Do the letters WWJD mean anything to you? To large numbers of people in America they hold an altogether special significance. You may see these four letters in-scribed on bracelets, rings, necklaces, key chains, and other items used by millions of Christians. Followed by a question mark, the letters pose a formidable challenge to these believers.

The letters stand for the question “What would Jesus do?” This is what many people, especially the young, have promised to ask themselves whenever they are about to make important decisions. These individuals take the presumed action of Jesus as their guide for doing the right thing, the loving thing, the heroic thing.

The WWJD slogan got its start in 1896 when Charles Sheldon, a Protestant minister based in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps. It’s a novel but one closely based on the real-life experience of Rev. Sheldon. Almost immediately, the book found extraordinary success, selling millions of copies in this country and being translated into 23 other languages.

The Sheldon novel tells about a minister in a mid-western city who receives a visit from a poor man who has no work and no place to live. The same man, in his early thir-ties, also interrupts the pastor’s Sunday church service and presents his desperate situation to parishioners. After speaking, the man collapses in church, is taken to the minister’s house, and soon dies.

Following this upsetting experience, the pastor proposes to members of his congregation that they adopt as their rule of thumb for all that they do the question “What Would Jesus Do?”

The novel goes on to tell how this principle of conduct transforms the lives of some individuals and has an impact on the whole city. For example, the publisher of the leading newspaper changes his journalistic approach so that he no longer includes reports of  prizefights and announces that the newspaper will stop issuing an edition on Sundays. Measures like these cause chaos within the newspaper company and lead to severe losses in circulation and advertising revenue.

Another establishment figure, Donald Marsh, the president of Lincoln College, breaks his longtime habit of standoffishness from civic affairs, gets involved in local politics, and, allied with other reformers, tries to oust a clique of self-serving office-holders. For his part, the minister decides to devote himself to the poor and erects a tent for people to gather in the most deprived section of town.

My route to the book was a college assignment given to my daughter. In a tutorial on American social thought, she studied the book and then urged me to read it. I did so with intense interest, even though I quickly came to agree with Ralph Luker who writes in American National Biography  that In His Steps is “a simple story with little literary merit.”

Though the book possesses a certain eloquence, I also found it to be quite dated in its tendency to moralize and editorialize rather than letting the action and characterization speak for themselves

But the main message of In His Steps still resounds in modern America. The WWJD approach shows surprising power when you consider the difficulties of applying this norm to a time and place so different from that of Jesus in the Palestine of two thou-sand years ago.

What started the current WWJD movement? Apparently it began in 1989 when a woman named Janie Tinklenberg, a  lay minister in Holland, Michigan, got her youth group  to read In His Steps and devised the bracelet idea that has proven so popular.

A prominent professional youth minister in the Greater Boston area, Bob Doolittle, has used the WWJD bracelet during one of his retreats. He tells me of the good ef-fects wearing the WWJD bracelet has had on at least one young man in his group. “When he makes a decision, he looks at it and it keeps him straight,”  reports Bob. “It’s like a prayer – it reminds him to listen to what the Lord is saying to him.”

According to Bob Doolittle, the recent high school graduate has drawn yet another benefit from the bracelet. “It helped him say ‘no’ to violence.” Not surprisingly, Bob says of the WWJD movement, “I like it a lot.”

Richard Griffin