The Man Nobody Knows

In 1925, a man named Bruce Barton published a book called The Man Nobody Knows. It became a best seller that year and was influential for several years afterward.

The man in question was Jesus. Barton made the claim that Jesus was the greatest business executive in all of world history. Jesus, Barton said, took eleven fishermen - and let's be honest, they didn't have one entire brain among them - and one tax collector - an unpopular occupation in every time and place - and forged them into an organization that went out and conquered the world. Eleven oafs and a pariah they were.  By inference, businessmen are heroes, making order from chaos and promoting the general welfare, and their own welfare in particular.

A few years later, President Calvin Coolidge repeated Barton's claim when he said that, "The man who builds a factory builds a temple, and the men who work there worship there." Then the stock market collapsed in 1929, a Great Depression followed, the reputations of businessmen were soon in tatters, and Barton's book, and Calvin Collidge's opinions, were consigned to the dustbin.

Nowadays, I think Barton's premise would be laughed at, both from a historical and religious viewpoint. Peter did head the Jerusalem church in the years after Jesus died, it is true, but the center of gravity in the embryonic Christian church soon passed to the Greek and Italian converts attracted by Paul and his successors. The other apostles are hardly mentioned in Acts or the epistles. Though the Catholic church of my youth insisted that they scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth  to preach, the lack of any historical record leaves the impression that they simply resumed their prior lives.

Theologically, Barton's Jesus is just ludicrous. The gospels are replete with warnings about those who prosper in this world and clearly say there will be a much different order of things in heaven. Corporate Jesus is just unimaginable.

Now I say all this because we're in an election year, and much of the country is still reeling from the worst economic downturn since shortly after The Man Nobody Knows came upon the scene. You might think the image of Jesus encouraging entrepreneurs and suggesting the poor must shift for themselves would be thoroughly discredited, considering so many people have lost jobs through no  fault of their own. You might think too that the political party which champions unfettered private enterprise would be tainted by the likes of Bernie Madoff, the auto executives who flew private jets to Washington to beg for a bailout, the banks generally, the financial houses especially,  and anyone who profits from the misery of others. But no, they still bang the drum for rich rewards to people who have a product or service, no matter how lame or injurious that product or service might be.

Sometimes when I'm out driving, I get behind a truck with mudflaps, and on those flaps there is often a profile cutout of a half-recumbrent girl, presumably naked, in chrome. I wonder, when I see the image, how long it took someone to produce it, and how much money that person has made from it. Yet, that's what we reward with large sums of money in our country, while the ordinary hard working man or woman suffers along from paycheck to paycheck, often slowly sinking into greater and greater debt and discouragement.

And people still listen to the latter day Bartons and Coolidges. And more's the pity.