1. WHO IS THIS? How many of you agree this is Jesus? HOW DO YOU KNOW?
Race and Representations of Jesus. Moments from the history of Jesus representation in America, focusing on the question of Jesus’ race. Why did people choose to make Jesus look a certain way? What did they say about his appearance? How did Jesus’ appearance support cultural ideas about what the changing categories of whiteness and blackness meant?
Proceeding roughly CHRONOLOGICALLY. Few snapshots from the history of Jesus and race in America. Pdf of images available on sakai.

2. Race and Representations of Jesus
There is nothing natural or necessary about the appearance of Jesus in American cultural artifacts.
Nothing in American society escapes the history of race. Race permeates every aspect of American life.
Images of Jesus can tell us a lot about the history of race in America.
Major Arguments:
1) There is nothing natural or necessary about visual representations of Jesus. Jesus didn’t ever need to look a particular way. He never sat for a portrait. No photographs exist. No rules bound American Protestants.
2) Nothing in American society escapes the history of race. Race permeates all aspects of American culture. Construction of racial hierarchies often happens subtly. Racism wasn’t just cooked up by a few evil people twisting their mustaches. Race is subtly built into the structure of everyday life in America. Example: UNC religious studies department is located in a building called “Saunders Hall.” Named after William L. Saunders ( ), a Chapel Hill graduate, Civil War veteran, successful lawyer, a politician, and an amateur historian. He was also the chief organizer of the Ku Klux Klan for the state of North Carolina. Buildings bear the history of race. SUBTLE.
3) Because of 1&2, images of Jesus can tell us about the history of race in America. Protestant depictions of Jesus reveal Americans’ changing cultural values. Jesus’ appearance in visual representations can tell us about the ways Americans understood themselves as white, black, and Christian, how they asserted racial hierarchies, how they challenged the world they grew up in. Meanings of “white” and “black” have changed over time. Images of Jesus reveal those changes.
Note: Most often, Jesus has been white in American history… but “whiteness” has meant different things at different times. WHO had access to new technologies like industrial printing presses, movies, television? Who had access to resources that allowed them to produce and distribute an image of Jesus? What images of Jesus were authorized by people in power? How did people without access to official channels contest images?

3. For every image of Jesus we will see, there were people who loved and hated it. The history of American Jesus images was never as simple as making Jesus “in our own image.” Often, black churches had pictures of a white Jesus on the walls. Often, images of Jesus challenged prevailing notions about white supremacy. Often, people used the same image of Jesus to do very different kinds of things.
Story: At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, in September of 1963, a bomb broke the stained glass window of a black church – Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham AL. MLK spoke there often. It was an organizing center of the local Civil Rights Movement. Set up by the local KKK, the bomb killed four innocent little girls and galvanized support for the cause of civil rights. When the bomb broke through the stained glass, it destroyed the face of a white Jesus that had been part of the building for its whole history. When white schoolchildren in Wales heard about the bombing, they collected pennies and donated a brand new stained glass window to the church. The design they picked showed a crucified black Christ.
Race in representations of Jesus is never simply a matter of making Jesus in our own image.
You Do It to Me. Stained Glass. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL.

4. How do we “recognize” Jesus?
Popular Mechanics Forensic reconstruction of Jesus’s face based on archaeological evidence. NEVER really caught on in churches.
If not from science, where do ideas about Jesus’s appearance come from?
NOT the Bible. No mention of Jesus’ appearance in the Gospels.
Other images of Jesus. Every new images of Jesus stands in a line of thousands.
Religious expectation. This is the Jesus I pray to or sing about in church. This is MY Jesus.
Cultural expectation. In America, Jesus’ has been white more often than black.
- How did anthropologists know Jesus looked confused? How did they determine the way he trimmed his beard? How did they know that his hair was greying?
“The Real Face of Jesus.” Forensic reconstruction of an “average” first-century Jewish man. Popular Mechanics

5. Moravian devotional image to the bleeding side wound of Jesus. 1700s.
Making Jesus White in early America.
Jesus in colonial America  According to historians Paul Harvey and Edward Blum in The Color of Christ, first depictions of Jesus in America were not white. Either a bright light or RED. During the first Great Awakening, people had visions of Jesus as bright light. Not WHITE just LIGHT. Red = Moravian side wound art, Catholic images of crucifixion. Celebrated the blood of Christ.
Moravian devotional image to the bleeding side wound of Jesus. 1700s.

