“Jesus, My Pal”: Reading and Religion in Middlebrow America

• Published in: Canadian review of American studies Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 147 - 181
• Main Author: Smith, Erin A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.08.2007
• ISSN: 0007-7720; 1710-114X
• DOI: 10.3138/cras.37.2.147

Bruce Barton was an advertising executive and the author of a best-selling life of Christ, The Man Nobody Knows (1925). Although they were immensely popular, Barton's books are dismissed by scholars today as theologically empty justifications for consumer capitalism. Through an analysis of letters from readers, this essay argues that Barton's work was part of the “lived religion” of ordinary Christians, whatever its intellectual or theological failings. First, it filled a vacuum in advice in modern America. Second, it finessed the impersonal scale of urban life by presenting Jesus as a friend. Third, it rendered irrelevant deeply felt contradictions in Protestant America between religion and science, fundamentalism and modernism. I demonstrate a gap between intellectuals and ordinary readers that has implications for our own scholarly practices.