Jesus, religion and American culture

Last month, authors Stephen Prothero (American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon) and Alan Wolfe (The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith) spoke at the second panel discussion in the ongoing series "America the spiritual," hosted by The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity in Boston. Mary Trammell, Editor in Chief of the Christian Science magazines, moderated the evening's presentation. Here are a few excerpts from the discussion:

Mary Trammell: Alan, in your book you say, "American faith has met American culture, and American culture has won." What did you mean by that?

Alan Wolfe: Religion is a hugely powerful force. It shapes how people think and how they act. But culture is also a very, very powerful force that shapes how people think and how they act. Sometimes the two of these conflict. . . . Culture in America is of individualism, populism—a culture that distrusts authority. It's an emotional culture more than intellectual. . . . [Today], people approach religion like they typically approach politics—"What have you done for me lately?" [Now] people are asking that of their faith.

Mary: Steve, how did you arrive at the title of your book, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon?

Stephen Prothero: I have written predominantly about Buddhists and Hindus in the United States. One thing that struck me in studying those groups is how Christianity in the United States, particularly Protestantism, has so deeply influenced those [other] communities. . . . As I studied these groups for Christian influences ... I kept running across Jesus, to my surprise. . . . One of the themes of the book is how in the United States Jesus has moved outside of Christian communities and into non-Christian faith, and then beyond even religion altogether into popular culture.

Mary: You write that over the past two centuries there has been a shift from the centrality of God in the Trinity to the centrality of Jesus—that today Jesus actually dominates the Trinity and, in a sense, stands above God in American thought.

Stephen: It is very difficult to devote [exactly] 33.3 percent of your attention to each of the three persons in the Trinity, and so as a practical matter, Christians really do choose. [During] the Colonial period when Calvin's theology reigned among Puritans in New England, the focus was on God the Father. . . . Jesus' role was quite minimal. ... What happens after the Revolution is . . . that God just looks too much like George III, who is this distant, authoritarian king telling you capriciously [what] you should do, without your really being able to engage with him at all. There was a popular demand . . . for a a more near-and-dear approach to God. Christians . . . started running their piety through the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, rather than the first, God the Father. They started thinking about Jesus in terms of . . . the person who helps the Samaritan woman, or the person who walks with you and listens to your problems.

Mary: Alan, you traveled around the country and went to a lot of church services. Tell us a little about that.

Alan: What I found was a tremendous emphasis upon love, which surprised me. I think I probably heard the word love more than any other—much more than truth. For example, I remember one minister in suburban Cincinnati . . . .

When I asked him, "What is the message of your sermons?" he said, "Love, love, love, love truth." . . .

That seemed. ... to capture a great deal of what I was experiencing.

Mary: You write about the marvelous mix of religions in the United States. Tell us about "religious mixers."

Alan: Fifty years ago, maybe 4 percent of American [adults] would identify themselves ... as belonging to a different religion from the religion which they grew up [in]. Now, it's between 30 and 50 percent. . . . So switching from one faith to another is a fairly common experience these days. ... That has huge implications. It transforms the whole meaning of what faith is. We talk about how religion is supposed to impress us with . . . some respect for tradition. In fact, religion and tradition are almost synonyms. As I define tradition, [it's] inheriting something from your parents and believing that you are under an obligation to pass it on unchanged to your children.

You talk to evangelicals, though, and they will tell you that they are "born again." To be born again is, in a sense, to reject . . . tradition. It places a value on authenticity of belief over the mere obligation to find something and leave it unchanged. We are all born again in that sense. One of the themes in my book is that we are all evangelicals now. We all personalize our faith—we've all seen something that speaks to us. If we don't find it in one tradition, we are going to look for it in another.

Mary: Would you say that the strength and the staying power of this current great awakening is going to be ongoing or not?

Alan: I would not compare it to the earlier ones .... I see [those] as having a fervor and depth that I think [stand] in sharp contrast to what I see as a certain shallowness to the present "awakening." I see a religion out there in America that does not make all that many demands on people, that does not force [believers] to really change the way they live, that does not confront them with a real power of some other force outside themselves.

I see a religion that has many positive features: It gives people a sense of self-confidence, it gives them a sense of empowerment. . . . But, to me, if there is an awakening here, this is the great cultural awakening rather than the great religious awakening. . . . Will it be around? I don't think so, because I don't think it's very deep. ... I see the secular trends in America as much more powerful than the religious trends.

Mary: Do you agree, Steve?

Stephen: No. I agreed all the way until the end. In my book I talk about how Jesus has been buffeted about by the kinds of cultural, economic, social winds that Alan describes in his book. And how [Jesus] probably has been more often a pawn than a king in this spiritual chess game. He tends to take his marching orders from the culture rather than to give marching orders. Of course there are moments where Jesus is enlisted in cultural programs [that] very much [transform] society. The Civil Rights Movement is a great example of Jesus' cultural authority [being] called down by people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

But I am not sure Alan meant to invoke the idea . . . that we are a society moving from religion to secularity. I don't think that. I think we cycle through different forms of religion — that, if anything, religion is becoming more dominant in the US than in the past. We know that four out of five Americans are Christians. We know that we have one million Hindus, we may have three or four million Buddhists, and we may have four or five million Muslims. So religion is alive and well .... It may be relatively shallow in the sense that it is not making hard-core demands on a lot of people. But I don't think that means it's going away.