6. “There has appeared in our times, and there still lives, a man of great power (virtue), called Jesus Christ. The people call him prophet of truth; his disciples, son of God. He raises the dead, and heals infirmities. He is a man of medium size; he has a venerable aspect, and his beholders can both fear and love him. His hair is of the color of the ripe hazel-nut, straight down to the ears, but below the ears wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright reflection, flowing over his shoulders. It is parted in two on the top of the head, after the pattern of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and very cheerful with a face without wrinkle or spot, embellished by a slightly reddish complexion. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is abundant, of the color of his hair, not long, but divided at the chin. His aspect is simple and mature, his eyes are changeable and bright. He is terrible in his reprimands, sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of gravity. He was never known to laugh, but often to weep. His stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. His conversation is grave, infrequent, and modest. He is the most beautiful among the children of men.”
- Publius Lentulus Letter to the Roman Senate, c. 10th-14th century. Uncertain origin.
In the days just following the creation of the United States, people’s ideas about Jesus’s appearance came from this letter.
Publius Lentulus letter.
Supposedly from a Roman governor of Palestine to the Senate of Rome giving a description of Jesus.
Jesus has light brown hair, his hair is long and straight. His complexion is so white that he’s pink. Eyes are “bright,” which many thought meant BLUE.
Forgery.
BUT, it became very popular when Americans wanted to support a white Jesus. Jesus’s whiteness changed over time… this letter helped lend the idea of a white Jesus the air of ancientness.

7. First images of white Jesus appear in the earliest days of American independence. Land-stealing from Native Americans. Institutionalization of slavery.
White Jesus allowed white Americans to presume that “whiteness” stretched back thousands of years and had divine sanction. Helped them assert who would be in charge in the new American republic. If Jesus was white, white people could justify their hold on America.
From Light to White  Mormonism. 1820, Joseph Smith said he saw a bright light when he saw Jesus. By 1844, he said he saw a man with “light complexion and blue eyes.” Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, others started to agree. Jesus’ whiteness was established through TRACTS, Bibles, lithographs that hung in homes.
This lithograph, based on the Publius Lentulus letter, clearly depicts Jesus as a white man.
William S. Pendleton, Letter from Publius Lentulus, to the Senate of Rome Concerning Jesus Christ. Lithograph

8. Revelation ch 22. Harper’s Illuminated Bible. 1846
1846. Harpers Illuminated Bible. Built the fortune of the Harper press. Made whiteness of Jesus seem like it was contained on the pages of the Bible itself.
Revelation ch 22. Harper’s Illuminated Bible. 1846

9. White Abolitionist Jesus  When white northern evangelicals began to see slavery as a moral problem, they enlisted a white Jesus in their crusade against it. After 1850, white Jesus appeared on the banner for William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator.
Abolitionists often identified Jesus with slaves. One author in The Liberator wrote that “The Christ of American civilization is the slave.” Jesus identified with slaves. In the image, he appears to slave and slave-owner at the same time.
He disapproves of slavery, glaring at the white slave owner with disapproval. But he doesn’t do anything to stop the slave auction on the left. He wants slavery to end, but he doesn’t use his supernatural power to intervene.
“I come to break the bonds of the oppressor.” Masthead for William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Design by Hammatt Billings. 1850s.

10. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Now seen as purveyor of harmful stereotypes, VERY popular abolitionist book. Made many white northerners realize the emotional horrors of slavery. Sufferings of slaves resemble suffering of Jesus. Tom suffers like Christ, sees Christ right before his violent death. White Jesus appears to slaves, towers over them.
 The tall, white abolitionist Jesus was NOT the Jesus of slaves themselves. In slave songs and stories…
Spiritual song identified enslaved Africans’ suffering under the oppressive system of slavery with suffering of Jesus in a hostile world  “Poor little Jesus boy/ Made him to be born in a manger/ World treats him so mean/ Treats me mean too”
Jesus was often imagined as white in slave stories and songs. BUT, he was the kind of white man who turned whiteness upside down. He could go wherever he wanted because he was white, walk right past the slave owners and enter the slave quarters to free people. Because he was white, he could cross the color line. This white Jesus suffered just as slaves suffered. People looked saw in this Jesus a figure who would bring liberation.
UNLIKE in the abolitionist visions, in which he towers over hunched slaves, slaves who reported seeing Jesus usually said he was SMALL. He was a little man who made a big difference in the world. He was an unlikely hero who suffered so that slaves might become free.
Hammatt Billings. Jesus Appears to Tom. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853 illustrated edition.

