Christmas Eve, 2003. Fifty people gather on a misty night to sing Christmas carols and listen to readings about the birth of Jesus from the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke. Standing before a garlanded image of the Madonna and baby Jesus in a chapel near Kenmore Square, Swami Tyagananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order of the Vedanta Society, reads to the congregation: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

Many in Christian America might be surprised to learn that Jesus is a Hindu avatar – one of many human incarnations of the deity. But according to Stephen Prothero’s latest book, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, Jesus is not only a Christian figure. He’s also a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim prophet, and a black Moses, a great warrior and a devoted pacifist. He has been an “enlightened sage” in the fashion of Thomas Jefferson and a macho wielder of Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick. He is brother and confidant, soldier and CEO, yogi and feminist.

Prothero tells us that although the Bible may say that God made man in his own image, Americans have a long and colorful history of making Jesus over in theirs. In a nation that has been overwhelmingly Christian since its beginning, the varied conceptions of Jesus are, in a sense, the answers that Americans, Christian and non-Christian alike, have given to the question, who do you say Jesus is?

Prothero, a CAS associate professor of religion, department chairman, and director of the GRS Division of Religious and Theological Studies, has written widely about religion in America. His work has been visible on the public stage for several years in such periodicals as the Chicago Sun-Times, Salon, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

With American Jesus, Prothero has clearly struck an evocative chord with a broad audience. The book has been widely and positively reviewed, by the New York Times, CNN.com, and the New Yorker, among other media outlets. He’s been interviewed by the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and Fox News. And in the wake of the controversy over Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, he has written about this latest chapter in Jesus’ American history for several publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate.

“I like religion being out in public, and that’s part of what I like about this Jesus book,” Prothero says. “There is a sense I get from my students that it’s bad manners to talk about religion in public, and that it’s especially bad manners to argue about it. It’s kind of like double-dipping your chip at a party: it’s just not to be done, because religion is private. I totally disagree. I think society benefits from public debate about religion, and I think that individuals benefit.”

Prothero delivered a short, informal lecture about American Jesus to a crowded room at an author event at Barnes & Noble at Boston University in January, foregoing the usual reading from the book. Tall, square-jawed, with sandy-blond hair, engaging and easygoing, he peppered his talk with spirited and unceremonious language, describing Jesus as so malleable an icon as to be “almost spineless, in a way – more of a pawn in the chess game of American history than a king.”

The responses illustrate the ecumenical nature of Prothero’s scholarship. During the Q&A period, nearly all the questioners began by identifying themselves in religious terms: “I’m a Unitarian and . . .”; “At my synagogue . . .”; “Many of us in the Christian community say, ‘Well, Jesus wouldn’t go to that church . . .”

Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People was selected as the Jesus “of our time” in the National Catholic Reporter’s Jesus 2000 competition. © 1999 Janet McKenzie, www.janetmckenzie.com

A Radiant Yellow Halo

So who does Prothero himself say that Jesus is? “Of all the images in the book, I think the black Moses figure resonates with me the most. The idea that Jesus cares about this world as well as the next is very strong in black culture,” he says. “But as far as my own views of Jesus, I’m just very confused and perplexed. And I think that’s why I was able to sustain interest in this project for more than two years: if I knew definitively what I thought about Jesus, then I don’t think it would have been as interesting.”

Prothero’s own conception of the man from Galilee is neither a liberating black Moses nor a collage of different Jesuses, but a young boy in a radiant yellow halo, an image from a 1931 children’s book called The Christ Child, which his father read to him every Christmas Eve. It’s the nativity story as told in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew – the same pieces read by Swami Tyagananda – with beautiful illustrations depicting the birth and childhood of the young Jesus.

His favorite is of the boy Jesus meeting with the rabbis in the Temple. Mary and Joseph find their young son, Luke writes, “in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both hearing them and asking them questions.”

Like many other scholars of religion, Prothero is a seeker in spiritual as well as academic questions. He was active in the Episcopal Church as a teenager, serving on the vestry of his local parish at sixteen and even considering a career in the ministry. But over time his religious uncertainties began to outweigh his convictions. As an undergrad in American studies at Yale, Prothero encountered a scholarly environment that sought to challenge students’ assumptions, to foster an open-minded and curious skepticism. But some of his professors seemed to consider it their responsibility to impugn students’ spiritual convictions, as though to participate fully in intellectual life required dispensing with what they considered religious illusions. The pressure took a toll on his faith. “At some point in the middle of my college career,” he says, “I found that I had more questions than answers about religion, and the answers I had previously in my life just didn’t hold.”

