When God Became White: Dismantling Whiteness for a More Just Christianity

by Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Everything is connected to race. Race might be considered a social construct, but we can see how race affects culture, history, religion, employment, laws, and ideas. Race influences how we act and behave daily. It forms our perceptions of each other and affects how we act in different circumstances. The societal views of immigrants, Natives, and refugees have a profound impact on our ability to relate to people of different races. It has also greatly influenced Christianity and our understanding of God.

The white Jesus on our wall was a depiction to me of how God looked as well. I pictured God as an old white man, just as everyone else did. There was no reason to question that notion. It was everywhere: in paintings, stained-glass windows, and storybooks. I never questioned it. I didn’t even think twice about whether Jesus was white or not. It was not in my consciousness to question anything that was taught by my mother or the church. Both pushed a white Jesus, and I just took it as the truth.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is how influential that picture was on my own theology and faith development. That image of a white Jesus was imprinted on my brain and body so that I could not even question whether Jesus actually looked like that. It was a given, as it was the most famous picture of Jesus. I went to visit family in Korea twice during my youth, and even my family members there had the same picture of the white Jesus in their homes. The Korean churches also had the same picture of white Jesus. Furthermore, when I traveled to India during my seminary years, all the churches that I visited had this same white Jesus picture. This confirmed to me that this must be the real Jesus, as it is universally understood to be the image of Christ. I just took it for granted that Sallman’s Head of Christ must be the real thing.

This book is about the religious journey I took to make sense of my own experiences and place them in context. It explores the emergence of a white Jesus and what the implications of this are on racialized minorities. In this process, I came to understand how whiteness has corrupted our understanding of each other and God. If we are to overcome the devastating effects of whiteness, we need to move forward and adopt a theology of visibility so we can embrace the other and live in peace with our neighbors.

As the center of Christianity, God being white implies that whites are the center of humanity and that God’s concerns and God’s desires center on white people at the expense of people of color. This has damaging consequences for people of color who experience grave injustices due to racism, discrimination, and xenophobia.

The notion of race is based not on biology but on social meanings that are created and re-created due to changing contexts. The concept of race was created mainly by Europeans in the sixteenth century and is based on socially constructed beliefs about the inherent superiority and inferiority of groups of people.

No person of any race or ethnicity has a biological or spiritual claim to being better than anyone else. Race has served to separate society into different levels for the benefit of a few people who have been defined as white, to the misfortune of anyone considered nonwhite or of color. “Although race is something imagined (or constructed), its effects are real. From lifespans to salary to where you live, race has a measurable impact on a person’s quality of life.”

American race relations emerged from the intersection of three significant events in history: the conquest of Native Americans, the forced importation of Africans, and the coming together of Europeans, Asians, and Latinos.4 The intersection of these significant events led to the need to divide and distinguish people according to race. This was carefully accomplished by those in power to serve themselves and maintain their power.

Before the seventeenth century, Europeans did not think of themselves as belonging to a white race. Instead, they viewed themselves as belonging to different parts or regions in Europe and had a very different perception of race and racialization. But once this concept of white race was shown to be advantageous to Europeans and enslavers, it began to reshape and redefine their world.

Around 1640, the working and living conditions of indentured servants began to affect the numbers of those willing to enter the arrangement. The loss of this source of labor drove landowners to seek new forms of labor that would be cost efficient and profitable. With the loss of European indentured workers and the need for a high volume of cheap labor, the colonialists turned to Africans, which became advantageous and profitable.

The english revolution influenced this. Part of the reason there was so many willing (and interested) in leaving England was the political and social realities (and the population explosion) in England.

Before the late 1600s, Europeans did not use the term Black to reference any group of people. However, with the racialization of enslavement around 1680, many looked for a term to differentiate between the enslaved and the enslavers. Thus the terms white and Black were used to represent and differentiate racial categories.

