Hey, remember Buddy Christ? The celeb spokes-deity in the 1999 Kevin Smith comedy Dogma offended a lot of people. But remaking Jesus in our own image is a popular pastime among Christians — and it has been for centuries.

The beardless, toga-wearing, chariot-driving Christ in the fourth century looked suspiciously like earlier images of Apollo the Sun God. In fact, a scan of history pops up any number of “Jesuses”: Confederate Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Black Jesus, Comrade Jesus, Coach Jesus, Amway Jesus, the Aryan Jesus, Psychotherapist Jesus, Jesus the Vegan, Jesus the UFO Pilot, the Ascended Master Jesus, Isa the Imam and Jesus the Star-Spangled Patriot, to cite but a few.

Many people — even devotees of other religions — want to use the Man from Galilee as the poster boy for their nation, ethnic group, cause, hobby, profession or obsession of choice.

In some ways, this profusion of Jesuses shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, the Bible provides us with well over a hundred names, titles, descriptors and word pictures of Jesus. He is the Son of God, Son of Man, King of Kings, the Messiah, the Prince of Peace, the Word, the Light, the Alpha and Omega, the Vine, the Lily of the Valley and on and on. Jesus Himself was quoted in John 12:32 as saying, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (KJV).

The problem is telling the difference between lifting up the universally relevant Jesus Christ and squeezing Him into culturally constructed roles as a shill for everything from candy bars to political platforms.

AMERICAN JESUSES
Americans seem to have unique problems with remaking Jesus in their own images, as we see in two recent books: Richard Wightman Fox’s Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004) and Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Prothero’s American Jesus, in particular, does a splendid job of bringing to light some of the widespread conceptions of Jesus that have been  popular in U.S. history.

Prothero argues that there have been eight major archetypes of Jesus portrayed in the course of the American experiment: Jesus as the Enlightened Sage, the
Sweet Savior, Manly Redeemer, the Superstar, Mormon Elder Brother, Black Moses, Rabbi and Oriental Christ.

Some of these might be familiar to you. You might snicker at others. Those who profess a commitment to biblical revelation might click their tongues at the deistic, moralistic concepts of Jesus the Enlightened Sage — famously exemplified by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and his miracle-free, oh-so-18th-century Jefferson Bible. Mormon Elder Brother won’t resonate with many, with the possible exception of the struggling non-Mormon youth pastor marooned in Latter-day-Saint country, such as rural Utah or Idaho.

But there is plenty of evidence that modern-day Christians — even those who tout their allegiance to Sola Scriptura — are guilty of cutting and pasting together their own versions of a Jesus to fit their predispositions.

Let’s take Prothero’s archetype of the Sweet Savior. In Victorian 19th century, the emphasis was on feminine virtue and its role in civilizing both the home and the larger society. Church thinkers reflected that. The Savior became all love and motherly hugs: humble, pure, tender, comforting, truly “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” Prothero points out that the artwork American Protestants hung in their homes reflected this. Think of Bernhard Plockhorst’s popular “Jesus Blessing the Children” (1885). Plockhorst “borrowed from European paintings of the Madonna and Child” but reversed the usual roles — in this instance, the cherubic babe was found “sitting on the lap of an adoring Jesus.”

The tender, maternal Jesus, Prothero contends, easily lent itself to a related “sub-Jesus” of the era: Jesus as Friend. To many evangelical Protestants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was, indeed, “no friend like the lowly Jesus, no not one!” Prothero points out dozens of hymns from this period with the “friend” imagery, including probably the most popular of them all, the enduring “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” (1855). Even more intimate was the 1912 classic “In the Garden,” which describes a Jesus who “walks and talks” with us and tells us that we are “His own.” It would be hard to envision this Jesus overturning tables in the temple courtyards.

JESUS: MEEK OR MUSCULAR?
America in the late 19th century was a pretty rough-and-tumble place. Farmers, loggers, miners, cowboys and on-the-make entrepreneurs rebelled at picturing Jesus
as a mama’s boy. “Muscular Christianity” became a buzzword, promoted by groups such as the YMCA as part of a growing tolerance for sports and exercise, emphasizing manly vigor. Not surprisingly, Americans’ images of Jesus moved toward a rugged male version of the Son of Man.

Among the most prominent boosters of this new vision, Prothero notes, was Bruce Barton. Barton, the son of a New England Congregational minister, made his fortune in marketing and advertising (he invented “Betty Crocker”). In the massive bestseller The Man Nobody Knows (1925), Barton portrayed Christ as a hearty, robust figure whose carpenter’s muscles “stood out like knots of iron”; His firm handshake and keen sense of humor would fit any go-getting Rotarian. Jesus was also the author of “the most powerful advertisements of all time” (the parables) and the team leader who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” For Barton and his enthusiastic readers, Jesus might have been the Rose of Sharon … but He was no shrinking violet, mister.

