Christ in American Religious Fiction

Abstract

HE old painting that still decorates some middle-class Protestant homes, showing Christ with lantern in hand, knocking at the heart's door, holds an ironic symbolic significance for the development of American literature and its religious expression: if Christian fiction in America has contributed little of lasting value to serious literature, it can at least claim credit for opening many a nineteenth-century home to novel reading that would have remained otherwise closed for a much longer time. Although poetry was accepted from the start as compatible with the practice of piety, the novel was not. It got off to a bad start, since the first native novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) dealt with a seduction as its central theme, while those immediately following the picaresque Modern Chivalry (first part, 1792) by H. H. Brackenridge, and Brockden Brown's Gothic romances together with the imported English offerings of the century, did not inspire confidence in the new genre as a means for spiritual growth. Not until almost the middle of the nineteenth century did an author hit upon the formula that rendered the novel respectable, even desirable, for Christian consumption. That was in 1841, when the Unitarian Reverend William Ware discovered that the traditional Christ story plus considerable fictional embellishment equals a best seller. His Julian; or, Scenes in Judea, featuring a Roman Jew who finally gets to see Jesus, set the pattern for a series of phenomenally popular time-of-Christ romances that continues into the present. Thus the beginnings of American fiction on one level are intimately related to the story of Christ.' Although nearly all of the historical Christian novels present obvious distortions of the Testament picture of Jesus, either by sentimentalization of his personality and work or by mixing fictional-romantic and biblical-historical elements, the religiously-conditioned public has accepted them as inspirational and continues to read the blendings of salvation, sex, miracles, and magic as reverently-composed products of Christian art. When, in 1855, the prolific Joseph Holt Graham turned out The Prince of the House of David (an epistolary account by a peripatetic young girl of her encounters with Jesus), its sales were fantastic. Timothy Shay Arthur, the teetotaling author of Ten Nights in a Bar-room, wrote the only discordant review. He complained that New characters and incidents are introduced and language put into our Saviour's mouth, of which we find no record in the sacred volume ... a page or two was sufficient to create the same feelings we have when an imaginary head