American Jesus (October 7, 2007 by James Montgomery Jackson)
Do me a favor and close your eyes. All set? Now call forth a picture of Jesus. Does your image come from a picture from church school or hung on your parents’ living room wall? Maybe a blue-eyed Jeffrey Hunter in the 1961 film “King of Kings?” How about a thin, wiry, short, middle-aged, dark-skinned guy with scarred hands from carpentry work? You can open your eyes now.
The American Jesus was not born in North America, although he was most recently sculpted here. His formation started soon after his death as the James and Peter, heads of the Jerusalem faction and Paul, the evangelist fought over the message and the religious organization of what became Christianity. It wasn’t until 381 CE that the Nicene Creed was adopted (or rammed down the throats of the losing side, literally by sword point in many cases.) And only in 450 CE at the Council of Chalcedon was Jesus declared to be “truly God and truly man.”
The battle has continued and continues.
Did you know that when the King James Version of the Bible it refers to Jesus as “he” that the “he” is not capitalized? Before the Revolutionary War church members were in the minority: In the middle colonies between New England and the South only one in five people was affiliated with the church. In the South it was less; the slaves had not yet found Christianity. Even those who were church goers focused on God the angry father, who they feared rather than revered. The Old Testament was the primary reference.
The Puritans set the American stage. As Stephen Prothero notes in his book American Jesus from which many of my facts are taken, theirs was a covenant theology “focusing not on the individual’s relationship with God the Son, but on the community’s covenant with God the Father.” They were God-fearing people. Hymns were a cappella versions of Old Testament Psalms and stayed that way until the “Great Awakening” in the 1740s when itinerant preachers first taught Jesus hymns like those of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. These caught on in a few congregations, but most rejected them.
In the late 18th century Unitarian Joseph Priestly developed a theory that would have significant, and probably unintended, consequences on American Jesus beliefs. His theory, or myth if you prefer, went as follows: Jesus’ message was simple – it affirmed the one God, taught about an afterlife and required moral living. Paul and his kin hijacked that simple message and Christianity the religion was born with its complex dogmas and complicated rites. Jesus had been overthrown by Christianity; it was time to liberate Jesus.
Thomas Jefferson was influenced by Priestly and, as you probably know, he developed the Jeffersonian bible. Actually, there were two versions of this “bible.” The first he developed while President. In 1804 he took two or three nights to accomplish the task it would take over a decade for the late 20th century Jesus Seminar group of over 100 researchers to accomplish. When he was done, Jefferson had created a document he called “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” which consisted, like the more recently discovered but earlier written Gospel of Thomas, only sayings of Jesus without any narrative structure. Fifteen or so years later Jefferson revisited this project producing “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” which also included Jesus’ “genuine” actions and well as “genuine” sayings. This is what we today know as the Jefferson Bible.
Everyone reads the bible selectively, even if they don’t take scissors to the offending sections. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the radical reformer of Judaism – rejecting the layers of ritual and hierarchy developed by Moses and emphasizing how one lives one’s life on earth as the central issue.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1791. The last state religion was abolished in 1833 when the Congregational standing order finally ended in Massachusetts. This disestablishment distinguished American religion from European forms which preferred antidisestablishmentarianism (which as a kid I was told was the longest word in the dictionary until Mary Poppins trumped it with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I never thought I would use the word, so thank you for the opportunity.) During the first half of the 19th century, the United States was blessed with massive immigration which included for the first time many non-Calvinistic Protestants and significant numbers of Catholics. Americans, freed from the monarch’s yoke thought nothing of freeing themselves from the yoke of traditional religions.
The Unitarians broke from the fold based not only on their rejection of the trinity but their more optimistic view that man was basically good, opposing the Calvinist view of man being at heart evil. From the Unitarians came the Transcendentalists in the 1830s, insisting on the sovereignty of the individual soul. That same decade the Disciples of Christ formed to return Christianity to its pre-creedal purity; Spiritualism arose to harken messages from the dead and The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) began.
Pre-revolution religions centered on churches frequently with lifetime ministers. Methodist circuit-riders and Baptist farmer-preachers spread with the growing country leaving the staid religion behind. Their message was directed to the individual, not the community. Religion became enthusiastic (think revivals) and egalitarian…American. It became evangelical. For the Puritans the bible was God’s truth and evangelicals followed their Puritan forebears in affirming the divine inspiration of the bible. For the first time some went further: no creed was acceptable expect the bible. And during this period African Americans, slaves and freed, were brought into the church. Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church proclaimed his faith in “the Bible, the whole Bible and nothing by the Bible.”
Sermons were shortened and became more entertaining, down-to-earth, and practical. They became consumer-oriented, not God-oriented. Storytelling replaced dogma. For stories one needed human lives to illustrate and where better to find such illustrations than in the life of Jesus. When a story wasn’t in the bible, they improvised. Very little evidence of Jesus’ life exists outside of that found in the gospels. Despite that, the 19th century saw the flowering of the “Life of Jesus” books that extrapolated generously from the paucity of information found in the four gospels of the bible. The Library of Congress holds more books about Jesus (over 17,000) than about any other historical figure (Shakespeare is in second place.)
Once religion became competitive, the Old Testament angry god lost out to the New Testament’s kinder, gentler god. The trinity may be composed of three component manifestations but it seems impossible that all three can be treated equally. For the Puritans the emphasis was on God the father; for Pentecostals it is the Holy Spirit, for much of the rest of America, it is God the Son, the Christ, Jesus. Evangelical Christians claim to accept the entire Bible as the Word of God and give emphasis to the New Testament over the Old. Fundamentalists focus on the Passion of Jesus, the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation much more than Exodus and Leviticus (despite their preference for the Ten Commandments to be placed in all courthouses.)