11. Currier and Ives. “Freedom to the Slaves.” Lithograph. c.1863-70
Abraham Lincoln = white Jesus. Posed exactly the same way. Idea of Lincoln as Jesus got a boost when Lincoln was shot on Good Friday, Reconciled North and South. Liberator of the slaves. Sacrificed for freedom and the salvation of the nation.
Currier and Ives. “Freedom to the Slaves.” Lithograph. c

12. Apotheosis of Lincoln. Unknown artist. Carte-de-visite. 1860s-70s
Apotheosis of Lincoln.  George Washington was like God, Lincoln was like Jesus. Sacrificed for national salvation from sin of slavery. White man sacrificed to freedom. Just like Jesus.
1862. African American newspaper writer T. Morris Chester argued against the deified white hero. Said African Americans should remove all images of white leaders, politicians, military heroes from their homes and churches. Wanted them to replace such pictures with images of people like Bishop Richard Allen or Frederick Douglass. White images of Jesus had no place in black life.  “As it is a mere speculation what is the color of the inhabitants of the celestial and infernal regions, I am confident that if the developments of the two races are an index to their complexion, that God and his winged seraphs are black, while the Devil and his howling imps are white.”
Apotheosis of Lincoln. Unknown artist. Carte-de-visite. 1860s-70s

13. N. Currier. Christ Walking on the Sea. Lithograph. 1850s.
Overlapping abolitionist Jesus was Jesus of white domesticity. Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister, likened white Christian mothers to Jesus. Women’s homes were supposed to be like churches. They were Christ in the home. In The American Woman’s Home (1869), Stowe said “The family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister. Her great mission is self-denial, in training its members to self-sacrificing labors for the ignorant and weak: if not her own children, then the neglected children of her Father in heaven. She is to rear all under her care to lay up treasures, not on earth, but in heaven.”
White women were supposed to be the priestesses of the Christian domestic sphere, teaching religion to their children. Images of Jesus supported this cause. Jesus embodies the qualities white Christian mothers ought to aspire to.
Nobody actually DID what they were told. But this was the cultural ideal for white womanhood was. Images of Jesus supported that ideal. Christ walking on the sea  little red riding hood cape, dresslike robe, very long hair… hips. Extends an invitation for Peter to come out of the water. He’s not pulling Peter out. He’s inviting.
N. Currier. Christ Walking on the Sea. Lithograph. 1850s.

14. Currier and Ives. Jesus Blessing Little Children. Lithograph. 1867.
Domesticity told women they were responsible for teaching religion to their children. Images often depicted Jesus surrounded by children, “suffer the little children to come to me.” Here, Jesus is warm and inviting. He is pale skinned, and he blesses cherubic white children. Sparse beard. Flowing robes. Being cuddly and nurturing with children in ways most 19th-century white men wouldn’t have been. He’s acting like a good evangelical mother was supposed to act.
Images like this were part of a growing parlor culture that was influential in both black and white homes. Homes had a PARLOR where they received guests. It was also supposed to be the room where mothers educated children. Parlor decoration was considered a mother’s responsibility, and important to religious training of the family.
Currier and Ives. Jesus Blessing Little Children. Lithograph

15. Currier and Ives. The Return from Egypt. Lithograph. 1860s-70s
When he wasn’t blessing white children, the Jesus of this time often appeared as a child himself. Return from Egypt, a minor story in the New Testament, became a favorite scene. White. He’s blonde.
Currier and Ives. The Return from Egypt. Lithograph. 1860s-70s

16. Muscular White Jesus
As America began to establish a place for itself on the world stage, a new Jesus emerged. Late nineteenth century America: industrialism on the rise. America acquires overseas colonies in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines. At home, segregation was becoming a reality through changing laws that systematically excluded black Americans from public life. A white Jesus appeared who fully supported the idea of white supremacy. He was more assertive, more aggressively white supremacist than earlier Jesuses.
Tissot. French artist. Watercolor exhibit of hundreds of paintings of Jesus toured major American cities. Very well received. Jesus is white, blonde, and muscular. Blonde Baby Jesus grown up, pushing his weight around. Those around him are dark-skinned. Jesus commands authority through his muscular white male body. He glows white and knocks dark-skinned Roman guards on their backs.
Dissenting voices  Henry McNeal Turner. newspaper, Voice of Missions (1898) “We have has much right Biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro as you … white… people have to believe that God is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man. For the bulk of you, and all the fool Negroes of the country, believe that God is a white-skinned, blue-eyed, straight-haired, projecting-nosed, compressed-lipped, and finely robed white gentleman, sitting upon a throne somewhere in the heavens. Every race of people who have attempted to describe their God by words, or by paintings, or by carvings, or any other form or figure, have conveyed the idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves, and why should not the Negro believe that he resembles God as much so as other people? We do not believe that there is any hope for a race of people who do not believe that they look like God.”
James Jacques Joseph Tissot. “The Resurrection.” In The Life of Our Savior Jesus Christ. Watercolor

