In 1896 a Kansas minister asked a congregation to ask, before every act, “What would Jesus do?” The question sold millions of books, faded for most of the twentieth century, and came back in 1989 as four letters on a bracelet.
Measured, documented, authored. The curves are counts: how often a phrase appears in Google Books, and how often people search for it. The milestones are dated events, each with its source. The 1896 column of the comparison is a reading of the novel itself, and is marked as one.
Books and search never share an axis. They measure different things.
WWJD is also a set of radio call letters, so the acronym's faint trickle before the 1990s is not the slogan. The page dates the slogan from the first year it passes 2 per billion.
The same four words, put to different subjects. Switch between the two versions, or compare them side by side.
FIG. 02 “What would Jesus ___” in books: the words that fill the blank, other than “do”
While the bracelet spread, a church was breaking apart over the Sabbath. In December 1994 the Worldwide Church of God dropped the seventh-day Sabbath as a requirement; in 1995 ministers who would not drop it formed the United Church of God. The two stories run side by side for five years, and meet in 1998 and 1999. Click any event for the detail.
FIG. 03 WWJD and the Sabbath split, 1989–2000
The Sabbath events are from the same chronology as How a phrase spreads, where the split is one step on the trail of “Jesus is the Sabbath”. A month after the United Church of God article, the exact words “Jesus is the Sabbath” turn up in the post-split debate, answering the very argument WWJD made easy: Jesus kept the Sabbath, so keep it. It is the earliest use located so far, not a proven first. That moment, and what changed around it → · the trail →
Sermons, a magazine serial and a book in the 1890s; then, after a long silence, a youth group, a bracelet, a radio mention, the stores, music, a Bible, an ad campaign, a film. Click any step for the detail and its source.
FIG. 04 the media it traveled through, in order
Each step is a dated, documented event. A line joins each step to the next in time; it shows order, not that one caused the next. The long dashed stretch is the quiet decades. Steps are evenly spaced, not to scale: read the year under each.
Google's search records begin in 2004, after the bracelet's peak. Since then searches for “WWJD” have fallen steeply, while searches for the full question have held roughly level, and in the United States have grown.
FIG. 05 searches for “wwjd” and “what would jesus do”, asked together
Google Trends, monthly, both terms asked in one query, so the two lines share a yardstick: 100 is the busiest month of either. The thin line is each month; the thick one is the average of the twelve months to that point. Search figures are rescaled by Google over time, so they carry their export date.
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