In the mid-1800s Christmas emerged as a major religious event, followed closely by the Christmas hymns we grew up with. The most popular pictures of Jesus during this time began to show his “humanity” – known today as his feminine side: Jesus with children; Jesus caring for the sick; Jesus with the animals.
Coincident with the Life of Jesus works were religious popular novels, including those like The Gates Ajar, Elizabeth Stuart Philip’s novel depicting middle-class domestic bliss in heaven. Christ-like literary figures were popular including Little Eva and Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hymnals were being augmented with “Jesus the friend” songs.
Post Civil War the evangelicals continued to emphasize the twin authority of Jesus and scripture. Liberals parted company from the evangelicals by the 1880s, not in rejecting the authority of Jesus, but that of the bible – no longer considered “God’s book” but rather a “good book,” leaving Jesus holding the field. God’s real revelation was Jesus, the liberals argued. By the end of the 19th century even evangelicals were no longer defining Jesus in terms of God, but were defining God in terms of Jesus.
This Jesus with largely feminine characteristics led to a backlash in the early 20th century. The President was Theodore Roosevelt – a manly man who decried the over-civilization of man. In America, religion had traditionally been male-dominated and church attendance had been more or less equal between sexes, but by 1910 US Churches were only 1/3rd male. At the same time all-male organizations such as the Odd Fellows, Freemasons and the Red Men were booming. The hymnals again illustrate the change including a YMCA 1910 Songbook, “Manly Songs for Christian Men.” Jesus became a tough guy. Clearing out the temple of moneylenders was in vogue.
Concerns about social chaos have been the motivator for much of American history. The first immigrants’ main concern was communal survival. Denying the self for the greater common good was the original message of religion. With the ever-growing cities with mass production factories, losing one’s individuality became a larger concern for religion. Middle class Americans no longer developed themselves primarily through self-control but first through self-improvement and then through self-actualization.
The split between liberal religion and conservative religion continued to widen but for both Jesus was center stage, the main act with lights dimmed in the sideshow. In the late 60s one liberal theological question was “Is God Dead?” No one ever asks in the same manner if Jesus is dead.
The Jesus Seminar started in 1985 and is a thoroughly American concept: find Jesus through the democratic process by voting on passages from the four Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas. They too had an agenda, liberal in this case and not so different from Priestly 200 years earlier: rip the true Jesus away from the myth of churches, the myths of evangelical preachers and the cloistered halls of academia. Additionally, they wanted to court controversy. Whether or not they accomplished the first three goals is debatable; they certainly accomplished the last. For example, in 1993 a group of ministers in Gary, Indiana were so aggrieved by an article in the local newspaper describing the Jesus Seminar’s work that they burned copies of the offending newspapers in protest.
The result of the Jesus Seminar’s work can be summarized as follows: They deemed only 18% of what Jesus was purported to say were things he said, or was likely to have said, or had said something similar although the words may have suffered a bit in translation. The remaining 82% consisted of sayings that were at best not his words, although the ideas were close to his own or at worst, something the later writers of the Christian community inserted to project their own point of view, or content added from a later, different tradition.
Jefferson would have been comfortable with the Jesus Seminar, but most Americans are not. But then again, most Americans do not know what is in the Bible and what is not. They place the message that “God helps those who help themselves” as Biblical – the reality is it came from Ben Franklin’s fertile mind and was recorded in Poor Richard’s Almanac.
As part of the countercultural revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s Jesus Freaks led a movement toward a return to early Christian practices, for example simple communal living. While fringe and short-lived it once again focused on Jesus without much in-depth theology and produced the precursors of Christian music. Traditionalists denounced their music as an instrument of Satan (just as the organ was once considered the Devil’s pipes.) Today Christian rock dominates large portions of the airwaves and is focused on Jesus.
Twenty years after the Jesus Freaks left the stage, the “What Would Jesus Do?” movement erupted. (It was based on a book published in the late 1800s.) And more recently we are treated to a so-called Christian diet book entitled, “What Would Jesus Eat?” Now these aren’t bad questions to ask, especially for Christians: those who purport to be Christ like. But how can people answer the question when there is great dispute about what Jesus actually did?
Albert Schweitzer noted that a quest of the true Jesus can be like looking into a deep well and seeing there only one’s reflection. We know so little about the historical Jesus that when we look for him we tend to find what we are looking for. One can believe based on faith and follow that belief – but that takes great work and courage. Or one can have a personal relationship with Jesus, whether or not one has a “born again” experience. In the United States, God the Father has retired from the field of play. How can he compete with Jesus the superstar in a culture that pays superstars (athlete, movie stars, pop artists, corporate executives or TV evangelists) tens of millions of dollars and pays those who take care of our elders minimum wage? Who wants to be saved by the old man when the hot kid is just the ticket?
We live in a culture where facts are irrelevant; it is the spin that matters. We have framed our collective American understanding of Jesus based on three centuries of changing needs from our religion. We need religion to justify the Me, Now! consumer world we live in, and it must be all right because each of us can have a personal relationship with our very own American Jesus.
This is not a very satisfying situation for me, nor do I suspect it is for most of you. We have chosen a different understanding of religion. It is a better way and we need to share that understanding with the world at large. Next month, I’ll explore how we can draw on our Universalist roots to develop an understanding and language to bring our message to the wider world.