The Unmaking of the White Christ: Why Remedial Images Fail

My post content

Introduction

The impulse is as understandable as it is urgent. For centuries, our people have been forced to gaze upon a Jesus with flowing blond hair and eyes the color of winter skies—a Christ who looked like our captors and whose image was used to bless our chains. In recent years, a well-intentioned response has emerged within Black Christian communities: the call to paint, draw, and digitally render a Black Jesus. The project presents itself as remedial, a necessary undoing of the psychological violence wrought by Eurocentric representations.

I want to argue, with both sorrow and conviction, that this response—however understandable—is misguided. It is not rooted in Scripture and ultimately serves to justify the very thing that lies at the root of the weaponization of the White Christ in the first place. For believers who desire faithfulness more than fashion, I offer this case: we must not make images of Jesus at all, not even as remediation.

The Problem of Remediation

The foundational error of the remedial project lies in its assumption that the harm of the White Christ can be corrected by replacing it with a Black Christ. This seems logical on the surface: an oppressive image is countered by a liberating one. But this approach mistakes the symptom for the disease.

The disease was never merely which race was projected onto Jesus, but the very act of projection itself. Europeans did not err simply by getting the skin tone wrong; they erred by making God in their own image. To counter this by making God in our image is not to escape their error but to replicate its deepest structure. As one scholar of religion and psychology notes, "the psychological mechanism operates regardless of the ethnicity depicted: a child conditioned to associate divinity with features that mirror their own will form an historically inaccurate and unconsciously formative association between their own racial identity and moral goodness."¹ The problem is not the particular race of the image, but the fictive act of depicting the earthly manifestation of the invisible God at all.

The Absence of Description and the Imagination as Arbiter

We must begin with a careful distinction: the New Testament provides no physical description of the earthly Jesus—the Jesus who walked the roads of Galilee, who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who hung upon a cross. The Gospels give us his teachings, his actions, his relationships, his suffering, and his resurrection. But they give us no description of his hair, his eyes, his skin tone, his stature. The early church showed virtually no interest in what he looked like during his earthly life. The earliest Christians understood that his appearance was not a matter of salvific significance.

What the New Testament does give us, in the book of Revelation, is a vision of the risen and glorified Christ:

His head and His hair were white like white wool, like snow; and His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like a burnished bronze when it has been heated to a glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters. (Revelation 1:14–15)

This description matters. It is not a concession to our curiosity about the earthly Jesus, but neither is it merely abstract symbol stripped of material reality. The text reaches for actual things: wool, snow, fire, bronze. It could have chosen other images—the hair of a foal, skin like a snow owl—but it did not. For communities who have endured centuries of being told that divinity wears European features, a text that describes divine hair as wool and divine feet as burnished bronze is not incidental. These are not neutral symbols; they are images drawn from a particular world, and they carry weight. Wool speaks to texture, bronze to complexion. They are reality-based and identity-bearing.

Yet even here, we must be careful. The Revelation vision does not give us what we might call a portrait. It does not tell us the shape of his nose, the color of his eyes in ordinary light, the manner of his beard, his height, his build. It tells us his hair was white like wool—not black, not brown—but white with the wisdom of age and glory. It tells us his feet were like burnished bronze—a complexion not foreign to North Africa of the first-century, a description of radiant, refined, furnace-heated majesty. These images draw from the created order to communicate his judgment, endurance, and unapproachable brilliance. They are rooted in Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9), where God’s hair is analogically described in similar terms.

They are descriptions of the ascended Christ but not an authorization or invitation to produce naturalistic portraits of either the earthly or the glorified Christ.

When an artist today sits down to paint a Black Jesus, they must make countless decisions. What shade of brown? What shape of nose? What texture of hair? What expression? These are not neutral transcriptions of historical reality—they are imaginative constructions. The artist’s biased imagination becomes the sole source of conveying imagery that depicts the appearance of the Son of God in his earthly life. The artist becomes the interpreter of general information with a specific focus. But on what basis? There is no photograph, no death mask, no first-century description of the historical Jesus to guide us. We have only general clues—he was a first-century North African Jewish man from the region of Galilee, likely bearing features common to that time and place.² To construct a detailed naturalistic image from such minimal evidence is to supplant the unknown with the assumed; it is to rely on what the artist imagines and then to share the impression.

