Paul Bryant's Reviews > In His Steps

This is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and had the lightbulb idea of incorporating it into his sermon in the form of an ongoing story – come back next week for part two, everybody! See what happens when our characters try to live their lives asking WWJD all the time! The idea was a huge hit, his church was packed, and at the end of it he wrote it up as a novel and serialised it in a religious magazine and tried to get it published. The publishers turned him down flat. So the magazine decided to publish it as a novel themselves, and they sent off the manuscript to be copyrighted but they didn’t send the whole manuscript and the copyright office said their application was invalid.
So the magazine version sold out immediately – 100,000 copies, apparently, and of course other respectable publishers spotted this phenomenon and also saw that it was out of copyright and pirated it and sold millions, and poor Charles Sheldon didn’t get a dime. How sad. But it was God’s will, you know!

I read all this in the preface, which also tells me In His Steps has been

carefully edited and updated for modern readers.

Hmmm…. What could that mean? I don’t think they did a great job because quite soon we have Rev Sheldon introducing a young female character like this :

A statuesque blonde of attractive proportions, Virginia had an appealing face. The spectacles she wore simply emphasised her gifted intellect.

Well anyhow, the story is located in the town of Raymond and focuses on the big cheeses in the church who take the WWJD pledge, such as the editor of one of the main local papers. He immediately decides to stop publishing accounts of prize fighting and he cancels all adverts for alcohol and tobacco, much to his manager’s consternation, who loudly proclaims they will go bust within the month.

Transposing the moral teachings of first century rural Judea onto late 19th century middle America throws up some bizarre questions, which Rev Sheldon acknowledges :

It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilisation that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?

Apparently if you feel that’s what Jesus would do, then that’s enough. So we get some ludicrous stuff like :

The three agreed that, whatever Jesus might do in detail as editor of a daily paper, He would be guided by the same general principles that directed His conduct as the Saviour of the world….Jesus would not issue a Sunday edition.




The big idea is actually most interesting – what would happen if Christians actually took the teachings of Jesus seriously? The characters are convinced they are at the beginning of a social revolution. And yes, you can see that could very well be. But the novel fritters the big idea away, and its band of well-meaning wealthy types spend their time and money improving the lives of the poor by singing beautifully to them and closing down saloons. There are cringe-makingly pat scenes such as the one where it is discovered that a member of the church is the owner of some slum tenements – he immediately weeps and promises to fix all the plumbing. (In fact there is a whole ocean of religious weeping here, the pages are wringing with it. )

But I will give the Rev Sheldon credit for one scene, in which a bunch of working men let the do-gooders know what the real solutions are, as opposed to the weeping, singing and nourishing soup. One guy frankly says that revolutionary socialism is the only way forward, none of this mystical nonsense.

And indeed there is a lot of Christian self-criticism in here :

The bishop was appalled to discover how few of his wealthy friends would really suffer any genuine inconvenience for the sake of humanity.

Well, as a novel this is hopeless, the reverend was no writer, his characters are thin puppets, and he has no idea of a plot, but we can’t complain about that, it’s all about the Big Idea; and I don’t think he worked it out well enough or went as far as he could with it.

File under : curiosities.