Product Description

Where else but America do people ask: What Would Jesus Do?
What Would Jesus Drive?
What Would Jesus Eat?

"This book is for believers and non-believers alike. It is not a book about whether one should believe in Jesus, but about how Americans have believed in and portrayed him." -- from the Introduction

Jesus in America is a comprehensive exploration of the vital role that the figure of Jesus has played throughout American history. Written by one of our most distinguished historians, Richard Wightman Fox, this book provides a brilliant cultural history of Jesus in America from its origins to today, demonstrating how Jesus is the most influential symbolic figure in our history.

Benjamin Franklin understood Jesus as a wise man worthy of imitation. Thomas Jefferson regarded him as a moral teacher. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which occurred on Good Friday, was popularly interpreted as paralleling the crucifixion of Jesus ... as one preacher put it, "Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country." Elizabeth Cady Stanton appropriated Jesus' message to champion women's rights. George W. Bush named Jesus as his favorite political philosopher -- and several other GOP candidates followed suit -- during the last presidential race. As we have seen in recent presidential elections, the name of Jesus is often thrust into the center of political debates, and many Americans regularly enlist Jesus, their ultimate arbiter of value, as the standard-bearer for their views and causes.

Fox shows how Jesus influenced such major turning points in American history as:

• Columbus's voyage of discovery
• The arrival of the English puritans and Spanish missionaries
• The American Revolution
• The abolition of slavery and the Civil War
• Labor movements
• Social and cultural revolutions of the sixties and beyond
• The swelling tide of Christian voices in the politics and entertainment of today

Fox gives an expert, lively account of all the ways that Jesus is portrayed and understood in American culture. Extensively illustrated with images representing the multitude of American views of Jesus, Jesus in America reveals how fully and deeply Jesus is ingrained in the American experience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1029639 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02
• Released on: 2004-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Amazon.com Review
Historian Richard Wightman Fox casts a wide net over the role Jesus has played throughout American history. No question about it: Fox is thorough, insightful and well researched--qualities readers have come to expect from this established teacher and historian, now based at the University of Southern California. Starting with the early 1600s and the Puritan missionaries' determination to persuade Native Americans to convert to Christianity and moving on through the early 21st century, in which he references the influence of the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, Fox is an informed and intelligent narrator. But as a storyteller, Fox frequently falters. It appears Fox was victim to an over-researched and poorly contained project. His chapters are often vague in theme and tend to jump around in focus. This is unfortunate, because Fox, who masterfully wrote Trials of Intimacy, does have the capacity to set a strong scene and spin a riveting story. But this time his skills only shine in disjointed segments. His first-person narrative is especially strong, such as describing when he was an intern for the U.S. Senate in 1965 and saw the smartly dressed Billy Graham for the first time. Fox does have interesting information and viewpoints to add to the American interpretation of Christ. In lieu of the hubbub over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, readers will particularly enjoy Fox's analysis of the American movie industry's interpretations of Christ, especially his take on Jesus Christ Superstar. Readers who are accustomed to theological discussions may find this a satisfying read, but the average reader looking for a more focused history lesson may be better off with American Jesus. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly
Jesus has been an astonishingly mutable figure in American culture, lauded by presidents from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, pressed into service by both abolitionists and slaveholders and marketed by Broadway producers and T-shirt makers. USC professor Fox undertakes the daunting task of telling a roughly chronological story of how Jesus-or the many versions of Jesush-as animated American life from the days of Cotton Mather to the days of Mel Gibson. Precisely because of Jesus' evergreen popularity, some readers may find Fox's book an inviting entree to the personalities and controversies that have shaped Christianity in America. Fox's scholarship is dependable, and he does a fine job of distilling the essence of figures ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Aimee Semple McPherson. But Fox's net is so broadly cast that the book ends up contributing little to a story that has been exceedingly well told, and more persuasively interpreted, by historians like Mark Noll (America's God). This book will undoubtedly be compared to, and confused with, Stephen Prothero's American Jesus, but the text lacks Prothero's deftness with historical sources and his interpretive boldness-there is little here to challenge historians' conventional wisdom or mainstream readers' assumptions. Nor does Fox, unlike Prothero, give much attention to non-Christian encounters with Jesus. But Fox still does a very serviceable job of explaining why pollsters say Americans rank Jesus as the "thirteenth greatest American of all time."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"An exciting book... a fresh history that will likely be influential for years to come. Highly recommended." -- Library Journal

