What To Do about a White Jesus?

Earlier this year I wrote about removing Confederate statues, and my previous post was about toppling statues of the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra. But now I tackle an even harder question: what should be done about the statues—and stained-glass windows—of a white Jesus?

The Popularity of a White Jesus

By far, the most famous painting of Jesus is Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ.” Sallman (1892~1968) completed that painting in 1940, and in the 80 years since, some say it has been reproduced a billion times. 

News stories this year about Sallman’s painting have been titled “How Jesus became white” (see here, for example), but there were a multitude of paintings and stained-glass windows depicting a white Jesus long before 1940.

From the late 16th century until the early 20th century, Raphael’s “The Transfiguration” (1520) was the most famous oil painting in the world, and Jesus is clearly “white” and with blond hair. (See Anna House’s 7/17/20 essay, “The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European.”)

The Problem of a White Jesus

Eminent Black theologian James Cone highlighted the problem of a white Jesus in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011): “The White Christ gave blacks slavery, segregation, and lynching and told them to turn the other cheek and to look for their reward in heaven” (p. 115).

Partly for reasons noted by Cone (1938~2018), according to a June 22 Newsweek article, Shaun King, an American writer, civil rights activist, and co-founder of the Real Justice PAC, has insisted that “White Jesus statues should be torn down.”

King (b. 1979) also asserted that stained glass windows and other images of a white Jesus should be destroyed, insisting that they are “racist propaganda” and “a gross form of white supremacy.”

In his hard-hitting 2019 book Dear Church, Lenny Duncan, a Black Lutheran pastor, writes about how he and other Blacks have been hurt by the prevalent symbol of “a white Norwegian Jesus” (p. 68).

Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Seminary in New York, writes in the October 7 issue of The Christian Century about “Struggling with Black faith in America.”

Dean Douglas says that as a girl, the Jesus of her Sunday school lessons ”was always pictured as White. This fact alone made me skeptical of his love for me.”

Further, she writes, “How could a White Jesus ever care about me, not to speak of caring for poor Black children? And how could I, a Black person, ever have faith in a White Jesus?”

Douglas goes on to say that as she was “experiencing an agonizing crisis of faith,” she was introduced to Cone’s book A Black Theology of Liberation (1970)—and the content of that book was definitely liberating for her.

“I could be Black with a love for Jesus without contradiction, because in fact Jesus was Black like me,” she realized.

What To Do about a White Jesus?

Since the summer of 2019, I have served as the chair of my church’s Worship Committee. Most of this year has been hard because of not being able to have in-person worship services.

Unexpectedly, our committee was confronted with the problem of what to do, if anything, about the large stained-glass window in our sanctuary. It quite clearly portrays a white Jesus, as you can see in this picture: 

Our church building was acquired from the Methodists, and when it was remodeled in the early 2000s the stained-glass window was re-done—but there was no change to the Scandinavian appearance of Jesus.

We continue to wrestle with the question, What should be done about the White Jesus in our stained-glass window?

What advice would you give me and my committee?