JESUS IN AMERICA: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession

Jesus has been an astonishingly mutable figure in American culture, lauded by presidents from Thomas Jefferson to George W. Bush, pressed into service by both abolitionists and slaveholders and marketed by Broadway producers and T-shirt makers. USC professor Fox undertakes the daunting task of telling a roughly chronological story of how Jesus—or the many versions of Jesus—has animated American life from the days of Cotton Mather to the days of Mel Gibson. Precisely because of Jesus' evergreen popularity, some readers may find Fox's book an inviting entrée to the personalities and controversies that have shaped Christianity in America. Fox's scholarship is dependable, and he does a fine job of distilling the essence of figures ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Aimee Semple McPherson. But Fox's net is so broadly cast that the book ends up contributing little to a story that has been exceedingly well told, and more persuasively interpreted, by historians like Mark Noll (America's God ). This book will undoubtedly be compared to, and confused with, Stephen Prothero's American Jesus , but the text lacks Prothero's deftness with historical sources and his interpretive boldness—there is little here to challenge historians' conventional wisdom or mainstream readers' assumptions. Nor does Fox, unlike Prothero, give much attention to non-Christian encounters with Jesus. But Fox still does a very serviceable job of explaining why pollsters say Americans rank Jesus as the "thirteenth greatest American of all time." (Feb. 17)

Forecast: With the release of Mel Gibson's movie The Passion scheduled for Ash Wednesday (February 25), this book is poised to hit bookstores at a time when Jesus will be fodder for many a dinner conversation. First print run: 40,000.