In this racial identity, whites do not carry the burden of race in America as white people perceive whiteness as a neutral racial identity.16 White people are viewed as the norm, and everyone else is one or more steps away from the normative in society. This neutral racial stance is beneficial and powerful as it pits other racialized groups as inferior and deficient.

It was Augustine who developed the just-war theory in the fifteenth century based on the understanding that there are worse evils than physical destruction.

White Christianity and missiology are intertwined with colonialism, and it has had devastating effects all over the world. Whiteness is the root of much colonialism around the globe, and there are four deadly weapons employed in white Christian conquests: genocide, enslavement, removal, and rape. These weapons divide people, separating them from land, people, story, culture, and identity. These weapons serve colonizers in gaining more land and low-cost or no-cost labor to grow wealth.

The Doctrine of Discovery had immense consequences for the Natives who already lived on the land. Millions of indigenous people around the world have suffered genocide, land theft, cultural humiliation, displacement, and apartheid. These atrocious acts have long-lasting negative effects that get passed on from one generation to the next. Today many feel disenfranchised and disillusioned, and desire to gain their land, culture, and history back. As colonists arrived in the land that would become the United States, the territory was considered empty because indigenous people were not Christians and therefore not human and nonexistent. As such, you can do what you want to the land and to the indigenous people.

Decolonization is a spiritual matter just as it is a physical, mental, social, and political one.23 Hence, we need to decolonize Christianity from its whiteness if anything is to change.

See Emerson and Blancey

Today, crusader colonial spirit continues to live on as white supremacy and white Christian nationalism. Many white Christians would be loath to think of themselves as white supremacists but would be proud to think of themselves as Christian supremacists. Hence, their whiteness is hidden to both others and themselves in their Christianity.

This race system’s mission is to keep people in their place and maintain the status quo. The powerful keep their status and the powerless remain subordinate and subjugated. When I was in Korea, my family didn’t view me as yellow. Asians don’t view themselves as yellow, just as Africans do not view themselves as Black. It is only when Africans come to the United States that they come to see themselves as Black. This is the racialization process, which labels us according to our skin color. Along with the division of people according to skin color is the understanding of a hierarchy of color, with white being at the top.

People of color approach racial identity differently than those who identify as white. People of color must consider their racial identity in every situation and context where they find themselves. This happens due to the systemic and interpersonal racism that exists in all spheres of society.

During the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the AAPI community’s awareness of racial identity was even more heightened, and we all carried a keen awareness that we could fall victim to a hate crime even as we walked to work, returned home, and rode buses and subways. We were aware that we could not escape racialization, and we must remain on alert for any potential vocal or physical attacks. This is what it means to have to be conscious of racial identity daily. We live in fear that we, or a close relative, might be the next victim of racialized hate crimes. This is not something white people need to be conscious of, while people of color carry this fear constantly. When we say white people exist in privilege, power, and substance, it isn’t just related to material things. It includes their very existence—the degree of safety and security they enjoy on a daily basis. They have created a society where they are powerful, and the structure of that society ensures they retain their power.

racism must be named and categorized in order for society to view and understand. The atrocities committed against people of color will continue to occur if we do not eradicate racism. The cycle of vicious racism needs to be broken.

In my first teaching job there came a time when problems started to arise among some of the students. During a faculty and staff meeting about the issue, a white staff blurted out, “We decided to hire people of color, and look at all the problems that they bring.” People of color are continually assigned blame when things go wrong in society, churches, and workplaces. White people find it difficult to see where they are contributing to the problem or may, in fact, be the problem.

It is so blended and burrowed in Christianity that it becomes very difficult to divorce white supremacy from Christianity. Though white Christians may try to achieve reconciliation with people of color, they need to seek justice instead. Reconciliation suggests a restoration of a previously amicable relationship, of making two things realigned. However, that cannot be when there has never been alignment or equity between whites and people of color. To restore that relationship would mean taking things back to the way they were when people of color were silent and obedient. That offers no healing. White supremacy must be eradicated from institutions, religion, and white people’s psyches so they can move beyond forgetfulness, amnesia, and silence8 and into some form of action that will work for change and integrity.

