Articulated Insight – “News, Race and Culture in the Information Age”
As I continue this series of placing my thoughts on paper, I want to continue the conversation on the false images of Jesus that we have been indoctrinated with. In my last article, I asserted that if the black church wants to see explosive growth in its membership, we must do away with the false and idolized images of Jesus that have been long adored. In this article, I intend to explore the historical development of those images, particularly those that promote whiteness as superior to Blackness and present Jesus not as a liberator of the oppressed but as a tool of oppression.
Black theologians have worked tirelessly to dismantle the psychological grip of the whitewashed Jesus. James Cone provocatively asserts, “If Jesus is white and not Black, he is an oppressor, and we must kill him.” To end the damage inflicted by the white Jesus on the minds and hearts of Black communities, we must take a brief but critical journey through art history to understand why Jesus was made white in the first place. A natural place to begin this exploration is the Renaissance.
The Renaissance marked a cultural rebirth across Europe following the Middle Ages. Among its many developments was a flourishing of religious art, particularly paintings of biblical stories from the New Testament. During this era, artists consistently portrayed Jesus as a white European male, living in a utopic and serene landscape. But first-century Palestine was far from utopic. Jesus lived in a world defined by genocide, violence, economic exploitation, and systemic injustice. Dr. Obery Hendricks reminds us of this in his landmark work, The Politics of Jesus.
Yet Renaissance artists painted Jesus as if he resided in a peaceful countryside, far removed from the harsh reality of Roman-occupied Judea. These depictions were not accidental. They served ideological purposes.
We must ask the enduring question: Why was Jesus painted white? Why was the Messiah, born in a region populated by people of color, depicted as a European? The easy answer is that artists sought to make whiteness superior. While this is true, the deeper historical explanation lies in the symbolism and cultural values of the time.
In Renaissance Europe, white was associated with purity, innocence, and divinity. Black, conversely, was associated with tragedy, evil, and sin. Artists painted Mary in white garments and used white doves to symbolize the Holy Spirit. Black was often used to illustrate death, despair, or hellish scenes. These color associations shaped religious imagery and were later codified in dictionaries and cultural language, reinforcing white as good and Black as bad.
This imagery carried profound theological implications. The white Jesus—with flowing hair, soft skin, a spotless lamb on his shoulders, and a dove hovering above—was not simply an artistic choice. It was a calculated symbol of racialized divinity. As James Cone reminds us in Black Theology and Black Power, “Whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is Black, baby, with all of the features which are so detestable to white society.”
To worship an image of a white Jesus in a Black church is to engage in the idolatry of whiteness. It is to internalize the notion that white is holy and Black is not. This imagery does not just hang on walls—it embeds itself in our theology, our self-worth, and our communal psyche.
We must tell the truth: Jesus was not a white man born in luxury. He was a man of color born in the hood of Nazareth. He grew up in occupied territory, shaped by state violence, religious corruption, and economic inequality. As Bishop Lawrence Reddick once put it, “We ain’t never seen a clean lamb!” The sanitized Jesus of European art erases the radical, revolutionary Messiah who flipped tables, broke unjust laws, and stood with the marginalized.
Whether they knew it or not, European artists perpetuated a racial ideology that elevated whiteness and demonized Blackness. Undoing this harm requires a theological and cultural deconstruction—not just of images, but of the ideas those images represent.
After studying the history of art and color symbolism during the Renaissance, the question remains: What comes next? Do we allow these whitewashed depictions of Jesus to remain in our churches? Do we permit whiteness to dominate sacred Black space? Or do we find the courage to remove these false idols and reclaim our own sacred narratives?
As a lover of Black Liberation Theology and a student of Cone, I argue we must choose the latter. Now is not the time to be timid. Now is the time to tell the truth.
As Albert B. Cleage Jr. declares in The Black Messiah, “Now we have come to the place where we not only can conceive of the possibility, but we are convinced, upon the basis of our knowledge and historic study of all the facts, that Jesus was born to a Black Mary, that Jesus, the Messiah, was a Black man who came to save a Black Nation.”
Let us tell the truth. We worship a Savior who looks like us, grew up in the inner city, turned water into wine, fed the five thousand, confronted religious authorities, led a protest into Jerusalem, and empowered women. Because of his unwavering commitment to the voiceless and the oppressed, he was executed by the state. But death could not hold him. And neither will white supremacy hold us.
Let the truth set us free.
Source:
4 James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power (New York:The Seabury Pressm 1969), 68.
5 In my work, I intersect ontology, studying of being, into black theology. The study of being must be added to our ever-ending struggle for achieving liberation. This will be another article I will expound on later in this article series.
6 Albert B. Cleage, Jr., The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 85.
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