Accuracy be damned; this is a matter of artistic freedom and as such, a matter of authority. When Jesus is presented in a detailed naturalistic image, the artist is implicitly claiming knowledge that God has not given regarding Christ’s earthly appearance. The artist is filling a silence God deliberately left with the products of our own cultural imagination; on what basis?

The Question of Remedial Efficacy

Is such a project actually remedial? This is a question we must press with honesty. The claim is that a Black Jesus will heal the psychological damage inflicted by a White Jesus. But what is the mechanism of this healing? If, as psychological research demonstrates, images form the psyche at levels below conscious awareness through processes like classical conditioning, then the Black Jesus does not undo the conditioning; it merely adds another layer.³

The White child who saw Jesus as White was conditioned to associate Whiteness with divinity. The Black child who is taught to see Jesus as Black will be conditioned to associate Blackness with divinity. We have not moved closer to truth; we have only changed which cultural projection we have agreed to call historically accurate

Moreover, this approach unintentionally affirms what it denies, that the manufacture of representations of Jesus, with inadequate and/or inaccurate information and no biblical basis is acceptable and defensible on a purely visceral basis. I’m not aware of any artist who claims that their representation of Jesus is authentic in the sense of his appearance. Assuming that to be true, what then beyond artistic license encourages artists to ignore the prohibitions of the second commandment unless it is a lack of clarity about its intent and parameters. Clearly, the interpretation of the second commandment is debatable, but it is worth exploring so that we do not fall into the trap of not assuming that the White manufacture of representation of the White Christ was ok on any level, or worse yet, failing to challenge the logic of racial projection merely to demand a turn at the projector.

The Psychological Evidence and the Unconscious Formation

Some will object: "But we are not worshipping the image. We are simply using it as a tool for teaching and psychological healing." This objection, however sincere, misunderstands the nature of image-formed consciousness.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) research pioneered by Greenwald and Banaji has demonstrated that exposure to images shapes unconscious associations in ways that persist even when conscious beliefs explicitly reject those associations.⁴ In one study, participants exposed to images of a White Jesus showed increased implicit bias against Black faces even when they consciously endorsed racial equality. The effect was not the result of explicit teaching; it was the result of repeated visual pairing of Whiteness with divinity, goodness, and authority.⁵

This is precisely why the second commandment is structured as it is. The commandment does not begin with "do not bow" but with "do not make" (Exodus 20:4-5). The making precedes the bowing, and the making has its genesis in the human imagination. By the time one explicitly bows or serves, the idolatrous work is already accomplished. The making itself participates in idolatry's dynamics because it is the making that initiates the formation.⁶

When we create and circulate images of a Black Jesus, we are initiating the same unconscious formation in our own communities. We are conditioning our children—and ourselves—to associate Blackness with divinity. This may feel empowering in the short term, but it is shortsighted. It feeds the moment while laying the groundwork for the same kind of idolatrous ethnocentrism that we rightly condemn in the European tradition.

A-Scriptural and Idolatrous

The remedial project is a-scriptural. Nowhere in the New Testament are we commanded to create images of Jesus for teaching, worship, psychological remediation, or any other purpose. The apostles, who walked with him, did not produce portraits. The early church, for centuries, did not produce images of Christ for devotional use—or rather, the evidence presents a more complex picture. The earliest surviving Christian art, dating from the late second century, appears in catacombs and burial contexts, not public worship spaces. These images—the Good Shepherd, the nursing Mary—were understood by many as symbolic rather than portraiture. Alongside these images, a strong literary tradition opposed image-making. Origen, writing in the third century, ridiculed pagan reliance on images and did not deny the charge that Christians despised images. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fourth century, used the Transfiguration to argue against representing Christ. The argument that the incarnation creates a license for image-making does not appear in the early church; it emerges much later, systematized by John of Damascus in the eighth century during the iconoclast controversy.⁷ The absence of a command to create images, combined with the contested history of their use, suggests that the early church did not understand the incarnation as authorization for portraiture. Rather, the early Christians understood that God had made himself visible in a human life, but that life was now ascended, and the Spirit was given to form Christ in us—not on our walls or screens.

