Notre Dame’s A. Scott Appleby reviews a new book about the ways American culture has imaged Jesus

More than one-third of American Jesus is devoted to the appropriation of Jesus by Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, the Dalai Lama and the Nation of Islam. In itself, this is fascinating and instructive material. For Prothero, the diffusion of Jesus into the thought worlds and sensibilities of non-Christian Americans constitutes the great triumph of the protean Jesus. Unfortunately, the celebration of Jesus’ ubiquity occasionally echoes a tired mantra: “Church bad, American individualism good. Religion bad, spirituality good. Christianity oppressive, other religions lighthearted.”

Tellingly, Catholics, who constitute the largest single denomination, do not fit Mr. Prothero’s version of “the good news.” Dogmatic to a fault, they insist that the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, far from being a metaphysical abstraction, roots Jesus’ self-giving nature, character and personality at the very center of the Godhead. The love of the other, which Americans find so endearing about Jesus, says something definitive about Jesus, of course. But Christians also hope that it says something definitive about the nature of reality and the meaning of existence, not least about human nature created in God’s image. The ancient creedal affirmations that attempted to link Jesus to “being itself” were on to something.

Throughout most of American history, the Catholic Jesus has been the suffering servant, the compassionate victim and wounded redeemer whose identification with the poor and the forgotten is an act of identity, not charity. Yet the suffering Christ makes few appearances in Mr. Prothero’s account. One worries that this Jesus, the Lord of the marginalized and forlorn, may soon become the man nobody knows in 21st-century America.