The rise and rise of the Church that feels at home on the range
America may not have been the first religious nation bent on reimagining Jesus for the contemporary world. Equally, no one could accuse it of lacking ingenuity when embarked upon this problematical task. The Tex-Mex blues rock band, ZZ Top, once produced a barnstorming number entitled “Jesus Just Left Chicago” (included on the album Tres Hombres) in which Our Lord features as a kind of stealthy Midwestern tourist, numinously in transit (“You might not see him in person/But he’s with you just the same”) from the Windy City down to New Orleans and anxious to make his presence felt at “all points in between”.
Or there is the Annie Proulx short story “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”, set in the wilds of Wyoming and featuring a rancher’s widow named Mrs Wolfscale who overhears a couple of younger women, fresh from Bible class, “a-tryin’ a guess how it would be if Jesus showed up in Sheridan”. The women agree that he would probably be able to find a job in construction. As for the furnishings of his apartment, Mrs Wolfscale, interested in spite of herself, concedes that “there I set, crazy as they was, wonderin’ if he’d pick out a maple rockin’ chair or a sofa with that Scotchguard fabric or what”.