The Color of Christ

by Edward J. Blum

When the United States formed, moreover, the Son of God was anything but a dominant hero or national symbol. Jesus as a physical symbol was not to be found in the revolutionary republic. Despite the public dominance of white Protestantism, the America of the founding era was anything but a Jesus nation.

The first British colonists in the New World were radical iconoclasts living in an age of radical iconoclasm. They left the realm of divine imagery unclaimed and hence untamed. Common people developed their own ways of seeing good and evil, Jesus and the devil. At times, their sacred visions spun society out of control, as in Salem in the 1690s.

Unlike the Franciscans and Jesuits, English settlers considered it blasphemous to depict Jesus visually. They did not know what Jesus looked like. They did not want to know. And they celebrated not knowing. As part of the Protestant Reformation, colonial Puritans thought that the Catholic representations violated the second of the Ten Commandments, which forbade the worship of material objects or images. From Zurich, Switzerland, to London, England, art was removed from churches and banned as part of worship. Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli gloated that “in Zurich we have churches which are positively luminous; the walls are beautifully white.” Under Catholic and Protestant leaders, English monarchs oversaw the destruction and removal of hundreds of depictions of God, Jesus, and the sacred. The visual arts, as historian John Dillenberger has written, “were largely absent from the lives of people generally.”25

From the fifteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, African slaves and their descendants would learn to associate the name of Jesus, as well as his presence and image, with horrific death and new life. In the process, they created something new from something old. They took shattered lives, communities, and traditions and built vibrant forms of Christianity. New faiths that bore the name of Jesus, in part, helped them endure and disturb the systems of their oppression. Their faith brought democracy to a land of tyranny, justice to a land of misery, and dreams to a land of nightmares. But this change happened gradually, and not until after the seventeenth century. And it happened through their crucifixions.

Throughout the colonies, fears abounded that the British were trying to “enslave” the colonists and lord over them with tyrannical laws. In response, about one-third of the colonists banded together, declared their independence, and set the world afire in a fight for independence. Jesus was part of the Revolution and the formation of the United States, but not as much as one might expect. As a physical presence, he was almost completely absent. And in the language of law and legislation for the new republic, he was virtually nonexistent. In comparison to how prominent Jesus would become in the United States of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Revolution and the founding of the new nation were profoundly Christless.

Christ was almost completely absent in the core founding documents and places of the United States. He is not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Tom Paine never mentioned Jesus in Common Sense (1776); neither did the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767–68). Even the evangelical Patrick Henry failed to speak the name of Christ in his “Give Me Liberty” speech. Jesus makes no appearance in the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison never invoked his name in their Federalist Papers. In the first twenty annual presidential addresses, neither George Washington, nor John Adams, nor Thomas Jefferson uttered the name Jesus or Christ. When the new American capital of Washington, D.C., emerged slowly from the marshes of Virginia, moreover, Jesus was nonexistent as a physical presence. There were no statues or paintings of him there.50

In the new United States, Americans had images of Washington, but not of Jesus.

What ultimately occurred was a great reversal and resurrection. By the end of the century, the American Christ who had come to identify with slaves was transformed into a messiah of former slaveholders whose disciples wore white robes, burned crosses, and terrorized people of color. George Kelly’s vision of a white Jesus who fought for black people faded, and in its place arose a neo-Confederate Christ who subjugated black people in the name of liberty and democracy. Jesus as an overt physical symbol of white supremacy was born only after dreams of Confederate independence died and after Reconstruction had severed the legal ties between whiteness and citizenship.2

When the twentieth century came, the West and the South united to create a new Christ for America. Unlike the one of the Civil War era, this one supported white supremacy. He was a white man who strengthened white men, subjugated people of color, heralded the Ku Klux Klan, and did it all in the name of sacred liberty. This white Jesus had his vocal critics and competitors, and the decades following Reconstruction witnessed another round of intense competition for the soul and body of Jesus. If Harriet Beecher Stowe defined a suffering servant Jesus, one closely identified with the slave, her brother pioneered a new way of conceiving of the life and face of Jesus, one that rhetorically claimed no race for Jesus but visualized him as white.

By the 1920s, a Nordic and nativist Christ had been created who sanctified national unity through more rigid racial hierarchies and inspired international glory through military adventures.

Two weeks before his death, Shakur explained: “I feel like Black Jesus is controlling me. He’s our saint that we pray to; that we look up to.” Shakur believed that the black Jesus protected him for a greater purpose: “How I got shot five times—only a saint, only Black Jesus, only a nigga that know where I’m coming from, could be, like, ‘You know what? He gonna end up doing some good.’”22