SANDI DOLBEE:

HOW A JEWISH MAN FROM THE MIDDLE EAST CAME TO BE DEPICTED AS WHITE, AND HOW SOME CHURCH LEADERS ARE SEEKING MORE DIVERSE DEPICTIONS

Edward Blum’s book about the White Jesus begins with the horrific bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on a Sunday morning in 1963, when White supremacists took the lives of four young black girls.

The dynamite also obliterated the face of Jesus in the church’s stained glass window. The face was White.

This White Jesus, which had gazed upon the historic African-american congregation for decades, suddenly “was made a casualty of race war,” Blum and co-author Paul Harvey wrote in “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.”

But this White Jesus also is a symbol of how the bleaching of Jesus had become so pernicious an image that Black churches in America — from Birmingham to San Diego — displayed it.

How could this be? And when did Jesus, a Jewish man from the Middle East, become White, in some cases with blue eyes and blond hair?

When I posed these questions to Blum, a history professor at San Diego State University, he begins with, well, a history lesson.

During the Renaissance, European artists began to create religious iconography, and since they used local residents as models, the depictions of Jesus became more European, he says. Later, American and British artists started painting Jesus as more White “in an atmosphere where whiteness was associated with citizenship and power.”

To put it bluntly, for White people to feel supreme over persons of color, Jesus had to be White. It was especially helpful for Christian slaveholders to justify their behavior and skirt pesky Bible verses like the one about the golden rule.

“Instead of dealing with the particulars of what Jesus or the particulars of what Jesus you can make Jesus White, associate whiteness with goodness and whiteness with Christianity, and you don’t have to perform the of Christianity,” Blum explains. “You don’t have to do unto others as you would have done unto you because the image is doing the work.”

Joan Taylor, a professor of Christian origins at King’s College in London and author of “What Did Jesus Look Like?” echoes this in her answers to my emailed questions.

“White Jesus is a legacy of colonization,” Taylor says. “In visualizing Jesus as a real man in his time and place, I have argued in my book that we should see him correctly as a Middle Eastern Jew, with brown skin, brown eyes and black hair.”

She adds: “I think people of color themselves can explain much better than I can how it makes a difference if Jesus is understood as a man of color, rather than a man of European descent. From what they’ve shared with me, there is a profound sense of relief. Seeing Jesus with brown skin severs Jesus from a link with the global legacy of European authority and dominance.”

Potent images

This brings me to Vince Bantu, an African-american seminary professor, and the Rev. Harvey L. Vaughn III, senior pastor of Bethel Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first Black church in San Diego.

Bantu, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Houston campus and Meachum School of Haymanot in St. Louis, argues that besides being historically inaccurate, portraying Jesus as White “is very psychologically traumatizing to Black people and to people of color.” He adds: “And most importantly, it is theologically heretical to portray Jesus as a White man and, in so doing, basically portray Christianity as a White religion.”

Bantu told me about one of his students, a pastor at a small Africanamerican church who recently draped the face of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus on a stained-glass window. The congregation doesn’t have the money to replace it, and the pastor, given all that has happened, just couldn’t continue looking at that depiction.

For Bantu, the solution lies in images “that reflect the beautiful racial diversity in which He’s created humanity — so there should be Asian and indigenous and Polynesian and Arab and African and European depictions of Jesus.”

Vaughn, a third-generation pastor, acknowledges growing up in, and leading, churches with depictions of a White Jesus — including Bethel Memorial. But he counters that reality with this caveat: “The teaching and the preaching and the social action that I saw my father and my grandfather and the African Methodist Episcopal Church participate in would defy the belief that we would have to be under the thumb of, or oppressed by, anyone.”

Still, he understands these depictions can be potent manipulators. “If you are looking at this image and you are seeing it, that is going to have an impact on how you view yourself and how you view those who mistreat you, oppress you, people who do all manner of things, treat you as subhuman.”

He adds: “I think the image of a White Jesus, it really plays into the hands of White supremacists and that rhetoric that says, ‘We are the superior race,’ or, ‘By the way, this is what God looks like, so we must be the superior race.’ ”

Rather than drape the depictions, Vaughn advocates pushing beyond the literal image to teach people “that God is a spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit. In that vein, I believe African Americans have shown great strength and resilience in spite of not having images in our houses of worship that depict a more accurate depiction of what Jesus looks like or reflective of its parishioners.”

If the churches could afford it, and the congregations are willing to do it, he would favor a “multi-cultural face of Jesus, because he came for all humanity. Or no image at all.”

Making changes

Last month, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, head of the Church of England, said Western churches should rethink their portrayal of Jesus as White. “I don’t think that throwing out everything we’ve got in the past is the way to do it, but I do think saying, ‘That’s not the Jesus who exists, that’s not who we worship’ is a reminder of the universality of the God who became fully human,” he told the BBC.

The reaction was furious. “What is wrong with this man?” one person tweeted. Another called the archbishop a “disgrace.”

Taylor, the King’s College scholar, says she also received angry, dismissive responses to her book. “It can feel like I am trying to take away a precious, important image they have,” she concedes.

When Blum, the SDSU historian, speaks to predominately White church groups, he asks them what they have to lose by depicting a more authentic-looking Jesus. “They would hem and haw. They wouldn’t have a good answer,” he says. Basically, the message he heard was this: “I want to have racial equality, but I don’t want to give up anything.”

I asked him why any of this really matters. “Because Jesus is the ultimate mirror of who we are,” he says. “So the fact that Jesus was made White is a great expression of how much White supremacy needed, and White power needed, a White Jesus. And the ultimate mirror of, ‘I’m not willing to give up a White Jesus,’ that says something powerful about us.”

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church repaired the damaged stained glass window. And yes, the new face is White. But joining it in their rebuilt sanctuary, courtesy of a gift from Wales, was another stained glass window — with a striking image of a Black crucified Christ. His arms are outstretched; the right hand said to symbolize the pushing away of injustice and hatred, while the left hand offers forgiveness. A much-needed message for such a time as this — for all races, all colors.

Dolbee

is the former religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-tribune. She also is a former president of the Religion News Association, where she continues to serve as a judge for its annual contests.