I'm new to this board, so I'm posting in an old thread... I realize that...
but I was wondering, why can't Shadow be both?

... I mean, he is the son of Odin, which makes him distinctly Norse pantheon, but he's also the son of an American woman, who might very well be a Christian. You could say he is the "marriage" of Germanic paganism and christianity the way it is in the western world. I don't know if Greek and Russian Orthodox christians celebrate Christmas and Easter the way we do, but I do know that it was a Roman Catholic "church father", named Augustine, who made sure all the Christian holidays fell on the same days as the pagan ones. For example, the winter solstice and the festival of Eostre both symbolized new beginnings: respectively the sun on its way back to the land, and the sun having arrived and things growing again, basking in its light.

This fits perfectly with the Christian holidays Christmas (Christ is born, you cannot really feel his influence yet, but he'll be there to Save The World some day) and Easter: again, new life, new beginnings, what was dead is finally waking up again.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe that Shadow is predominantly Norse, or Germanic - especially because people who think he was a Christ Revisited forget that Odin also hung on a wooden thing for nine days (Yggdrasil the Ash tree, gee, does that ring a bell?) - willingly, so his friends did not come and rescue him - and because the Virgin Mary thing is a little far-fetched. The thing about the Virgin Mary is that it was a Miracle that she got pregnant without ever having had sex. Shadow's mother has had sex, so there's no Miracle to her becoming pregnant.

But Shadow being mostly Germanic does not mean that there are no Christian influences. Have you never wondered where Christianity was in this book? I mean, not that it's interesting to write about - nobody can see the Christian God, or depict him, which makes him a rather dull character, and Jesus is just too successful to associate with the riff-raff who are about to start a war over control of the American believers. He has all the Soma, why fight over it?
Also, with the Christian God being all-knowing and all, good chance that he's guessed Wednesday and Loki's intent and warned Jesus not to have a part of it.

But the fact that christianity isn't really mentioned in this book does not mean it's not out there. And it also does not mean that there can't be any christian influences to a storyline. But to call Shadow a "christ-figure" is a little too much in my opinion...