The Color of Christ

by Edward J. Blum

To Stowe, if white Americans desired to learn true Christianity, they needed men and women of color. The “Anglo-Saxon race,” which she viewed as “cool, logical, and practical,” had trouble comprehending Christianity because “God gave the Bible to them in the fervent language and with the glowing imagery of the more susceptible and passionate Oriental races.” To the question of how whites could ever see Christ, she had this answer: join the abolitionist crusade and learn from black Americans.13

How long have white advocates encouraged following Black voices? (But still written words for them)

“He was Manacled for Us.” Davis was the “chosen vicarious victim,” said the rector of Baltimore’s Memorial Protestant Church, for northerners had “laid on him the falsely alleged iniquities of us all.” A southern poet in 1923 made the connection most explicitly: Jefferson Davis: Still we honor thee! Our lamb victorious, who for us endur’d A cross of martyrdom, a crown of thorns, A soul’s Gethsemane, a nation’s hate, A dungeon’s gloom! Another god in chains.35

Beecher’s The Life of Jesus, the Christ (1871) was the first American biography of Jesus. An important wrinkle was what Jesus looked like, for any good biographer would describe his subject physically. Beecher admitted that it was impossible to know truly the contents of Christ’s countenance. Beecher was biblically honest: “There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus. . . . To his form, his height, the character of his face, or of any single feature of it, there is not the slightest allusion.” Text was one thing; art was another. Beecher included five visual heads of Christ on one page. All were from European artists and all featured a white Jesus with brown hair and brown eyes. With text and image, Beecher set up Jesus so that white Americans and Europeans could claim him rhetorically as a universal, nonwhite savior,

Rhetorically, Beecher acknowledged Jesus as nonwhite but visually rendered him white.

Jesus imagery may have had its greatest impact in American Sunday schools, where the whiteness of Jesus became a religious fact in the psyches of children long before they could experience conversion. Beginning in the 1880s, the Providence Lithography Company published thousands of biblical scenes as posters and lesson cards. The cards measured three-by-four inches. A year’s supply of fifty-two cards cost only ten cents, so even the poorest churches could own them and most Sunday schools could have multiple sets. The cards had a fully colored image on the front and a lesson plan on the back. A generation of children first visualized Jesus and other biblical characters from these cards.13 Although Jesus looked somewhat different in each card, he was always white, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a ruddy face. Sometimes his beard was short; other times it was long. But always it was like his hair: straight.

New religious groups were also drawn to the whiteness of Jesus. Even Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Science followers described Jesus as white. This was particularly paradoxical since a main tenet of Eddy’s doctrine was the falsehood of material matter—that there was only spiritual energy and that the physical was a delusion. One of her New York disciples, Augusta E. Stetson, wrote to Eddy in 1909, “Let me continue to follow, and obey and adore the white Christ, fall at the feet of Love, and leave behind me all that is false and unreal.” Stetson often encouraged her students to adore the “white Christ” and wrote to church officials in Brooklyn that she longed to gaze “on the white Christ through tears, trials, toils, tribulations, and persecutions.”18

Assumptions of Christ’s whiteness became so powerful that they even reverberated into legal arguments about citizenship for immigrants. When Syrian immigrant George Dow faced a challenge to his eligibility for American citizenship in the 1910s, the Syrian American Association rallied to his defense with Christ. They endeavored to establish Dow’s and their whiteness through Christ’s. Syrians were not “Asiatic,” they protested, unless one described Jesus, “the most popular man in history,” as “Asiatic.” The community reasoned that “if Syrians were Chinese then Jesus who was born in Syria was Chinese.” Of course, neither American whites nor American judges by this time believed that Jesus was Chinese. Only through his whiteness had Jesus saved Dow. He won the case and remained in America, white and free.