent -- the burning of Catholic convents or churches, assaults on Protestant neighborhoods -- but in the main the war was ideological. Pitched cultural battles were fought over many issues, including the right way to represent and worship Christ. Catholics took heart from the image of Jesus as the physically abused, suffering servant, a depiction the Irish had already nurtured under English oppression. It was a portrayal guaranteed to alienate, if not disgust, most Protestants, who regarded it as medieval and idolatrous. Each group got to savor the conviction that it was being faithful to the original Jesus of the Gospels.

Protestants, especially educated, liberal ones, held Jesus up as the ultimate individualist, the model of the self-made man. Catholics and many other Protestants praised him as the consummate family man. Catholics, naturally, kept him tied to his Holy Family of origin, an only son and a celibate adult. Protestants gave him brothers and imagined he might have been married. Jesus could be pushed in either direction, autonomous individual or family pillar. The solitary divine-human person promoted the relentless American assault upon any customary practice that got in the way of personal development or social progress. Modernizing Americans liberalized Jesus into a God of pure "love" who had nothing but scorn for inherited "law," a radical critic of all old-fashioned limits and boundaries. Meanwhile, the Catholics' Holy Family member and the Protestants' personal Savior could stand for the importance of tradition. With Jesus as their hero, Americans could have their cake of old-time values and devour it, too. They could get divine sanction for making all things new while believing that they honored their most precious inheritance of all, Christ himself. They could see themselves as a chosen people -- the ancient Hebrew notion adopted in the 17th century by the Puritans -- but a people chosen now for free-spirited development as individuals. Jesus, the chosen Son, provided vital underpinning for this novus ordo seclorum (new order of the ages): a nation of individuals embarked on an open-ended journey of territorial expansion, economic innovation, and social experimentation. He was such a symbolically rich figure that he could offer moral support while also raising moral objections. Protestant and Catholic Americans could never have remade their nation in the 19th century without trusting Jesus to propel them forward while steering them away from sin.

Jesus has had a distinctively American incarnation over the past two centuries because the overall national infatuation with him has been supported by so many independent, subcultural traditions of allegiance to him. African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Anglo-Americans, Native Americans, and many others have developed their identities in relation to Christ. Within each group he helps to link the past and present. Individual immigrants can choose to worship him in ways familiar to them from the Old World or select new ones that stand for and help speed their adaptation to America. Today many Latino Catholics are combining old and new by relying on Catholic masses when marking important life events and attending evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant services when seeking emotionally potent encounters with Christ. Hispanic Protestantism takes over from the Catholic tradition a far more corporeal Jesus than most American Protestants recognize. This physical Jesus fits naturally with the body-transforming charismatic speaking and hands-on healing practices of much of the Protestant revivalism and Pentecostalism.

The African-American tie to Jesus is the most historically complex of all the ethnically differentiated faiths in him. While it stemmed originally from a forced adaptation to the white world, it ended up exerting a major impact on the Southern white Protestant culture to which black people had been forced to adapt. Early on Jesus emerged for some African-American slaves as the figure who bridged African past and American present. By the early 19th century, slaves had become Christians in large numbers. African convictions about the living presence of the dead, and the reality of the unseen world, made Jesus a powerful presence in dreams as well as wakeful states. Thanks to his paradoxical place as Lord and servant of both highborn and low, Jesus came to stand in African-American religion for the mysterious agency through which, against all appearances, the last would ultimately -- and even now, in faith -- be made first. The last had a forceful cultural impact on the first. White Protestantism immediately understood the religious power of the black spiritual. African-American creations such as "Steal Away to Jesus" or "Balm in Gilead" spoke of distinctively black yearnings for temporal as well as spiritual freedom and consolation. But white people could appropriate the songs as pleas for Jesus to free them from bondage to sin. "If you can't preach like Peter," declares the final verse of "Balm in Gilead," "if you can't pray like Paul, just tell the love of Jesus, and say He died for all."...

Even if Jesus is losing a small percentage of his religious disciples in America at the start of the 21st century, he is certainly an omnipresent symbol of religious, ethical, and philosophical seeking. He is so pervasive culturally that some representations of him have no apparent religious reference at all. Over the past generation, for example, his crucifix has taken on a secular life of its own as a hip fashion statement. But the commercialization of the cross -- and of Jesus himself in secular as well as Christian music -- may still carry with it a moral or spiritual yearning that marks it as religious. It is hard to separate religious from secular piety where Jesus is concerned.

NB: This essay is adapted from Mr. Fox's book Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.