Jesus in America by Richard W. Fox

Author:Richard W. Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

SIX

HE TELLS ME

I AM HIS OWN

I

The end of the southern whites’ War Between the States produced a suffering Jesus who stood for the sacrificial valor of a regional culture. Southerners could construe defeat on the battlefield of war as victory on the battlefield of spirit. Blood sacrifice brought purification, drawing the entire southern people in their devastation closer to Christ their savior. The North had mounted a mighty juggernaut, said southern Christians, but the northern soul belonged to Satan—the same judgment voiced by many southerners from the eighteenth century to the present day. Meanwhile, the end of the northerners’ Civil War, and of the anti-slavery movement, released a broader liberalization of Christ than the one already sparked by the abolitionists. They had made him an advocate of equality and distinguished his historical consciousness as a Palestinian Jew from the unchanging truth of his basic principles. Some former abolitionists continued the egalitarian campaign during Radical Reconstruction— keeping Jesus alive as the sword-wielding judge of John Brown’s Kansas dreams—but by the mid-1870s their militancy was spent. Liberal Protestants returned to the tranquil mission inaugurated by early-nineteenth-century Unitarians and stalled by the anti-slavery crusade. Jesus modeled and enacted the rule of love in society. Love ruled across the board in all human relations, public as well as private. Love transformed souls and institutions alike. Liberal Christians no longer debated whether Christ had brought peace or the sword. They returned to the effusive, progressive idealism represented by the saintly William Ellery Channing: Jesus was the Prince of Peace and the Apostle of Love.1

Like Emerson (and unlike Jefferson), mid-nineteenth-century Protestant liberals wished to break down the barrier between the natural and the supernatural—not to naturalize the divine (the mistake they thought Theodore Parker had made), but to reveal the sacred already instilled by God in the world. Spiritual reality came in a single form—the divine spirit—and ordinary human life pulsed with it. Likewise Christ possessed one seamless “nature”—the spirit of love—not the two (“true God and true man”) posited by traditional theology. The liberals presented Jesus as proof that natural and supernatural spheres flowed together. They were not proposing that all reality was spiritual—the formulation chosen by Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Scientists in the 1870s—but that God had already seeded the very real material world of sin with his spirit. Christ was the living symbol and embodiment of selfless love in a society given over to greed and self-aggrandizement.2

The liberals’ blissful theorizing about the natural and the supernatural, and about the luminous Jesus who reconciled all good things to himself, comprised one central pillar of a much broader nineteenth-century liberal faith in reason, science, and morality as the motors of American progress. Most liberal Protestants gladly embraced scientific knowledge, including the scholarship of post- Civil War biblical criticism. Nearly all Americans, for that matter, reveled in what they called “science.” They rejected only a skeptical science that declared outright war on religion or religious belief—and that kind of anti-clerical science was rare in mid-nineteenth-century America.

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