AMERICAN JESUS
How the Son of God Became a National Icon
By Stephen Prothero
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
343 pages
Reviewed by Jules Siegel
In "American Jesus," Boston University professor Stephen Prothero diligently ponders the changing manifestations of Jesus in American culture over the years and finds -- surprise! -- you don't have to be a Christian to love Jesus. Believers of all faiths have adopted Jesus as one of their own icons. If only "Studies in Iconology" author Erwin Panofsky were alive to see this. You've got your black Jesus icon, your Moslem, Jewish and Mormon Jesus icons. How about that Hindu Jesus doing yoga? Far out!
Professor Prothero would never stoop to such outmoded hippie exclamations of joyous awe. His prevailing expression is a carefully almost concealed bemused smile. The Establishment lip will curl distinctly on trailer-trash-type trends. Anything decidedly Californian tends to produce a raised eyebrow. One would have to be a very well-informed religious scholar to challenge the accuracy of Prothero's library research. When he gets into areas that ordinary folk might know something about, however, he can be much less convincing.
He writes about the Jesus freak movement, "As heroin replaced pot as the drug of choice and overdoses multiplied, many came to associate drugs with captivity rather than freedom." (127) Few in the Bay Area will agree that heroin ever replaced pot as the drug of choice. Heroin has never been an important drug numerically. In the Federal 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of illicit drug users admitted using marijuana, compared with 0.1 percent for heroin.
A principal social characteristic of the time was the belief among users of marijuana and the hallucinogens that they were sacramental substances, one of whose main results was the feeling of closeness with the Great Spirit, whether the flavor was Aquarian, Mesoamerican, Oriental or Christian. Many an atheist found God through LSD and other drugs. For Christians, especially, getting to know Jesus was a common psychedelic experience. To this day, some Jesus freaks quote holy scripture to support their belief that God made drugs to help human beings, and that Jesus himself was a mushroom eater.
Prothero is a very gifted and astute observer with an attractively clear, direct and concrete literary style, but he is not easy to trust even when he gets his facts right. In writing about the way Jewish thinkers have attempted to come to terms with Jesus as a Jew, he must explicitly mention each and every one's condemnation of Paul's invention of some of the most irritating aspects of Christianity. Maybe this is just awkward writing, but it comes across as subtle ridicule. His humor is limited to a few Black Jesus jokes ("Yo Mama's so old she was a waitress at the Last Supper"), and two very lame Jewish Jesus jokes. He rarely writes about how people feel, but concentrates on institutional political motives and strategies. See how Jesus became a focus-group celebrity through astute marketing techniques such as seeker-sensitive branding?
It's really quite awkward for orthodox Christians to accept fully how others see Jesus and the uses they make of him in their own belief systems. The Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are exclusionary. You can't be any combination of Jew, Christian and Moslem at the same time, although you can recognize Jesus. Oriental religions are inclusionary. As Prothero points out, to the followers of the Hindu religions, Jesus is merely another avatar of the universal life spirit.
As a child, Prothero's "most sacred Christmas moment" was his father's annual reading of "The Christ Child," a children's book illustrated with "wondrous color lithography, and always, that halo bursting forth from the page." (xi) Today, he seems rather annoyed by "crazes" such as "What Would Jesus Do?", "What Would Jesus Eat?" and "What Would Jesus Drive?" He notes that the 110-foot-tall, 750-pound Jesus hot air balloon "continues to lift off each Easter over northern California," and new controversies such as the dubious brother of Jesus burial box and Mel Gibson's "gruesome" movie continue to arise.
"What would Jesus make of all this?" Stephen Prothero asks at the end. "That is anyone's guess," he writes. "But I rather doubt that he is leaning back and laughing." (302)
Gee, why not? That Jesus balloon sounds a lot more appealing than some Christo wrap performance. In spreading the Gospel, your best guide is "in my Father's house there are many mansions." Better yet, go to the New Testament, Acts 2: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues.... Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because every man heard them speak in his own language." Jesus speaks the language of universal love. Each soul receives it and reflects it with a personal twist -- even Stephen Prothero in "American Jesus." Isn't that just great?