At the same time, among his college friends was a degree of religious diversity he’d never experienced before. “I had friends who were Jews, who were Muslims, people who in my own Christian world were ‘lost’ and ‘wrong,’” he recalls. “The challenge to your faith can be pretty severe if you are in a tradition that is exclusive in the sense that it believes that only your people are going to heaven or only your people will be enlightened.”

The doctrine of his youth didn’t seem to have room for the new reality he encountered in college. Faced with a choice between his friends and an apparently immutable dogma, Prothero says, “I chose to be a good friend.”

In place of an unquestioning faith, he developed a lifelong curiosity that he seeks to share with his students. “I try to get people arguing with one another in my courses,” he says. “Those are some of my fondest memories from college: sitting around with my friends and arguing about politics and economics and religion.”

Remembering the challenges to his faith in college, however, he is careful to avoid undermining students’ convictions with intellectual queries: “I frankly envy people who have a really strong faith,” he says. He wants his students to consider for themselves how their studies fit into their experiences. He wants them to listen to one another and to ask questions.

After all, his questions about religion were the catalyst for his career as a scholar. “Pursuing religious studies was a way to keep asking religious questions,” he says, “without having any assumption that I would come up with the right answers for any particular community.”

Prothero graduated from Harvard with a doctorate in religion and an interest in “outsider religions,” the many faiths that have historically been relegated to the margins of this still deeply Christian country. For years religions such as Santería, voodoo, Wicca, and even Hinduism and Buddhism were understudied, consigned to the periphery of theological inquiry. “Like a lot of scholars of religion, I wasn’t interested in studying my own people,” he says. “What interested me was learning about people that I knew nothing about.”

Transformative Influences

As Prothero acquired a scholarly expertise in Asian religions in the United States, he grew intrigued by “religious encounters” – the ways that different faith communities have shaped the history of this country and of one another. His 1996 book The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott is a biography of a white American whose conversion to Buddhism changed that religion both in Sri Lanka and in the United States. Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America in 2001 examines changing American attitudes toward cremation, a practice drawn from Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

In these works and as coauthor of 1996’s The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, now in its second edition, Prothero found that he could not ignore the transformative influences of Christianity on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam – and in turn, of those religions on Christianity. He is well versed in the words of figures such as Swami Vivekananda, founder of the Vedanta Society, Swami Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, the Dalai Lama, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Malcolm X, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Yiddish novelist Sholem Asch. Again and again in his research Prothero encountered Americans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds talking and writing about Jesus. “The U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian place,” he says, “and Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims are all aware of the Christian majority in the U.S. The fact that Sunday is a holy day, the fact that Christians send their kids to Sunday schools, the fact that they emphasize their scripture and talk about faith” – these things are part of the culture and are evident everywhere.

Jesus, as a Hindu avatar, meditates in half-lotus position in Eugene Theodosia Oliver’s Christ the Yogi. Courtesy of Vedanta Press. © 1986

In American Jesus he traces the gradual shifts and sudden revolutions in American perceptions of Jesus across this country’s history, from wise Jeffersonian teacher to Jesus Christ Superstar. And he is hoping to create some change of his own. “I think the book challenges people in my field of American religion to do things a little differently,” he says.

He cites a long-running debate among the field’s scholars about what kind of religious nation America is. One of Prothero’s mentors was Harvard Professor Diana Eck, director of the Pluralism Project, a research and education project studying religious diversity in America. She argues that the modern United States should no longer be considered a primarily Christian nation. (Her 2002 book A New Religious America is subtitled How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation.) But Eck’s view is far from universally accepted: many scholars and writers point to the numbers – and the political clout – of Christians to argue that America remains a Christian country.

So, is America Christian or multireligious? “It’s both,” says Prothero. “Clearly, it’s both.” Recent polls tell us that more than 80 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians. And yet, he points out, a quick look at the Boston-area phone book reveals communities of Muslims, Theosophists, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, Sufis, humanists, and Jews for Jesus. In the United States, the Christian majority is leavened both by a diversity of beliefs and by a history of robust – and constitutionally protected – religious dissent.

This combination of factors, Prothero says, is unique and leads to what he calls a “national conversation about Jesus” outside the control of any single religious authority. “I think it’s wonderfully audacious,” he says, “that these Hindus and Buddhists will say, ‘Oh, Jesus, yeah, I love the guy. Now let me tell you who he is.’

http://www.bu.edu/alumni/bostonia/2004/spring/lord/

by Tricia Brick