Contextualizing Christianity and trying to make sense of it in different cultures will help it move away from whiteness.

Allowing white culture to become more important than faith has led to the emergence of a prideful and nationalistic Christianity rather than a Christianity focused on the oppressed and the marginalized, as Christians are called to do.

We cannot work toward eliminating racism from our society until we unpack and understand whiteness and its true impact. Naming whiteness doesn’t mean we don’t like white people, just as calling out sexism doesn’t mean that we hate all men. We simply need to recognize whiteness as a system that takes up space and rarely allows people of color to move forward or move up. It consumes too much air in Christianity, politics, culture, philosophy, and history. And white people spend too much time justifying, dismissing, or denying the problem and not enough time listening.

We also cannot allow whiteness to define God and Christianity.

I just thought everything I was taught at church from the Old Testament and New Testament was written by white Europeans. The white, male Jesus I learned about at church and saw in the painting my mother hung in a prominent place in our childhood apartment was engrained in my body and my mind. It was instilled into my faith system that repeatedly affirmed the goodness of being white people. God is white, Jesus is white and, therefore, white people are the closest to God. This white Christianity was part of my faith until my adulthood, and it took me a long time to unpack, dismantle, and reimagine God as nonwhite.

There was a lot of messaging and branding that went into how Jesus was depicted. For example, in a mosaic from Santa Pudenziana, the oldest surviving Catholic church in Rome, built between 384 and 398, Jesus was portrayed as “pantocrator” and as a ruler-judge at the end of the world. Jesus is presented to the world as an imperial leader wearing a lavish gold garment, which was classic Zeus and Jupiter clothing and not what Jesus most likely wore. His posture is also painted like imperial emperor Augustus, holding out his right arm to the viewer’s left as a gesture of law-maintaining authority. His long, baggy sleeves were inspired by the dalmatica worn by the upper classes in the Byzantine era. After this Byzantine period the imperial ruler image of Jesus was cemented and spread around the world through colonialism and missionaries.3 Jesus became molded into the images of the European leaders and their gods. This helped legitimize their power over their own people as well as others around the world through colonialism and domination.

The equating of whiteness with purity and goodness in the Bible created the perfect vehicle for whitewashing Jesus. The notion of the color white as good has been transferred to Jesus, who is seen as pure, perfect and holy.

In John 8:12, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” which means he is pure and good. Jesus came into the world to bring light into darkness. Jesus is the light, and light is goodness and stands in contrast to the darkness, which is evil and bad. The writer of John lived in a dualistic world, and he incorporates that dualism into the imagery of Jesus as the light in a dark and evil world. Darkness and light are separate and cannot be brought together. Dualism is very problematic as it divides the world into two categories in which there can be no harmony. In this dualistic world, Jesus can only be viewed as white and male as both categories are lauded as good and desirable. The feminine is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the male. Within dualism, we also see the contrast of knowledge, or the masculine logos, as better than wisdom, or the feminine Sophia. The preference for logos over Sophia also leads to a male Jesus. Jesus is understood as the word of God; as Scripture states, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Thus, Christianity has a long patriarchal history, and the maleness of Jesus further reinforces patriarchy, dominance, and white supremacy. If the church today emphasizes a white Jesus, the congregation will believe in a white Jesus. A white Jesus reinforces whiteness in the congregation and Christianity as a whole.

There was continual fighting between European Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims. To white Christians, the nonwhite nonbelievers were the enemy. Even though Jesus looked more like the Middle Eastern people than Europeans, for the crusaders, it was important to uphold the image of Jesus as a white man. They could not and would not paint Jesus like their enemy. It put God on the side of the colonizers and dominators.7 And there was an utmost urgency to solidify the perception of Jesus as a white man with light features.

This conflates too much history. The crusades were in part responding to muslim expansion. If the argument is about not portraying as enemy, there is a step between 11-12th cengury early crusades and 15-16th century colonialism. It is not that the line can’t be drawn, but there needs to be more development to draw that line.

