Jesus Isn’t White: Undoing the myth of a European savior, again
jonnyrashid.substack.com
Unconsciously white Jesus We started a conversation last Friday to shine some light on the myth of the white Jesus. One reason we want to “decolonize” Jesus is because continental scholarship and theology—that is to say, theology and scholarship in Europe—largely dominated the landscape of Christianity for a long time shortly after the movement started. European and Christian were synonymous for a long time, and even after the Reformation, when the church split, it remained that way. So on one hand, Jesus was “white” by default. White people studied him, evangelized Christianity, and understood him through their lens. They never thought of themselves as making Jesus white, because like many white people, they didn’t have to consider their race very much at all. The dominant aren’t confronted with their uniqueness as a problem. And so to them, they just did what seemed to be normal. Were they malicious? I don’t think intentionally, but there was definitely a large degree of ignorance and violence that many of them spread, both against Jewish people and the people that they would eventually be complicit in colonizing.
Jesus Isn’t White: Undoing the myth of a European savior, again
Jesus Isn’t White: Undoing the myth of a…
Jesus Isn’t White: Undoing the myth of a European savior, again
Unconsciously white Jesus We started a conversation last Friday to shine some light on the myth of the white Jesus. One reason we want to “decolonize” Jesus is because continental scholarship and theology—that is to say, theology and scholarship in Europe—largely dominated the landscape of Christianity for a long time shortly after the movement started. European and Christian were synonymous for a long time, and even after the Reformation, when the church split, it remained that way. So on one hand, Jesus was “white” by default. White people studied him, evangelized Christianity, and understood him through their lens. They never thought of themselves as making Jesus white, because like many white people, they didn’t have to consider their race very much at all. The dominant aren’t confronted with their uniqueness as a problem. And so to them, they just did what seemed to be normal. Were they malicious? I don’t think intentionally, but there was definitely a large degree of ignorance and violence that many of them spread, both against Jewish people and the people that they would eventually be complicit in colonizing.