17. Darius Cobb. The Master. Lithograph based on an oil painting. 1914.
“Muscular Christianity.”
Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, Jesus led a ragtag band of followers and forged them into one of the most powerful institutions on earth. He was an organizer. A tough guy who took no guff from anybody. An innovator and captain of industry like Henry Ford. Muscular Jesus was Jesus the White Businessman.
Temple Cleansing scene became a favorite. Barton described images of the temple cleansing with disdain: “almost invariably the pictures show [Jesus] with a halo around his head, as though that was the explanation of his triumph. The truth is so much simpler and more impressive. There was, in his eyes, a flaming moral purpose; and greed and oppression have always shriveled before such fire. But with the majesty of his glance there was something else which counted powerfully in his favor. As his right arm rose and fell, striking its blows with that little whip, the sleeve dropped back to reveal muscles hard as iron. No one who watched him in action had any doubt that he was fully capable of taking care of himself. No flabby priest or money-changer cared to try conclusions with that arm” (Barton 37).
JESUS HAD A MUSCLY ARM that commanded respect.
Cobb’s Jesus looks like a mountain man. He’s supposed to. He’s a rough and tumble, no-nonsense guy. He has thick eyebrows. He has a thick beard.
Darius Cobb. The Master. Lithograph based on an oil painting

18. Jesus was white. He was a hard worker
Jesus was white. He was a hard worker. Not an intellectual, a philosopher, but a man of action.
As white Americans used this “muscular” Jesus to cement white supremacy, first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard, W.E.B. DuBois, used the idea of Jesus as a laborer to challenge the notion of white superiority. He hated the idea of a white God and a white Jesus. Working-man’s Jesus, man-of-action Jesus, challenged white supremacy.  “Jesus Christ was a laborer and black men are laborers; He was poor and we are poor; He was despised of his fellow men and we are despised; He was persecuted and crucified and we are mobbed and lynched. If Jesus Christ came to America he would associate with the Negroes and Italians and working people; He would eat and pray with them and He would seldom see the interior of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine” (The Crisis 1913; qtd in Richard Fox, Jesus in America, 2005, p360.).
“The Carpenter of Nazareth was a ‘Workman that Needeth Not to be Ashamed.” Jesus in The Call of the Carpenter, by Bouck White (1913)

19. From very early in its life, Hollywood preferred a white, glowing, muscular Jesus. Subtle enforcement of white supremacy.
The story of this film makes the connection between white Jesus and white supremacy more obvious than it had ever been.
D.W. Griffiths’s epic silent film, Birth of a Nation (1915), was a landmark accomplishment in filmmaking. Over 3 hours long, it used hundreds of extras and massive sets. It made the origins of the Ku Klux Klan into an epic story. It told how the KKK saved white America from the brink of disaster after the Civil War. Crowds cheered as white-hooded riders kept freed black men from voting. They booed as actors in blackface groped white women. It depicted the KKK as the defenders of freedom. At the end of the movie, Jesus appeared, pouring out his blessing over the America the KKK made safe. The Star-Spangled Banner played in the background. President Woodrow Wilson loved the movie. So did millions of other white Americans. Still considered a landmark achievement in filmmaking.
Jesus blesses white America at the end of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)

20. Alma White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy. 1925
Jesus of the KKK. KKK saw itself as a thoroughly Christian men’s movement. White robes – put on purity of Christ. Red cross – blood sacrifice like the sacrifice of Jesus. Burning crosses – bright beacon of Christianity in the night. Defending nativism (anti-Catholicism, anti-immigrant, anti-black) as white masculinity. “Knights” of the KKK – defenders of Christian America.
Alma white image  “‘Then he took the five loaves and two fishes… and blessed them… and gave to the disciples to set before the multitude.’ (Luke 9:16). In like manner is the truth being carried to the people by the Ku Klux Klan.”
One Klansmen of the 1920s said simply, “I think Jesus would have worn a robe.”
Alma White, The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy. 1925

