Imagining a Jesus-less world

I tend to find good TV shows when they're just about to end. My first "Game of Thrones" episode was the finale. My wife said I missed a lot, and she got weary of explaining every plot nuance to me.

Dejà vu. It seems I found the Amazon Prime series "The Man in the High Castle" at the end of its run, too. For readers with any interest at all in world history -- and what history would be like without Jesus of Nazareth -- the show is appointment television. I'm working my way through the first season right now -- so please don't tell me how it ends. No spoilers!

The premise is pretty simple. "The Man in the High Castle" offers an alternate outcome to World War II. The 1939-1945 conflagration ends with the Axis powers -- Nazi Germany and Japan -- prevailing. Hitler got hold of the atomic bomb first, beating America's Manhattan Project to the punch, pardon the pun.

America, in this fictionalized treatment, is no longer a sovereign nation but divided into the Greater Nazi Reich (eastern U.S. and Midwest) and the Japanese Pacific States (western U.S.) There is a slender "neutral zone" in between German and Japanese territory. It is from this zone that hope for restoring a free United States is found.

Because I want to encourage you to see the series or read the 1963 novel by Philip K. Dick on which it is based -- I will refrain from giving any further plot details in this column.

However, there is a scene in the second episode of the first season worth recounting.

The protagonist, Juliana Crain, has fled into the neutral zone with a newsreel that shows the Axis actually losing the war. Both the Reich and Japan are seeking Crain because the film is considered anathema. Trying to hide in the zone, Juliana takes a job there as a server in a diner. She has an encounter with a customer reading a book.

Crain: What are you reading?

Customer: You really don't know what this is? It's the Bible.

Crain: I haven't seen one of those since I was a little girl. This is forbidden by the Pacific States.

Customer: Yes, and by the Reich too.

The customer gives Juliana money to go to a secretive book dealer and purchase her own copy. She does so -- after convincing the seller she is not a spy. The Bible helps Crain to see the vastly different approach to life found in its pages, specifically to a man (Jesus) who once told the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36)

The celebration of Christmas is upon us. The day will be here in 10 days. Many will find themselves in a house of worship on Christmas Eve, singing songs and lighting candles in remembrance of a Savior born to peasants in a place called Bethlehem.

Come with me now as I try to imagine a different TV series for this holiday season -- a series in which the United States is still sovereign, still powerful on the world stage and still giving hope as the planet's most prosperous republic. Not too much of a stretch of the imagination. But imagine, too, that this series portrays an America where the Bible is absent and where no one knows the name of Jesus -- let alone what he said or did.

Take one person, one special person, out of history and you wonder if anything would change.

Every Christmas, the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" imagines what the small town of Bedford Falls would be like without George Bailey. Bailey, played by legendary Jimmy Stewart, is the unhappy savings and loan manager who is given a glimpse of a world where he is absent. The vision he is given is terrible for him and for his little town.

In a world without Jesus, would we try to love those who persecute us? I doubt it, so radical is his notion of loving the unloveable.

In a world without the world's most famous itinerant carpenter, would we forgive others? I doubt it. The example of Jesus forgiving those who were executing him is powerful. Without it, I'd lose my template.

No one will ever make a motion picture envisioning a world in which Jesus is completely missing because such a project seems impossible to conceive.

The Nazarene's influence on believers and non-believers alike is so deep and pervasive, we simply can't imagine a universe where He is not present. At least I can't.