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Jesus for president; peace his platform

Here's the premise of Roland Merullo's American Savior: Jesus Christ suddenly appears on earth with the intention of running for president of the United States. He's a smart, compassionate, honest kind of guy - also charismatic, handsome, buff, with a gif

From the book jacket
From the book jacketRead more

A Novel of Divine Politics

By Roland Merullo

Algonquin Books.

320 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Paula Marantz Cohen

Here's the premise of Roland Merullo's

American Savior

: Jesus Christ suddenly appears on earth with the intention of running for president of the United States. He's a smart, compassionate, honest kind of guy - also charismatic, handsome, buff, with a gift for oratory and a talent for staging a newsworthy event. He gathers around him a group of ardent disciples - i.e., campaign staffers - and, despite efforts by his opponents to go negative ("Is Jesus gay?" "Where does Jesus come from?"), he holds to the high road and begins to make headway in the polls.

Roland Merullo, author of

Breakfast With Buddha

and

Golfing With God

, is no stranger to spiritual themes, but in this novel, timed to coincide with the presidential election, he's pulled out all the stops.

American Savior

is not a subtle book. It begins with the sort of pseudo-drama of a Frank Capra movie: Child falls off fire escape, appears dead, but is brought back to life by a passing stranger with a tattoo of a flower on his arm. A miracle? Russ, the local TV reporter who narrates the events, assumes at first that the story has been concocted by the baby's neglectful mother.

But once Russ meets Jesus Christ (yes, he goes by that name), he is converted. Jesus knows secret things about Russ and gives him a warm buzz when he touches his arm. Russ quits his job at the TV station to work for Jesus' campaign. So does his social-worker girlfriend, his mentally challenged brother, his ardently Catholic mother, and his lovably irreverent Jewish father. They, along with an assemblage of other presumably representative American types, travel across the country with Jesus to relay to the American people predictable platitudes or fundamental truths (depending on your perspective).

The importance of compassion and tolerance is stressed - then stressed again and again. To bring home the topicality of the story, Merullo has the newscasters and pundits who cover the campaign sport names like Lenny Queen, Harry "Hurry" Linneament, and Roger Popopoffolous. How you respond to this may be an indication of whether you will find this book funny.

Jesus' platform is hardly controversial, but Merullo is disingenuous in presenting him as a third-party candidate. Jesus is a Democrat, if one attends to his platform and to the jabs in the other direction (his fiercest opposition comes from the religious right, which Merullo paints as mean-spirited and hypocritical). The Democratic opponent is barely mentioned, while the Republican is depicted in starkly negative terms. Merullo also has Jesus born in Kansas to a Native American single mother, a bio too close to that of the current Democratic candidate not to make for discomfort (in more than one sense, I should add, given the resolution of the plot).

It would be nice to have a politician with the attributes of Jesus Christ who holds stubbornly to the line that we should all try to get along, listen to rather than attack one another, and be generous and compassionate in all our dealings. Do we need a novel to tell us this? Some people may think so - or they may prefer to read the Bible.