Jesus in America Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession Chapter One The Name of Jesus Christ Has Been Spoken Jesus of Nazareth came into the world around the year 4 BCE , and word of him reached what Europeans called the "New World" fifteen hundred years later. But how did Jesus enter that world, and what kind of Jesus was he? He arrived in the minds, prayer books, and Bibles, on the crosses, holy cards, and rosaries, of European traders, explorers, and adventurers at the end of the fifteenth century. Spanish Catholic missionaries and settlers took him into Florida, New Mexico, and other parts of the Americas in the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, French Catholics and English Protestants brought him to their settlements along the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic seaboard. If we limit our attention to these Europeans, we immediately note the gap between Catholic and Protestant Christs. The Catholic Jesus was visible, material, and portable. Packed wooden ships carried sculptures, paintings, and crucifixes in their holds, along with other necessities. Jesus was represented in those religious objects and embodied physically in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist. Images showed him embedded in his Holy Family -- Mary and Joseph -- and surrounded by the saints (see figs. 1-3). He was the fleshy, wounded, bleeding, suffering Son of God whose sacrificial life was the model for each Christian's pilgrimage through the human vale of tears. The early New England Protestants, like the Calvinists on the Continent, were in full rebellion against this Catholic love of "externals" -- all the trinkets and visible symbols of faith. For them Jesus was present mainly in the Word read and preached, not in the sacrament shared. They banished images of Jesus not to downplay his importance but to respect his divinity. They kept him under his transcendent Father's wing, safe from idolatrous manipulation by human admirers. Like the Catholics, these Protestants centered their theology upon his redemptive sacrifice and his union with the Father and Holy Ghost in the Trinity. They felt his invisible spirit blow through their inmost hearts but were dismayed at the Catholic contemplation of his body and horrified at the Catholic consumption of his flesh. They thought Catholics were too complacent about their natural, unaided ability to imitate Christ's virtue, too liable to reduce faith to the pursuit of good works. Catholics, meanwhile, thought the Protestants had lost direct historic touch with Jesus by breaking the line of apostolic succession in the church he founded. By elevating the Bible over church tradition and the individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority, they had severed contact with the incarnate Christ. For all the Protestants' talk about finding Jesus in their hearts, they diminished his humanity by neglecting his pierced body. Spiritualizing him to safeguard his purity, they gave up the daily bread of his succor. The Catholic-Protestant split in theology and piety has remained the central fault line in American incarnations of Jesus ever since the seventeenth century. Yet the basic divergence between seventeenth-century Catholics and New England Puritans did not prevent them from finding common ground on some of Christ's cultural meanings. If we focus on the two groups' interactions with Native Americans, some intriguing convergences come into view. Spanish and French Catholics and English Protestants all saw Christ as a gift they could bestow upon the Indians. All of the Europeans thought Jesus stood for and effected salvation from sin. The Catholics took him, in addition, as an agent of deliverance from a primitive social outlook. In their view he was both the incarnate God who transcended culture -- who lifted faithful human beings into a placeless eternity of souls -- and an agent of cultural progress. Jesus helped Catholics and Protestants alike to justify their American overtures. Both groups could see their American adventures as part of God's plan to liberate native souls from the devil's chains. Catholics went further and identified Jesus explicitly with the campaign to alter Indian social behavior. Yet it is an error to view the early American Jesus as primarily a servant of European imperial expansion. Surely many statesmen, explorers, and even clergymen would happily have confined him to that role. But Jesus was not so easily contained. As a symbol of everlasting love he occasionally offered resistance to the barbarities committed by Europeans in their practice of civilization. Christians in America as in Europe sometimes rose up to challenge worldliness, exploitation, and cruelty. In their meetings with the Indians, the Europeans all settled on two basic identities for Jesus. He was the healer and the martyr. The Catholics in New Spain and New France added a third identity: the civilizer who combated dissolute habits. He taught the Indians to see those habits as offenses against God. Puritans resisted this civilizing use of Jesus. It made Jesus too cultural, too instrumental, too easy and undemanding a gift. Catholics gave Jesus away in their Eucharist with too few strings attached. He had to be held in reserve until Indians could actually read and experience his Word. But the Puritans joined the Catholics in preaching Christ's healing powers and his selfless martyrdom. Christ allowed Europeans and Indians alike to greet their own earthly end with equanimity. For the Catholics a select cohort of gifted souls could move beyond the usual achievement of Christian virtue to a direct imitation of Jesus, in which they could anticipate a suffering, perhaps even a martyrdom, like his. Newly arrived Europeans wanted things from Native Americans, and the Indians they met wanted things from them. Europeans wanted to know where the furs, gold, and silver were. They wanted land and food. They wanted knowledge of topography and waterways. Indians wanted iron goods and weapons, clothes and tobacco, barrels of peas and beans, and novel objects of all kinds, including brass crosses and porcelain rosary beads. Sometimes both parties wanted the same things, like land, although Europeans and Indians had very different conceptions of what it meant to "own" land. The biggest difference between the two sides may have been that only the Europeans had something they urgently wished the Indians to want: their religion. The Europeans wanted Jesus ultimately to be everyone's exclusive savior. For some of them Jesus was the inspiration and justification for their entire enterprise, the symbolic junction of their worldly and otherworldly commitments. These pious newcomers wanted Indians to know him and love him because they could not imagine living or dying without him. They believed that his ultimate sacrifice on the cross had changed human history, reopened the gates of heaven, and allowed men and women to transcend sinful passion and consecrate themselves to God's service. Jesus in America Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession . Copyright © by Richard Fox. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession by Richard Wightman Fox All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
