The Color of Christ

by Edward J. Blum

Jesus changed shape as a white figure in the United States because who was considered white and what being white meant have mutated over time.

Throughout the seventeenth century, New World struggles did not revolve around what Christ’s body looked like, but whether he should be embodied at all.

Whiteness was not made sacred in the form of Jesus, in part, because whiteness itself as a marker of racial identity and power did not yet exist. Loyalties of nation, region, tribe, and religion outweighed other conceptions of identity and muddied the waters of allegiance.

the colonists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made some concrete moves in their laws and customs. What would become of a slave who converted to Christ and was baptized in his name? Would she or he be emancipated? What would the status be of a newborn whose one parent was free and the other enslaved? Colonists answered by disassociating faith from freedom and by setting slavery above Christianity and patriarchy. When Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom on account of converting to Christ, the Virginia assembly responded with an act “declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.”

patriarchy lost some power through new laws that declared that status would follow slavery, not paternity. A Maryland law from the early 1660s not only deemed an individual a slave if either of his or her parents was enslaved but also forced into slavery any white woman who married a slave. In this legal configuration, slavery overwhelmed faith, freedom, and paternal power.57

Puritans despised Quakers. Their focus on the “inner light,” through which God’s spirit could speak to anyone at any time, seemed like theological and social chaos. In the early colonial period, preaching Quaker doctrines was tantamount to witchcraft. It was a good way to be banished from or executed in Puritan dominions.

Benjamin West, embarked on a career that the Puritans would have denounced. He began sketching and painting representations of Jesus.

Light was not white. For colonial Americans, purity was not about color. It was about essence. Jesus as light connoted power, goodness, and love. He was, literally and figuratively, the light of the world. The color white, moreover, was not an unambiguous emblem of purity. As a color in dreams, white was considered an evil omen. The Universal Dream-Dictionary of 1795 claimed that in dreams, white or pale skin connoted “a sign of trouble, poverty and death.” It was a “black face” that meant “long life.” According to Jonathan Edwards, white was not even God’s favorite color. “Green, being the most pleasing color, and above all others easy and healthful to the eye, is a fit symbol of grace and mercy with which God is surrounded.”12

Quaker John Churchman, in fact, saw the angelic in Native American skin. In

Samson Occom, a Mohegan. He was a pioneer of Native American literature, a defender of Indian rights, and the author of poetry and hymns that spoke to the experience of Christian Indians.

1774, Occom published A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of All Sincere Christians, of All Denomination. It included 109 texts of hymns (not including tunes) and was one of the first American hymnals that was not merely a reprint or slight adaptation of an English original.18

treaty with Tripoli in 1796 declared that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”51

In Massachusetts, for instance, a group of blacks petitioned for liberty by using Jesus as Samson Occom had—as a symbol of white hypocrisy. In 1777, they lamented that they lived in the “bowels of a free & Christian Country” but were treated unjustly and cruelly.

True Christians would never enslave others, especially not other Christ followers. And hence, white Americans were not true believers.

If anyone was making the Son of God a son of liberty, it was African Americans and Native Americans.

ALMOST THREE DECADES after the American Revolution, Russian diplomat Pavel Svinin came to the new United States and was amazed to find sacred images everywhere. In homes, in civic spaces, and in businesses, he kept running into the same icon. It was not Jesus, though. It was George Washington.

The story of how Jesus became an emblem of the nation and white supremacy was one for the nineteenth century.