If anybody exceeded Barton’s depiction of a manly Jesus, it was the leading evangelist of the day, the irrepressible Billy Sunday. A man’s man, the ex-major leaguer (Ty Cobb eclipsed Sunday’s career record for stolen bases) had been a hard drinker and carouser until he was saved at Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission. Ordained a Presbyterian minister, Sunday took to the sawdust trail and attracted enormous crowds with his athletic preaching style and attacks on “dirty, low-down, whiskey-soaked, beerguzzling, bull-necked, foul-mouthed hypocrites.” Sunday’s Jesus, Prothero points out, was even more militant than Billy in the fight against sin. He “was the greatest scrapper that ever lived,” said Sunday — the kind of Christ every manly man wanted in his corner.

OUT OF SIGHT, MAN
The years passed; and America endured the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and what seemed to be an increasingly impersonal mass society. Many young Americans in the emerging Baby-Boom generation began to long for a little less in-your-face, more personalized Jesus. Out of this longing, Prothero argues, came a decidedly countercultural vision of a “hippified” Jesus — bearded, long-haired, sandal-clad and hassled by the authorities — who roamed Judea “with a band of unschooled ruffians,” to use the words of Larry Norman’s classic song “The Outlaw.”

Thus, it was not surprising that amid San Francisco’s 1967 “Summer of Love” a new movement of “street Christians” or “Jesus freaks” grew. While holding on to a conservative approach to Scripture and personal behavior, they embraced a Jesus who, in Prothero’s words, came to save “the high, not the mighty” — “someone who would hold your hand, wipe your brow, and get you through a bad trip.”

Soon the Jesus movement began popping up in Southern California and in urban hippie districts across the nation. A spate of pop hits such as “Oh, Happy Day,” “Spirit in the Sky” and “My Sweet Lord,” as well as the massive impact of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” brought publicity. Soon, high schoolers and teenyboppers joined the movement and embraced all sorts of fun stuff: posters, buttons, crosses, bumper stickers, J-E-S-U-S cheers, coffeehouses and — best of all — sanctified “Jesus Rock.”

Ultimately, disco, heavy metal and punk youth culture took over in the late ’70s. But the groovy Hippie Jesus has continued to live on (albeit with new fashions, hair-dos and music) among kids in evangelical church youth groups.

Interestingly, the widespread Psychotherapist Jesus — beginning with the writings of Norman Vincent Peale back in the 1930s and continuing with more contemporary evangelists of self-esteem, such as Robert Schuller and James Dobson — undergirds much of the “self-help” sections of your local Christian bookstore today. Powerful ideas embedded within a culture have long shelf lives: Often, when we think a certain proclivity has been put to rest, it is simply morphing into a new form that better fits with our current conventional wisdom.

BEYOND BUDDY CHRIST
So is it possible to escape culturally bound conceptions of Jesus? Probably not. A reaction in the other direction — toward some sort of bland, flannel-graph Christ — would certainly be the wrong way to approach the problem. The God-Man Jesus cannot be conceived of in any one way. He’s too complex, too multi-faceted in His divine role and in His humanity for us to limit Him in that manner.

Besides, remember all those scriptural names, titles and descriptors? The names and images of Jesus in the Bible originated within very real, historical and specific cultural settings. Human culture, per se, is not the problem — God in His love and mercy utilized it to reach out in our direction in the first place. But does that mean that only “biblical” culture is kosher? (Sorry, pun intended.)

We have a template for how to approach our dilemma in the 15th chapter of Acts. There we find a report of an early church council in Jerusalem. The leaders of the church were confronted with the reality that there were actually such things as goyim Christians — uncircumcised gentiles who were experiencing salvation and receiving the Holy Spirit, just like their Jewish brethren. At that momentous council, the apostles decided that the essence of the faith did not rest in following Judaism’s laws, regulations and customs. They relented on placing those burdens upon their gentile brethren.

Since that day, one of the unique attributes of Christianity has been the fact that it is a faith that is adaptable to multiple cultural settings. It does not demand a monocultural hegemony — as opposed to Islam, which asserts the preeminence of Arabic culture and language wherever it has spread.

As salvation did not belong to any one culture, neither does Jesus. We can be comfortable with the fact that His appeal is universal. It resonates within all cultures. On the flip side, we must beware putting this culture-busting Jesus back into a cultural prison of our own making. The solution lies in examining both our own and others’ conceptions of Jesus against the touchstone of Scripture.

While we may not be able to totally escape the powerful sway that our culture holds over us, we can be aware that our own fallen humanity bends us in that direction. It’s worth remembering that even some of our distorted pictures of Jesus are based on core truths.

Buddy Christ? Maybe not.

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Larry Eskridge is the associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College; he is currently at work on a history of the Jesus People movement.