Are We Ready for a Black Jesus?

By DON ROLLINS

Growing up in Chicago, there was a very particular type of home that would display the black Jesus figure. It wasn’t a radical home. You wouldn’t find these in a Black Panther house. — Rashid Johnson

Few things send white Trumpist Christians into theological cardiac arrest faster than a black Jesus. Barely willing to concede he lived and died a Palestinian Jew, the hardest of the hard consider any deviation from the dark blonde, blue eyed visage of yore just another act of pointy-headed political correctness, both un-Christian and un-American.

Not that Trump’s more theologically bereft followers much care, but this Beach Boy Jesus was centuries in the making. As the faith spread north and west from Palestine, dominant Christian societies co-opted and portrayed him in their image and service, best epitomized in modern America by increasingly caucasianized versions of Warner Sallman’s popular “Head of Christ,” circa 1940.

This “popular” Jesus has been durable on these shores despite the inroads of critical scholarship, Jungian-style archetypal interpretations and pan global liberation theologies. He is familiar, uncomplicated and personification of white privilege.

But from the academically serious (scholarship putting Jesus’ sexuality and purity of race in play) to the comically bombastic (cable channel Adult Swim’s “Black Jesus”), popular Jesus has now and then been challenged on the grounds of his accumulated exclusivity. And given the racial zeitgeist in which we find ourselves — this period of true not spoken uprising — white ways of doing theology have come in for examination as never before.

Slightly presaging the recent spate of police brutalities that brought black theology to the fore, author Jemar Tisdale makes the case for rediscovering the universalist Jesus - the one who includes then transcends all our human constructs, including a white Jesus:

“To say that Jesus is Black — or, more broadly, to say that Jesus is not white — is to say that Jesus identifies with the oppressed and that the experience of marginalized people is not foreign to God, but that God is on the side of those who, in Matthew 25, Jesus refers to as “the least of these.””

Tisdale goes on to make the case for a Jesus closer to the gritty star of Adult Swim’s “Black Jesus” than the perennially white manifestations. The idea is not to prove or disprove an historically mixed race Jesus, but to invite a conversation about how people of color want and deserve champions they can trust.

As one would expect, projecting blackness and brownness onto a white God, white Jesus and white disciples is drawing fire from the Trump-aligned faithful. Responding to the airing of “Black Jesus,” the conservative “One Million Moms” issued a statement in keeping with other protectors of a narrow white christology:

“The foul language used in the trailer, including using the Lord’s name in vain, is disgusting. In addition, there is violence, gunfire and other inappropriate gestures which completely misrepresent Jesus. This is blasphemy!”

And that’s one of the gentler conservative responses to date.

Conscious or unconscious, resistance to naming exclusion and oppression comes in all the usual forms — government, business, education, health care and yes, policing. But although not likely to command the same measure of attention, there is a similarly liberationist movement at work in progressive and black theology. The question at hand is at once simple and demanding: Are we ready for a black Jesus?

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

Populist.com