The 500 word book proposal (first draft)


The book that I want to write is about America and Jesus. I know that this book has been written a million times in a million ways—as history, sociology, theology, theory, propaganda, and erotica. It has been written as poetry, non fiction and fiction, it has been written from the beginning of America, and it will be written at the end of America. It is written because there seems to be a common idea that religion is the microcosm of the American ideal, and to understand it is to understand all of her complexities. Each writer has come with there own ideas, and there own solutions.
As a writer, although I do agree with the idea about Jesus being a metonymy for larger ideas of America; I do not believe that there is a solution to American Jesus, because I do not Him as a problem to be solved. It is a matrix threaded with half a millennia of history, a matrix so thin and gnarled that to pull one string means the whole web hums. Then, there needs to be a new way of writing about this matrix—away from the old narratologies and the dead hermeneutics—resurrect it like Ezekiel’s old bones (the ones reflected in the African American Spiritual dry bones—the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone and Thomas Merton is connected to James Dobson.)
Continuing with the other connections between Merton, Dobson and the African American Spirituals, I want this to be a book that works through the common and the found. I want this to be a book about how 300 million Americans think, and not the current trend at Harvard Divinity School is. I want to treat those who are usually held in contempt, with an intellectual rigor. To examine, is not nessciarly to judge, and if judging takes place, it must be in the spirit of inquiry.
To reflect this means there is a need to make the text closer to the matrices of American faith, finding a form that allows gaps and spaces have equal space to everything else. I think that the best way of showing this is a dictionary—a great American form, and one that allows for easy complexities. Not a dictionary in the traditional sense, because it is impossible for something so empirical to be reflected in the dry authority of Noah Webster—think of it then as more like The Devil’s Dictionary—witty, sharp, ready to reflect conflict.
But in opposition to Bierce’s angry and conviction about everything, I do not want to be an authority, I want to be an entry into discourse. I want people who are low key, liberal, mainline protestants to go to Baptist Mega-Churches, I want the loud dancing and glossilalia of the Assemblies of God to hear the quietness of qauker meeting hours. I want, in this age of god being used as a cynical pawn of the powers-that-be and hated by those who think they know, a large and wide ranging, amusing, and trenchant invitation to the nature of American Vernacular Christianity.

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