ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores Dorothy L. Sayers’s cycle of 12 radio plays, The Man Born To Be King (1941–42), and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1971). The chapter analyses how Sayers’s drama responds to social conditions in Britain during World War II and concerns about the feminization of piety, while Jesus Christ Superstar embodies the mores of the 1960s youth counterculture movement. I explore the controversies surrounding the direct representation of a humanized Jesus at the time these works premiered, and how their reception illustrates important changes in British religion and the process of secularization. I consider also how the radio play and musical relate to the doctrine of supersessionism.