21. Challenging the Muscular White Jesus.
Civil War brought freedom from slavery, but soon replaced by the racial violence and systematic humiliation of the Jim Crow system. Segregation laws tried to keep blacks and whites apart. Supposedly “separate but equal,” segregated facilities always managed to keep white people in a dominant position, to give them systematic advantages and keep them in charge.
One of the worst forms of racial violence came in the form of lynching. During the segregation era, African Americans were murdered by white lynch mobs every year. Police and judges turned a blind eye, sanctioning and often participating in the violence. Even though murderers often took photographs with the bodies of their victims, less than 1% of lynch murderers were ever brought to trial.
Harlem Renaissance. Black artists and intellectuals working in New York. Suffering of lynching victims identified with suffering of Jesus. Culture of white supremacy was not holy, but unholy. Jesus was best understood not a white member of the KKK, but as a victim of racial violence.
Charles Cullen. In The Black Christ and Other Poems, by Countee Cullen

22. Langston Hughes, “Christ in Alabama” (1931)
Christ is a nigger,
Beaten and black:
Oh, bare your back!
Mary is His mother:
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.
God is His father:
White Master above
Grant Him your love.
Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth,
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.
Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaissance poet.
Image: Julius Bloch, The Lynching (1932)

23. William H. Johnson, Jesus and the Three Marys. Painting. 1939-40.
Artists, like William H. Johnson, began to depict the Jesus of the Bible as a black man. No metaphor here. Jesus is simply black.
William H. Johnson, Jesus and the Three Marys. Painting

24. Warner Sallman, Head of Christ. Oil on canvas. 1941
Sallman, Head of Christ. Arguably the most popular image of Jesus EVER…
Jesus with NO context. Head-and-shoulders portrait—like a yearbook photo. Jesus looks slightly away, but invites the viewer in. According to many Christians, this was just Jesus as he REALLY was. People often called it a PHOTOGRAPH of Jesus. A reader of Christianity Today wrote in 1958, “I have had visions of our Lord Jesus Christ and his painting is a very close resemblance.”
Sallman thought it was simply a modern picture of a manly Jesus. An approachable Jesus.
500 million copies.
Lamps, clocks, calendars.
Mounted on church walls, in homes, in Sunday-school classrooms.
Given out on prayer cards to American soldiers in WWII. Catholic and Protestant, everyone seemed to use this image. Many soldiers reported that the image protected them from bullets. People attributed miracles to it.
Warner Sallman, Head of Christ. Oil on canvas. 1941

25. Sallman’s Jesus was so ubiquitous that it commonly appeared in black churches as well as white churches well into the 1960s. PHOTO – Little boy in a Sunday School parade dressed as a king, sitting under Sallman’s Head of Christ.
During the era of Civil Rights, MLK placed Jesus at the center of the Civil Rights Movement. He argued that the color of Jesus’ skin didn’t matter, that he was a universal savior who taught love and justice for all. “The color of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence,” he wrote, because skin color “is a biological quality which has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the personality.”
Many other Christian Civil Rights leaders disagreed with King. They thought the color of Jesus’ skin in visual representations was a matter of tremendous significance. Writing in the Christian Century in 1967, scholar Vincent Harding argued, “From the outset, almost everywhere we blacks have met him in this land, […] Christ was painted white and pink, blond and blue-eyed — and not only in white churches but in black churches as well. Millions of black children had the picture of this pseudo-Nazarene burned into their memory. The books, the windows, the paintings, the film-strips all affirmed the same message — a message of shame.”
William Gale Gedney. "African-American Boy Sitting on a Float Dressed as a King below Picture of Jesus." Photograph. Sunday School Parade in Brooklyn, NY, 1967.

