Roundtable

This is the trap that Bruce Feiler falls into with his recently released America’s Prophet: Moses and the American Story. Feiler is a popular writer known mostly for his Walking the Bible book and PBS series. He characterizes Moses as an imperfect human nominated by God to overturn unjust human authorities. The Moses story has a great many American analogs, from presidents Washington and Lincoln, to civil rights leaders Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. But the pathos of Moses is that he never quite succeeds, never makes it himself to the promised land.

All of these historical figures participate in the American cycle of revolution, failure, and redemption—explained by distinguished Harvard theologian Peter Gomes: “We have the Revolution, but then slavery. We have the Civil War, but then Jim Crow. It’s similar to the pattern described in the Hebrew Bible. First they’re faithful, then they become successful. Then they become unfaithful, God destroys them, and they become unsuccessful again. Then they repent and the cycle starts over.” Feiler takes this interpretation and runs with it, at one point declaring that he’s found “the one story that affects everyone in America.”

But there’s still at least one other figure that, as much as we loathe to admit it, comes instantly to mind when we think of Moses in America, one who doesn’t necessarily fit in as redeemer—Charlton Heston in a red-and-gold robe and massive white beard, holding court as the ultimate action-hero Moses in The Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacularly successful creation is Moses the enforcer, not Moses the liberator. This Moses is reactionary, not visionary.

The concluding chapters proclaim Moses’s greatness with unalloyed zeal. Moses is “our true founding father” whose “face belongs on Mount Rushmore,” “a looking glass into our soul,” and the “thinker” that has had the longest sustained influence over American life—that’s right, greater than Jefferson, Einstein, or Edison. Feiler’s wide-eyed earnestness is much more endearing when it doesn’t come with such certainty—when he interviews people who contradict his own beliefs, or whose own lives express more eloquently the inspiring role of Moses than his own narrative could.

Feiler writes that he didn’t set out to unseat Jesus from the throne of the American figurehead but as he went on, he felt that Moses should have the crown—the Exodus story is simply more relevant to the myth of America than the Crucifixion. He may be right, but Stephen Prothero, author of the 2004 book American Jesus, isn’t weighing in. Prothero, recently the author of Religious Literacy, offers a nuanced, surprising and sympathetic account of the way our American idea of Jesus has changed since the founding of the United States.

In American history, it seems you can’t encounter Jesus without echoes of Moses. Moses is human, chosen by God but continually humbled. Jesus is the next coming, human but also divine. Moses is about deliverance from oppression. Jesus is about redemption. But the two heroes overlap, as both authors recognize. The African-American Christian tradition has often merged New and Old Testament imagery in its folklore. Lincoln may have resembled Moses to the public, but he was more like Jesus in private.

For America’s founding Puritans, Jesus wasn’t such a big deal. They were more concerned with the faceless, fear-and-trembling Old Testament God—Moses’ God. So how did Jesus get to be the driving force behind the Protestant revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Throughout Christian history, innovators have proclaimed that there is a difference, between “the religion of Jesus”—the actual teachings of the carpenter from Nazareth—and “the religion about Jesus”—the cumbersome, ritualistic theology that churches built up around Jesus. Possibly the most unlikely of these reformers is Thomas Jefferson—inventor of the separation of church and state, who was in his time denounced as an atheist or even the anti-Christ. But Jefferson’s infamous re-mix of the Bible, which cut out essentially everything but the words of Jesus, was according to Prothero, not a destructive but a creative act, an act of respect for Jesus, or at least “a rational sort of Jesus that a leader like Jefferson could follow.” Throughout the various Great Awakenings of American history, this cycle continued: cutting away the non-Jesus parts of Christianity, until Protestant sects were left by the twentieth century with the notion of “Jesus alone.”

The second and more daring half of American Jesus takes place outside of Christianity altogether. We follow the pluralistic journey of Jesus’ extra-Christian reincarnations—from Broadway star in Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, to his reclamation by a small coterie of early twentieth-century rabbis as the consummate Jew, to his reincarnation as a model Hindu swami through the American Vedanta Society. Prothero argues that such complete re-imaginings of Jesus have actually enabled Jesus to survive and prosper as an American icon. New citizens, carefully balancing assimilation with cultural uniqueness, must reckon with Jesus in order to proclaim their Americanness.

So Jesus lives on: as a Christian prophet, yes, but also as a rock star, a rabbi, a swami, a bodhisattva, and a revolutionary. Prothero borrows the Hindu concept of the “avatar,” a Sanskrit word meaning the repeated descent of the divine gods onto Earth in human form. The idea that there could be only one such incarnation, the Savior Christ, is anathema to this American Hindu movement, as it is to Prothero’s book as a whole.

Whereas Feiler takes the culturally conservative line that “secularism, globalism, and pluralism threaten to undermine the Bible’s influence,” Prothero would heartily disagree. “The problem with this critique is that it assumes an unchanging Jesus [or Moses], untainted by human history, who is somehow being violated by his many resurrections and reincarnations. From the perspective of theology, an unchanging Jesus may be a necessity…From the perspective of cultural and religious history, however, Jesus is anything but unchanging.” In those terms, Feiler’s America’s Prophet would be theology and Prothero’s American Jesus would be a cultural history.