I was thinking about growing up. It was the 1950s, and Sunday mass was in the school’s basement at the parish (QAS). I remember walking out to the parking lot and always noticing the number of cars with plastic Jesus and plastic St Christopher, some with plastic BVM, and a handful with all three neatly lined up on the dashboard centered under the rearview mirror.
The cultural implications of all that. Think of all the different versions of the plastic Jesus, but not too many different ones for Christopher or BVM. It was the 1950s that gave us plastic Jesus, fuzzy dice, and Dashboard Hula Girl, one of my favorites.
During my senior year in high school, I worked at General Auto Parts. It was near the prison; you couldn’t miss it—a huge store with a machine shop and junkyard. I made deliveries for the store and ran errands, often using the owner's car instead of the pickup truck, and I asked him why he had a plastic Jesus on his dashboard. He said, "Have you not noticed how many we sell at the counter?" He said I tell people they need one and say I even have one; it’s all about marketing, he said to me.
Songs were written and sung about plastic Jesus. What does this say about faith in the era of the Industrial Revolution, when technology was becoming highly automated? Remember the song in Cool Hand Luke? It was a period of cultural phase change.
The 1950s gave birth to the CFM movement in the US, a Cardijn-inspired movement. I am sure many in the movement, like my parents, had a plastic Jesus on the dashboard. Faith and culture were woven together. If we think about it, our See-Judge-Act method is grounded in faith. Was plastic Jesus more about speaking to the world than speaking to us? Was plastic Jesus the medium to the message?
Do we ever wonder where all the plastic Jesuses have gone today? But then again, I wonder where that faith went.
Thank you, Richard, for your reflection. I recall using Earnest Larsen’s “Good Old Plastic Jesus” in the 1970s to help students unpack theological statements about the humanity and divinity of Jesus. Now, about fifty years later, such theological statements and the faith that they helped to explain represents just one option of many.