26. “Whom Shall You Serve?,” Cartoon by Eugene Majied,
Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam went even further than Harding in their opposition to images of white Jesus. They thought the problem of worshipping white Jesus ultimately made Christianity itself problematic. This cartoon from the Nation of Islam’s newspaper Muhammad Speaks asks “Whom Shall you serve?” On the side of Satan we see overdressed people entering the church of “white man’s slavery.” A large white Jesus appears above the church. On the right is a Mosque labeled “God’s freedom.” Modestly dressed men and women of the nation file calmly into service. White Jesus brings slavery. Because it does not bow down to a white Jesus, Islam brings freedom.
“Whom Shall You Serve?,” Cartoon by Eugene Majied,
Muhammad Speaks, September 9, 1964

27. Committee to Remove All Images of the Divine in Worship
Committee to Remove All Images of the Divine in Worship. The Nation of Islam had interfaith discussions with Christian ministers about what to do with white images of Jesus. They held protests against white images of Jesus. In this image, two such protestors carry signs.
One sign says: What would happen if white people were to sit in churches for 300 years with the image of a black man on the cross? What would this do to their minds?
The other says: What happens to the little white boy who sits and looks at the purported image of [the] Divine in his white skin? What does this do to his mind as he sees am image of himself?
“CRAID in Action: Remove racial images from worship,” image of a CRAID demonstration in Los Angeles, Bilalian News, December 14, 1977

28. “The Quest for a Black Christ.” Ebony. 1969.
Debates about race in depictions of Jesus were so far-reaching during the 1960s and 70s that Ebony ran a cover-story about them. The article was titled “The Quest for a Black Christ.” The subtitle read, “Radical Clerics Reject ‘Honky Christ’ of American Culture-Religion.”
The author of this story suggested that American culture was at fault for the racism of American religion. American culture created the white Jesus. Churches that wanted to embrace Black Power needed to find their own ways of depicting Jesus. Black artists and ministers should make their own images for their own communities, rejecting the white Jesus of American culture.
The article interviewed many black ministers who proposed new kinds of images to go in their churches. The cover image came from the dome of St. Cecilia Catholic church in Detroit. Not only was blackness beautiful, it was a source of pride and power.
“The Quest for a Black Christ.” Ebony

29. Scene from Good Times, “Black Jesus.” Television. 1974.
Such pervasive discussion that Good Times did an episode about it. Sitcom. Premise: One of the younger members of the Evans family paints a portrait of a black Jesus. It brings a string of good luck for each family member. Family discusses whether it belongs on the wall, or whether to leave up the white Jesus that their mother says has been there as long as she can remember.
Scene from Good Times, “Black Jesus.” Television

30. Joe Cauchi. The Black Jesus Blesses the Children. (c. 1970)
Black power artists drew on traditional motifs to produce their own Sunday-school materials.
Joe Cauchi. The Black Jesus Blesses the Children. (c. 1970)

31. Richard Hook, Head of Christ. 1964.
In the 1960s, white Jesus got a tan and grew out his hair. He stared directly at the viewer. He looked like a hippie because he was made by a community of white hippie Christians. For them, Jesus was the ultimate rebel. He lived outdoors. He never had a fixed address. He had long hair and a beard. He hated the establishment. He was the champion of whatever cause white hippies wanted him to champion, but especially the cause of YOUNG people.
Richard Hook, Head of Christ

32. Janet McKenzie, Jesus of the People (1999).
By the end of the twentieth century, Jesus had come a long way. The National Catholic Reporter ran an art contest to find the best image of “Jesus for the new millennium.” The winning entry depicted Jesus as young, dark skinned, androgynous, and surrounded by symbols of traditional native American spiritual practices.
Janet McKenzie, Jesus of the People (1999).

33. James Caviezel as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. Film. 2004
Jesus’s body really seemed to matter in Scenes of white man working, splashing in water, having a good time. Then he gets slowly ripped apart. Then he emerges whole again. Story of a white man’s body destroyed and reconstituted. Battered and bloodied, he emerges triumphant.
Very popular, but also very controversial. People were especially appalled at the film’s stereotyped and harmful depictions of Jewish people. Thousands of Christians saw the film with their churches and wept.
James Caviezel as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. Film. 2004

34. Slink Johnson as Jesus in Black Jesus. Television. 2014
Brand new sitcom. Black Jesus is about a man named Jesus Christ who lives in modern-day Compton. He is poor. He assembles a group of friends. People aren’t really sure if he’s actually Jesus, or just thinks he is. Just like always happens,
Slink Johnson as Jesus in Black Jesus. Television. 2014

35. Images of Jesus changed dramatically throughout American history
Images of Jesus changed dramatically throughout American history. These images hold a mirror up to American culture of a particular time. They reveal the ways Americans understood themselves in relation to the ever-changing categories of “white” and “black.” They reveal the ways people used Christianity to authorize racial hierarchies, and also to challenge them. When we look at pictures of Jesus, we are seeing American culture filtered and magnified.
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