What would the U.S. be like if Christian churches depicted the ethnicity of Jesus of Nazareth as the Middle Eastern Jew he must have been rather than as a White European?
In 1970s America, 90% of us identified as Christian. We weren’t a “Christian nation” but we were a Christian society, in terms of religion.
I grew up in the deep south, and when I think of Jesus, I see in my mind’s eye a man with light brown hair, light skin, a beard and blue eyes. A man, perhaps, not unlike the painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by 18thcentury Italian artist Pompeo Batoni.
Or I may be remembering pictures like the Head of Christ, painted in America in 1940and reproduced at least 500 million times. According to University of South Carolina scholar Anna Swartwood House, Sallman Head’s “painting culminates a long tradition of [W]hite Europeans creating and disseminating pictures of Christ made in their own image.”
It makes sense that American Jesus looks like a European because Western Europeans colonized North America. They brought White “European Jesus” with them.
But he is not authentic, because authentic would be “different.”
To be clear, I am not a religious adult. I’m one of the 1-in-3 Americans today who are unaffiliated. Yet I found myself thinking about religious iconography after hearing President Donald Trump rant about Minnesota Somalians and call those naturalized citizens “garbage.”
Why reject a community well-integrated into its surroundings simply because they don’t look like you, Mr. President? And then, not for the first time, I silently railed against faux Christians who treat empathy like a bad word.
How might our society change if our image of Christ were more authentic? Would we be more accepting of “the other” — like those Somalians — if our deity did not look like us?
Images of a darker-skinned Jesus in traditionally White Christian churches would probably initially be unsettling. After all, darker-skinned Americans (from Blacks and Asians to Native Americans and Arabs) are a minority here. What assumptions would we need to address so our iconography could reflect an authentic Jesus Christ?
