Paul Moses: Review of Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey’s “The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America” (North Carolina, 2012)

Paul Moses is Professor of Journalism at Brooklyn College, a former editor at Newsday, and author of “The Saint & The Sultan: The Crusades, Islam and Francis or Assisi’s Mission of Peace.”

The lively reaction to news of a supposed ancient reference to Jesus’s wife has shown anew that the itinerant Jewish preacher the Romans executed nearly 2,000 years ago continues to matter a great deal in America’s not-so-secularized culture. The New Testament authors, evidently not anticipating the cultural debates of the twenty-first century, had nothing to say about Jesus’ marital status. The same can be said for his skin tone.

As Professors Edward J. Blum, associate professor of history at San Diego State, and Paul Harvey, professor of history at the University of Colorado, demonstrate in their book The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, that lack of evidence has not been a barrier to a long history of coloring the image of Jesus to suit political or cultural agendas. No, their account does not turn on a fragment of papyrus, but rather on an exhaustive survey of art found on church walls, prayer cards, Sunday-school posters and in novels and movies.

Their book offers an impressively sweeping, well- researched journey of how the image of Jesus has been used and misused through American history. It documents how that image has been colored to further oppression or to push for liberation. Their insights are often illuminating and always interesting, although occasionally perhaps a little forced.

They write that as a result of Puritan influence, Jesus was not imagined through physical images in colonial America but instead through visions or dreams. The writers quote a Russian diplomat who remarked some three decades after the American Revolution that Americans had images of George Washington in their homes, not the saints.

But that began to change during the nineteenth century. In part, this was a function of better ability to mass-produce almanacs, religious tracts and Bibles, which carried renderings of Jesus. These images invariably depicted a white Jesus but, as the authors write, black slaves adopted them to their own needs by identifying Jesus with the poor. In the years before the Civil War, even William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper Liberator depicted Jesus as white in its masthead, the authors write.

After the war, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher wrote a biography of Jesus in which he acknowledged that nothing was known of his subject’s physical appearance. At the same time, his book offered five images of Jesus, all showing him as white. The authors see this as a prelude to a kind of winking acceptance of Jesus as white.

Children were deeply influenced by the colorful pictures of a milky white Jesus that were mass-produced for Sunday schools in the 1880s, the authors say. In the 1910 song “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” Jesus loved children of all colors. But, the authors note, a popular Sunday school graphic based on the song depicted a white Jesus physically touching four of the five children seated with him. Only a nude black boy was out of touch with the savior.

And in the concluding scene of D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation in 1915, the white-robed, white Christ was turned into an emblem of white supremacy. They add that as theories arose over superior and inferior races, Jesus was presented as not only white but as Nordic.

The Color of Christ cites various arguments to the contrary, notably by W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote of Jesus as “a dark and pierced Jew.” His friend, the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, painted Jesus as dark-skinned and Mediterranean. Mark Twain thought it ridiculous to say Jesus was white. And Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association told members to “never admit that Jesus Christ was a white man.”

The authors follow this trail through the world wars, the Depression, the civil rights movement and to the digital era. We learn that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that Jesus was no more or less significant “because his skin was white.”

One observation emerging from this book’s detailed survey is that the theology of liberation was alive at America’s grassroots centuries before it came into American discourse from Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1970s. For Native Americans (whose story receives admirable attention in this book), African slaves and many others, Jesus offered a path to freedom from oppression.

While many insights into American history and culture can be gleaned from this book, it is necessary to add that the whiteness-studies lens used in it has limits.

The authors, for example, dismiss the influence of European art that pre-dates American struggles with race. That may be proper for analyzing the image of Jesus as it appeared in early American history, but millions of European emigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought with them a visual understanding of Jesus, Mary and the saints. The history of American racial conflict did not necessarily determine the kinds of images enshrined in newly arrived immigrants’ national churches, prayer cards and street processions.

Many lenses can be useful to view art depicting Jesus. A theologian might look for a “high” or “low” Christology, of how divinity and humanity are brought together, for example. With detailed research that takes account the nation’s history of racial division, The Color of Christ shows how race has affected the way Americans visualize the man most believe is the savior.