All these churches and mission compounds were run by white missionaries from North America or Europe, and they taught of a white Jesus and a white God. The churches and even the artwork hanging inside the churches were European and white. Young girls and women went to church with a white lace veil or handkerchief over their heads. This is what the white missionaries told them to do, and they followed their instructions. This covering of their heads with white lace underscored the purity and cleanliness of white. The white Jesus was intentionally contrived to serve white men who were in power and wanted to continue to hold that power globally.

One day, a student approached me in the hallway outside of my office and said, “I have nothing to learn from a woman or a person of color.” This dagger crushed my heart.

The prominence of whiteness has been wedded to Christianity from its beginnings, and it is extremely difficult to divorce the two, as there is much resistance from those in power to do so.

I still think whiteness is a 15-17th century invention but the thrust here is that whiteness is older. In the sense of heirarchal power connected to Christianity that is true. But then the center is hierarchy and power not race. Race is the tool of power and hierarchy not the center

White people wonder why everyone can’t be treated the same while simultaneously ignoring how social structures have been historically designed to benefit them. As they argue for colorblindness, they make Jesus white and do not see the negative consequences that follow.

Loving one another should have no exceptions—not sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, ableism, or economic lifestyle. But this seems to be problematic in Christianity as whiteness has a lingering influence over who we are to love and who we are to hate.

History notes that while no human has ever seen God, man has continuously formed deities in his own image. God was portrayed like human beings in appearance, thought, and speech, and in the world they created. Procreative gods and goddesses reflected a sense of superiority based on an assumption that human beings out of all the animals are the only ones who can make creation conscious of itself.

Shekinah is grammatically feminine

TGC article on gender and translation https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/gender-in-bible-translation-a-crucial-issue-still-mired-in-misunderstanding/

When Asian Americans bring in Asian concepts to help expand our understanding of God, people begin to shout syncretism and claim it is not real Christianity. White people pretend that white Eurocentric male Christians never syncretized their beliefs, practices, and traditions. Many white people actually believe that their Christianity is pure, authentic, and the only true form of Christianity divinely given to white people for all of humanity. They want to share this belief to all peoples around the globe. However, we must acknowledge that Christianity is not pristine but tainted by cultural, contextual, and historical influences. This is true not just of people of color’s understanding of Christianity but also of white people’s version of Christianity. It is good to have multiple readings of theology and Christianity, as it helps widen our perspective and understandings of God. Every people, nation, and social location has something to contribute to a fuller, deeper, more meaningful picture and comprehension of God.

When Christian theologians talk about the Holy Spirit, they always mean God, never merely one of God’s gifts. The Spirit is the giver of life.

The God of visibility makes the marginalized visible and uplifts them. Spirit God is nongendered, nonracialized, nonwhite, and nonbinary. Spirit God is the life-giving God who embraces and cherishes all of us regardless of how we look, walk, love, dress, or eat. Spirit God loves us just the way we are, without any consideration of our zip code, education, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability. Spirit God is present in our midst as Spirit-Chi, who is liberative and embracing. Spirit God reaches out and finds us in our brokenness, gives us life, lives in us, and embraces us in spite of our downfalls and shortcomings. This is the embracing Spirit God of Chi and jeong who loves us with everything. Spirit God sustains us in this chaotic world of racism, sexism, whiteness, and prejudices. Spirit God will turn us away from racism and move toward love, wholeness, and jeong.

