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"What Would Jesus Do?": Modern Revival in the Marketplace, 1896-2000S

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W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2016 "What Would Jesus Do?": Modern Revival in the Marketplace, 1896-2000s. Jennifer L. Hancock College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hancock, Jennifer L., ""What Would Jesus Do?": Modern Revival in the Marketplace, 1896-2000s." (2016). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1593092110. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/m2-7d0m-9b37 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “What Would Jesus Do?”: Modem Revival in the Marketplace, 1896-2000s Jennifer L. Hancock Dallas, Texas Master of Arts in Religion, Yale Divinity School, Yale University, 2000 Bachelor of Arts in English, Abilene Christian University, 1996 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary January, 2016 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy fi [SkaJJJ£ULA— Jennifer L. Hancock Approved by the mmittee, November 2015 A Committee Co-Chair Associate\professor Mauread Fitzgerald, Religious Studies The College of William and Mary - n ( Cc mmittee Co-Chair ' Program Director & Assoefate Pr sor Charles McGovern, American Studies and History The^ Allege of William and Mary Associate Professor Chandos Michael Brown, American Studies and History The College of William and Mary ’rofessor Francesca'Sawaya, Amencan Studies and English The College of William and Mary Program Director & Professor Marktiulsether, American Studies University of Tennessee, Knoxville ABSTRACT In 1896, liberal Congregationalist pastor Charles Sheldon wroteIn His Steps, one of the bestselling novels in American history generating massive popularization of the question, "What would Jesus do?" In 1996, the question peaked in popularity again, this time not at the hands of Progressives like Sheldon but by conservative evangelicals who fashioned it into a commercial logo. In the intervening century, Americans never stopped asking the question and using the market both to revive popular incarnations of Jesus and alternately to consolidate influence over the faithful. This study examines four episodes of revival through commercial culture in struggle over social change: mass consumption ofIn His Steps at the turn of the twentieth century deployed for economic reform; Sister Rosetta Tharpe's “Swinging Spirituals” for racial and religious crossover in the 1930s and 40s; the popularization of the radical, grassroots Jesus MovementJesus by Christ Superstar and the emergence of the Christian Right in the late 1960s and early 70s; and the 1990s WWJD commercial bracelet fad, which helped elect George W. Bush into office even as it inspired subversive resistance in its redeployment as ‘Who would Jesus bomb?" following the declaration of War on Terror. This dissertation argues that Americans have used the question interruptively over time to question the status quo or to find a way forward in periods of modern religious or social struggle. Via the resultant commercialized WWJD revivals, Jesus has become increasingly intertwined in American life. Even as some have used the marketing of it for theological or political dominance, holding up the question of Jesus for popular morality and democracy perpetually undermines such consolidations, repeatedly cycling back to the fostering of religious ecumenism and cultural pluralism. Revival in tensive and generative relation to the market continues. There is no sign of abandoning the question of incarnating Jesus in modern American life any time soon. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Dedications iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. What Would Jesus the Carpenter Do?: A Progressive Gospel for the Million in Charles Sheldon’sIn His Steps 16 Chapter 2. Rock Me!: The Jubilee of the Kinsman Redeemer in Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Swinging Spirituals 78 Chapter 3. From Cosmic Christ toSuperstar. The Radical Gospel of the Jesus Kids and the Emergence of the Christian Right 138 Chapter 4. “Sex? Drugs? Gangs? WWJD?”: Jesus as Logo for Evangelical Morality in 1990s Culture Wars 201 Conclusion 253 Works Cited 260 Discography 270 Vita 275 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This writer wishes to express her appreciation for Maureen Fitzgerald and Charlie McGovern under whose guidance this study was conducted. The author is also indebted to the helpful archival staffs at the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka, KS, the Chicago Historical Society, the Contemporary Culture Collection at Temple University Library in Philadelphia, PA and the New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Thanks also to the friendly folks at Central Congregational Church in Topeka, KS for