Importantly, it was everyday Christians, including many “mothers and fathers, Sunday School Teachers and new Christian entrepreneurs” who made this image of a white Jesus famous. Depicting Jesus as a white American man hampered the cause of the civil rights movement because, as Blum and Harvey explain, “fashioning Jesus into a particular and visualized body made it impossible for any universal savior to rise above the conflicts.”46 Warner Sallman’s famous but contrived image of Jesus served to reinforce among Christians the status quo of the American racial hierarchy.
