Jesus Christ Depicted As a White Man
Emily Crowell
When asked to picture Jesus, most of us will automatically conjure a mental image of a brown or blonde-haired, blue-eyed, light-skinned angelic man. However, according to the Bible, Jesus was Jewish – he most likely would have had darker, olive skin tone and dark curly hair, at the very least. He would have looked like someone with Middle-Eastern ethnic origins rather than someone with Western or Northern European features. The problem with depicting this great spiritual leader with dark skin and hair is that throughout much of the history of Christianity, white Europeans and Americans have used religion as an excuse for oppression and genocide of dark-skinned people – people who may have looked similar to Jesus.
The Ku Klux Klan in the United States used the emblem of the white Jesus to explain and justify their doctrine of white supremacy. The 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which tells a very racist “history” of Reconstruction-era United States, did much to spur the growth of the KKK in the early 20th century. Write Edward Blum and Paul Harvey in their book The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America: “White crowds all over the nation were riveted. They gasped when white actors in blackface pursued white women to rape them. They cheered as Klansmen rode to avenge the South. And they experienced relief when Jesus stretched his hands over the nation the Klan had saved” (141). The image of a white Jesus became symbolic of the KKK as savior of the United States, saving it from the scourge of lesser races. A 1965 Saturday Evening Post article reports about “Fierce-eyed preachers, most of them self-ordained, [who] began to shout in public the twisted doctrine they had proclaimed in the secrecy of the Klaverns – that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, that the Pope of Rome was Anti-Christ, that the Negro was a beast that must be destroyed” (Martin and Fairly 28). Martin and Fairly go on to describe the attitude of people attending the KKK rallies: “The ignorant and frightened men and women who join the Klan claim to be uplifted by this savage doctrine. To them the Klan is a religion, a holy crusade. In North Carolina, a robed Klansman told reporters: ‘….When I put on this robe it’s a grand feeling. It’s white – as pure as Jesus Christ….’” (28). The KKK would have found it more difficult to perpetuate their doctrine of white supremacy in the Protestant South without the backing of a white Jesus.
Another group of people who manipulated Jesus’ race for destructive purposes were the Nazis in Germany. Jesus being a Jew is a major problem for anti-Semitics in general, and especially for a group of people who wanted to exterminate the Jews from the human race. In his article “The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus,” Peter M. Head writes, “Hitler was personally hostile to Christianity and yet publicly willing to use Christian vocabulary to bolster his position, especially in the early years after 1933” (70). He also quotes Hitler as saying, “Jesus most certainly was not a Jew. The Jews would never have handed one of their own people to the Roman courts; they would have condemned Him themselves…. Jesus fought against the materialism of His age, and, therefore, against the Jews” (Head 55-56). This insistence and racist rationalizing that Jesus was not a Jew makes sense, because how else could he justify the Holocaust? He needed to convince or at least pacify a nation, the majority of whom identified as Christian, with proof that not only was Jesus not a Jew, Jesus fought against the Jews.
Regardless of religious affiliations or lack there-of, it cannot be denied that Jesus Christ was and still is an influential historical figure. While the default image of Jesus is that of a white man, there is more acceptance today of non-white Jesus figures – for instance, the stained glass black Jesus in a certain church in Birmingham, Alabama. As a society we need to be aware of the history of Jesus’ image being used in justify everything from racist ideals to outright genocide. There is something wrong when a man who reportedly preached a philosophy of brotherly love is being used as a symbol for such a hateful, violent organization as the Ku Klux Klan.
Works Cited
Blum, Edward J. and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Print.
Head, Peter M. “The Nazi Quest for An Aryan Jesus.” Journal For the Study of the Historical Jesus. 1 January 2004. EBSCOhost. Web. 20 September 2014.
Martin, Harold H. and Kenneth Fairly. “We Got Nothing To Hide.” Saturday Evening Post 30 January 1965. 27-33. EBSCOhost. Web. 21 September 2014.