encouragement and for letting me poke around in the Charles Sheldon Room. Cheerful thanks to all who shared their own WWJD stories (and trinkets) with me along the way. This work is dedicated to my parents, Don and Forrest Hancock and to my husband, John Gattis For Ava and Eliza Nichols, this sentiment: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. ...And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." -Rainer Maria Rilke Introduction I came of age within the generation that wore woven WWJD wristbands earnestly as both fashion and faith statement. Beyond appearing virtuous and fashionable, I cannot say that either I or many of my peers could have explained our attraction to the straps spreading the question, "W hat would Jesus do?" far and wide. We simply sensed it was right, or righteous, or just righteously cool. In 1993, at my small, West Texas Christian college, we were on the cutting edge of a fad rapidly spreading in evangelical circles. Four years previously, in 1989, youth minister Janie Tinklenberg had reintroduced the question to her youth group at Calvary Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan. Moved by the many moral questions that contemporary teenagers faced - like sex, drugs, and gangs - Tinklenberg began discussing Charles Sheldon's 1896 novel,In His Steps, centered on the question. She initiated a partnership with local marketing company, Lesco Corporation to adapt woven luggage tags into bracelets bearing its initials: "WWJD?" Evangelical youth embraced these "bracelets" enthusiastically, and independent Christian bookstores did a steady business selling these wristbands through the early nineties. In 1997, the market exploded with WWJD products as the discovery of an untapped Christian market came into play with evangelical culture wars. As evangelicals discovered in youthful consumption of WWJD a potent (and profitable) means by which to advance their conservative cultural agenda, they followed bracelet production with a burst of other goods: devotionals, youth ministry curricula, books with inspirational quotations, WWJD-themed Bibles and Christian Contemporary music anthologies on compact disc. Other manufacturers, following Lesco's lead, produced a variety of WWJD wearables - not only t-shirts, hats, and other accessories, but a spectrum of WWJD bracelets that hit every price point and niche market, from the unpretentious woven strap to 14-carat gold and every color and material imaginable in between. Charles Sheldon's own great-grandson Garrett Sheldon, published an updated version of his grandfather's novel for nineties youth. The preacher at the church I attended released his own book of life-application meditations on the question. And this was only the tip of the WWJD marketing iceberg - both earnest and ironic. By this time, Lesco had sold 15 million bracelets- one for each American teenager - and other producers were lining shelves with snarky products like "WWJD" imprinted on underwear, "What would Jesus eat?" diet books, and "Who Wants a Jelly Donut?" license plate covers. The glut of 1990s WWJD market production, intertwining with heated moral positions on issues like sex, drugs, and gangs, as well as the politics of abortion, welfare, and school prayer, bracketed the one-hundred year-old conversation that Sheldon started back in 1896. In his own day, Sheldon worried about declining modern interest in Christianity as well as the "social question" - massive poverty and labor wars attendant to industrialization in large Northern and Western cities. He picked up on the contemporary tendency to project Jesus in modern scenarios as a compelling strategy to revive religious relevance while exposing modern labor injustice. In penning a series of narrative sermons that he republished as In His Steps, Sheldon imagined members of a small Midwestern congregation moved to engage in social reform by asking "What would Jesus do?" One by one, as fictional parishioners applied the question to their own realm of influence, they redeemed their town - a revival exceeding the page as Sheldon's readers, too, took the question to heart. By the turn of the century, contemporaries estimated sales in the millions, and the novel had been translated into at least ten languages. The novel has since never gone out of print, and any book historian would recognize it as one of the top-selling novels in American history. Just as In His Steps did in the 1890s, so "WWJD?" in the 1990s caught the imagination of millions of Americans, who deployed mass-marketed articulations of Jesus to address pressing social questions. Likewise, at points in between - from gospel song-making through the mid­ century, late-sixties radical theology movements, to nineties culture - the question of what might Jesus do if incarnated in modern America has never abated.
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