"An extrordinary blend of historical sophistication, theological discrimination and spiritual understanding ... rich and fluent in the complexities of religious life." -- New Republic

Customer Reviews

HOW JESUS LIVES IN AMERICA
If you are interested in Jesus, whether or not you believe that he is the son of God, a great philosopher, or simply a cultural phenomenon, I highly recommend Richard Fox's JESUS IN AMERICA. This a wonderful book, one that compliments the reader's intelligence even as it generates its argument, subtly and brilliantly, through a straightforward structure and generous, accommodating style. It is a book that invites you to think deeply, without telling you what you ought to conclude.

Richard Fox, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, takes as his subject the multiple ecumenical and secular versions of Jesus-worship and Jesus-theorizing that have grown and prospered on America soil over the past four hundred years. His is the only existing history that does so. What distinguishes Fox's approach is his conviction that the history of Jesus is not simply a story of progress. It may be tempting to believe that suffering- servant-Jesus gave way to philosopher-Jesus who competed with and ceded the ground to a more muscular savior-Jesus and a sweet feminine-Jesus who has been co-opted by an advertiser's-dream-Jesus. But to streamline the Jesus story in such a manner is to misrepresent the complexity of the many incarnations of Jesus in America.

No matter how popular they may be at any given time, successive interpretations of Jesus do not necessarily oust previous ones. As far as Jesus is concerned, the past is never "over." The American landscape is crowded with multiple Jesuses who remain perpetually accessible, and crowded with individuals, believers and non-believers alike, who simultaneously avail themselves of every Jesus manifestation.

Instead of mastering the abundant historical material by submitting it to his own rigorous, discipline-bound interpretation, Fox leads the reader directly into the American past. Immersed in that distant and not-so-distant world, held in the presence of the lives and minds of those who came before, the reader is suspended in the text, listening as these predecessors contemplate, argue over, and promote their own versions of Jesus. The story that emerges is rich, multi-vocal, immediate, bristling with diversity and with controversy. His method allows us to appreciate the profusion of beliefs that has created both our religious and our secular heritage.

And what a vibrant heritage it is! We get to linger with Franciscan missionaries in seventeenth century New Mexico who, like early-day Mel Gibsons, find salvific force in the terrible punishment of Christ's body. We overhear the spiritual agony of Puritan Thomas Shepard as he struggles with the moral dilemma posed by familial love; is his love for his wife in competition with his love of Christ? We feel the lucid working of Ralph Waldo Emerson's mind as he demotes Jesus from divine status in order to use his teachings as philosophies. We mount a wooden cross in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1898 along with the photographer F. Holland Day in order to resurrect an aesthetic of suffering. We stride alongside the reformers Jane Addams and Dorothy Day, attend to the mesmerizing shows put on by preachers such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Graham, listen to the eloquence of African-Americans: old Elizabeth, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr. Countless others animate the pages of this history. Filmmakers, academicians, politicians. The notes alone are worth reading. The superb images, both color and black and white, both leaven and illuminate the text.

Fox's authority lies in this generous approach. What emerges is at once startling and simple: to be an American is to live in relation to Jesus all the time, regardless of one's conscious belief. It's not simply that America's founding fathers were Christian and created a Christian country. America's "Jesus-ness" is subtler, more pervasive. The accessibility of the personhood of Jesus, in his role as eloquent speaker, dutiful son, original thinker, suffering victim, misunderstood leader, compassionate yet just individual, makes him a desirable candidate for appropriation in a nation that, at least theoretically, treasures tolerance and wishes to celebrate diversity and is always on the lookout for a spokesperson who can command an audience. Jesus may be worshipped only by devout Christians, but he is "used" by nearly everyone. And it is this through such common and familiar use that Jesus is constantly resurrected in American life.

