“Jesus, My Homeboy”: Teaching Bruce Barton’s Jesus in Twenty-First Century Texas

For many years, I have been teaching a lower-level, core curriculum humanities course called “American Studies for the Twenty-First Century” at the University of Texas at Dallas. I have three goals for the course: 1) to teach students how to be critical readers of American literary, historical, and visual texts; 2) to introduce students to the most exciting “classic” and recent scholarship in American Studies; and 3) to prepare students to be good citizens. I make no apologies for how old fashioned and naïve goal number three sounds. The course is organized thematically to explore issues and questions in five major areas: 1) gender and sexuality; 2) religion/politics/commerce; 3) race and ethnicity; 4) class, labor, and consumption; and 5) globalization. Each section is anchored by one or two major literary texts with a number of secondary readings to place the primary texts in their historical context. More contemporary readings invite students to think about how these themes continue to structure American social and political life. Students respond to these readings through both formal and informal writing assignments. My hope is to equip students with a “usable past,” a history of the debates that still shape contemporary society and politics, so that they can be better informed, more thoughtful citizens. The section “religion/politics/commerce” is anchored by Bruce Barton’s best-selling life of Jesus, The Man Nobody Knows (1925). I chose this text, because it raises questions about what religion scholar Leigh Eric Schmidt calls “the interplay of commerce, Christianity, and consumption” (13), an interplay as relevant today as it was in Barton’s era. Does God want us to be prosperous? Does He reward good people with wealth (or punish bad/lazy ones with poverty)? What’s the relationship between Christianity and profit-seeking? Is “Christian business” an oxymoron? Are faith and consumerism opposed? What if buyers are purchasing Christian commodities? Is consumerism itself a religion, and—if so—in what ways? Is there Biblical warrant for certain kinds of social and economic policies? Should it matter? Barton thought that running a business could be a Christian calling, and he cast Jesus as a role model for business executives and managers. One controversy over the book in the 1920s was whether Barton sanctified business (by raising it to a form of Christian service) or merely used Christianity to justify corporate profit seeking. Although scads of businessmen wrote to Barton to thank him for this Jesus they could relate to, one critic, for example, called Barton’s transformation of Jesus into a super salesman yet another