The American “Lives” of Jesus: The Malleable Figure of Christ as a Man of the People

Abstract

The religious culture of late nineteenth-century America involves a curious combination of theological debate and popular social reform rhetoric. A battle for cultural authority emerges in print culture between church leaders and social reform writers, particularly domestic novelists. This discourse is exhibited in the proliferation of religious biographies, which were profoundly influenced in American popular culture by Congregationalist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, who published The Life of Jesus, the Christ in 1871. This genre was quickly appropriated by popular novelists, and read in tandem, these biographies allow us to view a discourse that represents a shifting of power in the mediation of social reform rhetoric that ultimately materializes in the social gospel movement, a reform platform that marries Christian ethics with modern cultural concerns that are largely related to the Industrial Age. While American Protestantism in the nineteenth century, particularly in the Northeast, seemed to be moving away from its Calvinist roots and arguably toward an ecumenical Christianity, or at a least nondenominational Protestantism, Calvinist clergy nevertheless played a key role in the negotiation of both religious and social liberal reform. Because of increased access to the written word, the impact of such reform efforts affected national audiences with farreaching results. Popular preachers coming out of various Calvinist creeds, such as Presbyterian Thomas De Witt Talmage and Congregationalists Henry Ward Beecher and Charles Sheldon, relied on the printed word to reach audiences of thousands although each was equally skilled in oratory, drawing in huge crowds to their affiliated churches. These three prominent figures, along with several other popular literary figures, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Mary Austin, experimented with a variety of literary forms including sermons, religious tracts, fiction, and even religious biography in their reconsideration of biblical authority in relation to contemporary moral ethics. It is in the religious biographies especially, which are known as the lives-of-Jesus biographies, that one finds an interesting rhetorical intersection of hermeneutics, theology, and sociology. Beecher's is central to an examination of this genre because he bridges the gap between church leaders and social reform writers as he strives to find a literary form that allows him to construct a highly personalized theology that seeks to reach a public well beyond the confines of the traditional church congregation. Beecher's preference for interpretive hermeneutics shows his awareness of earlier biblical criticism undercutting scriptural authority, and we must view his as an expression of his desire to show the ongoing relevance of the Bible to the modern age rather than a dismissal of scriptural authority. Richard Fox writes, In the late nineteenth century, liberal Protestantism was the established religion of a nation without an officially established religion. Beecher's force derived from his command of a religious tradition that was rapidly secularizing thanks in no small part to his own work (Trials of Intimacy 21). These lives-of-Jesus biographies reveal the struggle to contribute to a liberal Protestantism that in turn responds to the declining Calvinist ethos in American culture. A close examination of some of these texts will show that this particular form of religious tract was appropriated in an attempt to achieve something more comprehensive than merely religious reform or biblical criticism; indeed, these biographies extended the role of the church well beyond the level of individual spiritual salvation. They came to represent a key philosophical turning point in the integration of religious and social reform ideology, one that moves away from eschatological concerns to a stronger material consideration of how to establish God's Kingdom here on earth. …