This is particularly tricky common ground for Americans to occupy comfortably, because it is hard to recognize exactly where its "commonness" lies. When Americans all sit at the same table arguing, it is easy for them to overlook two encouraging facts; they are sitting together at a table; they are free to argue. Jesus, and the multiple values associated with him, socially, politically, and religiously, is often the topic of that table talk.

Through its patient examination of centuries of such talk, Fox's book allows us to experience a sense of unity that underlies American divisiveness, and to anguish over the divisiveness that obscures American unity. To have created a book that permits us to feel and to think, to contemplate and to conclude, without asserting his authorial right to supervise and instruct, constitutes Fox's striking intellectual, and spiritual, achievement. His willingness to resist the temptation to appropriate Jesus for the advancement of his own personal beliefs, or for the promotion of a trendy political or social argument, should help make this book a classic.

A Worthwhile Read From a Distinguished Historian
Straight to the point --- I really like this book, and for a lot of reasons. But I think I actually fell in love with it halfway through page 304, where Richard Wightman Fox quotes from a 1910 hymnal I had never heard of before: Manly Songs for Christian Men. How can you not love a book that opens your world to such a wonderful tidbit as that?

In fact, JESUS IN AMERICA is loaded with wonderful tidbits, and that may be a problem for some readers. It's hard to get a sense of unity out of all this. That didn't particularly bother me --- I can do without a full view of the forest as long as the trees are interesting --- but anyone who approaches this book with the expectation of getting a clear, overall perspective on the ever-evolving roles Jesus has played in the life of America, ever since the very first Christian landed on its shores, is likely to be disappointed.

Fox sees Jesus as the quintessential symbol of American society, but hardly a symbol that means the same thing to each person. "In all likelihood, Jesus is permanently layered into the American cultural soil. Yet his identity is elastic. There is no single Jesus, in America or anywhere else," he writes. What many American Christians --- and non-Christians --- may be surprised to learn is that so much of what we attribute to our contemporary view of Jesus actually has its roots in Puritan and colonial America. The Puritans, of course, saw the settling of the New World as a significant part of God's plan of redemption for humanity, but it was the renowned colonial preacher Jonathan Edwards who applied the "born-again" imagery to the mission of Christians in the colonies. America, he believed, utterly exemplified spiritual rebirth.

Readers may also be surprised to discover how often throughout U.S. history Jesus has been adopted as something of a mascot by partisans all along the political spectrum. The "Jesus is on our side" mentality, as it turns out, isn't just a conservative mentality; liberals have been equally guilty of claiming him to be among their celebrity supporters.

According to Fox, as early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Christianity was what kept the self-absorbed individuals of America together as a nation. As Fox writes, "Jesus is a transferable loyalty: people move around the social arena and take him along. People use him for psychological cushioning when they feel anxious or alone. They offer him as proof of respectability when they need a job, a spouse, or a reputation. And they sometimes take him as a personal moral challenge to give more to others and take less for themselves."

And here's a parting tidbit: The first feature-length film depicting the life of Christ, the violent and disturbing From the Manger to the Cross, was released in 1912, much to the dismay of one movie reviewer who considered the crucifixion scene "almost too ghastly in its strict realism." Lo and behold, Mel Gibson seems to have had an equally scorned predecessor.

Bottom line here is that with regard to wordsmithing and research, Fox does an excellent job; with regard to structure, not so much. But JESUS IN AMERICA is still worth reading. If nothing else, you may learn a new song to teach to your manly choir.

Fascinating Overview of American History
Richard Fox's book is not a Church History, a Christian History,
or even a religious history. What it is is an American History
analyzed through the lens of how people responded to the life,
example, and image of Jesus. It takes the reader through the
life of the early Catholic missionaries, then the Protestant Puritans, the American Revolution, the Revival Movements, World
War I and pacifism, to modern evangelicism. I believe that
every high school student should be required to read this book
in order to develop a more balanced view of the role of religion
in American culture and government.