White Jesus

White Jesus

Our Caucasian Lord and Savior

Growing up in the U.S. I almost exclusively saw Jesus portrayed as a white man. In fact, all of the characters from the Bible that I can think of were of the Caucasian persuasion. I remember eventually seeing a black Jesus and an Asian Jesus, but by that point, they seemed odd to me since I had always seen him portrayed lily white.

Around the world this seems to be the most common portrayal of Jesus, and why is that? The religion didn’t originate with white people, it originated in the Levant where the population is overwhelmingly Arab. Some may try to point to current Israelis, many of whom are white, but this is only the case now due to the vast majority of them being immigrants from Europe, or descended from such.*

DNA tests have shown that the Palestinian population has a very high percentage of connection to the original Canaanite populations of the region**. So in reality, Jesus should be depicted looking like a Palestinian if anyone is concerned with accuracy.

So why hasn’t that been the case in paintings over the ages since the religion was founded? They knew what the people of the region looked like even back then.

The answer is power.

Power to oppress anyone who was of a different skin tone than them, and allow them to exploit and control them.

By portraying Jesus as a white European and forcing the conversion of the majority of the world to this religion it causes the world to have a Eurocentric worldview. This move elevated European culture as the standard and also marginalized any other racial or ethnic identities. Just think of the various missionaries who to this day go around trying to shove this religion at Indigenous people and help them not be so “primitive”.

Probably, more importantly, is that by forcing conversions and then portraying Jesus as a white European in art and other media, it has helped to control how people think of him, and by relation to white people in general. People who convert and then think their savior is white can end up thinking whites are superior to them, closer to the divine. The converse of this of course is that by thinking of whites as superior anyone who is darker complected may then feel that they are inferior by relation, less close to their God, to the divine.

This sense of being “closer to divinity” has been used as an excuse for various atrocities over the centuries; slavery, colonialism, and racial discrimination.

This type of thinking also brought on the concept of the “White Man’s Burden”, which comes from a poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling in 1899.

Using terms such as “Sullen People” and “Half Devil Half Child” makes it pretty clear exactly what he, and many whites of the time, thought of any other races.

You can see the lingering effects of this all around you unfortunately, little girls who want their hair to be straight, or blonde. People of other skin tones who want their skin tone to be paler. It also doesn’t help that so many dolls are blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and white.

This poem was specifically written after the Spanish-American war and refers to continuing where the Spanish had left off with spreading Western society and Christianity into the Philippines. A place in the world where to this day women commonly take Glutathione orally or intravenously to suppress melanin so they can obtain a lighter skin tone…

Pro-slavery “theologians” would cite a misinterpreted/misused version of the “Curse of Ham” to claim that one of the sons of Noah was cursed with dark skin after seeing his father naked, this story also has a more perverse interpretation I won’t get into. I personally have even heard old racists mention this claim of the origins of dark skin back in church when I was growing up.

The Mormons even take this another step further claiming that dark skin was a curse from God:

“And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.”-Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 5:21

Mormon teaching included the concept that before the creation of man Jesus and his brother Lucifer had a disagreement about who would be the savior and whether mankind should be given free agency. This erupted into the War in Heaven and those who sided with Lucifer became demons, but those who refused to choose a side ended up being born into human bodies with dark skin.

In case you ever wondered why so many Mormons are white…

What’s crazy is that non-Western Christianity gets almost no exposure. For instance over 60% of Christians in the world are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with one of the oldest Christian denominations being Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Yet the way the media portrays it you’d assume the majority of Christians were white folk.

The truth is that this religion was started in the Middle East by a man who was a brown-skinned Arab. Then as the religion spread into Europe the powerful saw that it could be used as a tool to subjugate the world, not just their bodies but their minds, which would make exploiting these populations infinitely easier. So they picked apart the scriptures to keep the narrative they wanted and literally whitewashed the main character of the story in all of their artwork to elevate themselves above those they considered lesser.

*Ashkenazi Jews (of European descent) have ~30–60% Levantine ancestry mixed with European admixture. Das et al. (2016): “The Origins of Ashkenaz, Ashkenazic Jews, and Yiddish” (Nature Communications).

*Canaanite Ancestry Study (2017) study published in The American Journal of Human Genetics. A 2020 study in Cell found that Bronze Age Canaanites are ancestral to modern Levantine populations, with Palestinians deriving ~50–90% of their DNA from these ancient groups.