American idol

Christian Century, July 13, 2004 by Randall Balmer

In an effort to reckon with the ell facts of the American obsession with Jesus, both authors repair finally to H. Richard Niebuhr. Prothero quotes The Church Against the World in which Niebuhr warns that when the followers of' Jesus grow too comfortable with the culture, "faith loses its force.... discipline is relaxed, repentance grows formal, corruption enters with idolatry, and the church, tied to the culture which it sponsored, suffers corruption with it." "The ironic fate of Jesus in America," Fox writes, paraphrasing Niebuhr in Christ and Culture, "was to end up being worshiped by many Christians who thought they were solely submitting to his authority when they were actually subjecting him to the authority of their personal obsessions or their culture's norms."

Niebuhr's admonitions are timely. Americans' eclectic spirituality threatens to reduce Jesus to a kind of talisman, and politicians compete with one another to have Jesus baptize their political schemes, be it the abolition of the federal Department of Education in the 1980s or the more recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. American culture, as both Fox and Prothero overwhelmingly demonstrate, presents Jesus in many guises. Historians and social critics will ruminate at length about this phenomenon, but for the believer amid all the confusing and contradictory images of Jesus in contemporary America, the central question remains the one Jesus himself posed to Peter: "Who do you say flint I am?"

Reviewed by Randall Bah her, coauthor of Religion in American Life (Oxford University Press) and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. Balmer also teaches in Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.