White Jesus and the “Other” Jesus: When Activists Come for Gods

“A civilization that worships at such altars is one that no longer believes in itself, that considers itself irredeemably guilty, sinful or evil…”

As any of us who have been following the one-sided national dialogue around race over the course of the past few months should, by now, have realized, jumbled together with any legitimate just cause #BlackLivesMatter may have concerning the real and continued plight of black Americans at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is a bevy of confused, incendiary and violent rhetoric. In that category, perhaps none is as offensive and as telling about the group’s ultimate objectives as #BLM activist Shaun King’s June 22nd tweet calling for “the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus” to “come down.” Such displays, King contends, are a form of … yes, of course: “white supremacy.” But why stop at statues or even at Jesus himself? King didn’t; he continued in a follow-up tweet: “All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.”

Yes.

All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down.

They are a gross form white supremacy.

Created as tools of oppression.
Racist propaganda.

They should all come down.

— Shaun King (@shaunking) June 22, 2020

Predictably, following upon King’s tweets, the media machine, increasingly batting clean-up for the Twitter mob, cranked up its printing presses (here, here, here or here) to push the “yeah, really, why is Jesus so white?” narrative a bit further into the Overton Window. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury got into the act, pondering whether the depiction of Jesus as white ought, indeed, to be re-thought. But what these opinion-makers do not appear to understand is that the demand to take down white Jesus is not merely literal; it is also a metaphor. It is a demand for us, as a civilization, to finally give it all up, to stop worshipping or even cherishing ourselves, to put in our own culture’s and our own God’s place a beatified image of the Other. We are, it hardly need be said, already most of the way there. #BlackLivesMatter would have us take that final leap into the abyss. And as soon as we do, there will be no more “us”; it will all come crashing down.

Our finest thinkers have long understood that all cultures depict gods as sharing their own features. In the fourth century B.C., the Ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes wrote:

“[M]ortals suppose that gods are born,
wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.
Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;
Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.
But if horses or oxen or lions had hands
or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,
horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen,
and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had.”