Spirit God who is loving and embracing cannot be destructive at the same time. Therefore, it is life-giving that we turn to Spirit God to move toward a loving, kind, welcoming, embracing, and graceful Spirit God.

whiteness has infiltrated much of North American culture, economics, and politics, as well as religion. For Christians, whiteness has caused great damage in reinforcing the notion of a white male God, teaching that white men are at the top of the social ladder and people of color, especially woman of color, are at the bottom of the hierarchy. My goal is to work toward reimagining a nonwhite and a nongendered God—a God who can help us build a more just society, faith community, and loving church. Spirit God will teach us that everyone is equal and everyone, regardless of gender, race, and ethnicity, is welcomed into the body of Christ. But how do we incorporate these new practices into our lives so we can move toward a nonwhite and nongendered God who embraces all people? We reimagine God by rethinking and rewriting worship and liturgy, reconsidering discipleship, and reshaping our community of faith.

For most of the church’s history, our prayers, hymns, and liturgies have been written by white European men. The language used in our church worship imagines, describes, and reinforces a white male God. From the beginning to the end of worship, we praise, read about, and pray to a white male God.

The white male language used throughout our religious practice reinforces our perceptions and beliefs that white and male is superior to nonwhite and female. We memorize prayers, hymns, and creeds during childhood that become embedded in our thoughts, hearts, and behaviors that end up carried into adulthood. These white male liturgies have become part of our being and greatly influence our perception of God.

We know that God is neither white nor male. That was merely a notion of God constructed by white male theologians. God is Spirit and, as a spiritual entity, cannot have gender or race, and this should be reflected in the liturgical languages that we use within the church. It is paramount that we rethink and re-create our liturgical language about God. One way we can do this is to shift our focus from using titles to describe God, such as Father, Lord, and Sovereign, to using words that convey action in the way we refer to God in our liturgies. There are inclusive hymnals and liturgical books, such as Inclusive Hymns for Liberating Christians1 that move away from a patriarchal understanding of God. For ministers and preachers, there is Wil Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church,

in Korea, the concept of ou-ri, translated as “our,” is far more important than the individual. “Ourness” is a concept that has built up the Korean community with an emphasis on being connected to each other to protect and help others. Ou-ri in the Korean language is often used as a personal pronoun. So instead of saying “my family,” in Korea, we say “ou-ri family.” Instead of saying “my spouse,” we say “ou-ri spouse,” even though you are married to only one spouse. This different outlook and emphasis in life challenges us to become different individuals within the community, to prioritize the needs of the community. We need to adopt an ou-ri-ness in our theological journey so we can fight racism and overcome the other divisive beliefs we face as people of God. All people are invited to the banquet of God where we can dance, rejoice, and be merry in the presence of God. It is the ou-ri-ness of God’s love that we should be embodying as Christians.

In the New Testament, we see over and over again how Jesus interacted with women and raised them up. Jesus conversed with and supported many women throughout the New Testament. In the story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet, all the men in the house were upset at this woman’s mere presence and became irate over her display of devotion to Jesus. But Jesus was not angry; instead, he welcomed it and said that we were to remember her actions because she demonstrated the kind of love he wants us to show one another. In other parts of the New Testament, we see that Jesus loved Mary and Martha and they became some of his closest friends. Jesus also talked to a Samaritan woman who was considered an outcast by her community. He told her about living water that would give her eternal life. Unlike the rest of society, Jesus did not set up barriers, oppress foreigners, nor subjugate women. Instead, Jesus did the opposite and praised the women around him. To grow in our discipleship, we need to do likewise. We need to become followers of Jesus and lift up the marginalized. By moving away from an image of a white male God, we can rid the church of the barriers, prejudice, and rejection of “outsiders” that is still so prevalent. It will help us to see how we are all important, valuable, and created in the image of God.

The damage that the image of a white male God has done to people of color and to women has been enormous. We need to unlearn our ways of thinking and believing as we try to live a more faithful life, which means loving and embracing everyone. We need to live trustworthy lives as we struggle to understand God Spirit, who is merciful, welcoming, and embracing of everyone. Discipleship is not just about knowing Christ; it is about doing something just, faithful, and life-giving. Discipleship takes a lot of maturity in our faith journey. It requires us to be disciplined in our life to work toward liberation and justice. A new discipleship in a faith that is nonwhite and nongendered is how we all will right the wrongs of generations of a distorted view of God.