The remedial project also opens the door to idolatry and violates the letter and spirit of the second commandment. To argue that an image is "just for remediation" does not exempt it from the commandment's reach. The commandment does not say, "You shall not make a graven image unless you have a really good reason." It prohibits the making because the making—regardless of intent—initiates the causal chain from imagination to attribution to formation. Of note is that "graven image" is simply the broad ancient term used to describe the plastic arts.

Consider the question of standard. Logically, to correct a White Jesus assumes there is a correct standard from which the White Jesus deviated. But what is that standard? We have no photograph, no description. We have only general historical clues. To claim that a particular artistic rendering is the corrected version is to claim a knowledge we do not possess. On what basis does one artist decide that Jesus had a broader nose or narrower lips? On what basis does another decide he had a particular hairstyle? The possibilities are endless, and each new image simply multiplies the problem. The project thus leads not to truth but to a form of relativism where "Jesus" becomes whatever any given artist or community needs him to look like.

Addressing Counterarguments

"But images help children understand the incarnation."

Do they? Or do they substitute a concrete, imagined face for the mystery of the God who became flesh and is now seated at the right hand of the Father? The incarnation is not an invitation to visualization but a call to faith. Children can understand that Jesus was a real human being without needing a portrait. Fictive portrayals of biblical characters can be helpful and can contribute significantly to remediating the harm done by Eurocentric depictions of Bible characters, but the portrayal divinity is proscribed by the second commandment.

"But I don't worship the image; it's just a reminder."

This response reduces worship to explicit acts of bowing. But the commandment's prohibition on making is independent of whether one subsequently bows. The making itself is the problem because it proceeds from the imagination and shapes the soul. A "reminder" that is factually false (since it presents a conjectured appearance as historical) is not a neutral prompt—it is a false witness.

"But this is about representation and dignity. Black people need to see themselves reflected in the divine."

This is perhaps the most compelling objection because it touches genuine pastoral and psychological needs. But we must ask: does our need for historical remediation and representation justify making an image of God that God has not authorized? And while it is true that we need to see ourselves reflected in the divine, the gospel offers something more: not just that Jesus looks like us, but that we are being conformed to his image (Romans 8:29).

A Better Way

To decline to make images of Jesus is not to accept the White Christ. It is to reject the worldview that gives license to projecting an alien psyche onto the divine. We need to unmake the White Christ by refusing to mimic the behaviors of the oppressor.

The second commandment is not a restriction on our freedom but a guardrail for our faithfulness. It frees us from the endless, exhausting project of making God in our own image and then defending our image against the images of others. It calls us instead to worship the invisible God who, though manifesting on earth in the likeness of sinful flesh, cannot be replicated through the human imagination except at the risk of idolatry. Clearly, history has revealed the perils of such projections, and to perpetuate them in the name of remedy is a concession to the visceral over the Scriptural. Until the day when we see him as he is, we will walk by faith, not by the sight of the artist's imagination. And in that walk, we are freed to represent Christ in our living, free from the pitfalls of artistic projection—free to worship the God who made us, not the god we make.

Notes

1. This point draws on the psychological research of Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013), which demonstrates that implicit associations are formed through repeated exposure regardless of conscious beliefs. Applied to religious imagery, the mechanism operates independently of the specific ethnicity depicted.

2. On the historical evidence regarding Jesus's appearance, Black and African scholars have challenged the Eurocentric framing that severs North Africa from the land of Jesus's birth. The Suez Canal (constructed 1869) functions as a colonial cartographic intervention, imposing a racial and geographic division that did not exist in the first century. See Nomvuzo Reve, "The Legitimacy of Jesus: An Afrocentric Reading of the Birth of Jesus" (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995); Cain Hope Felder, "Beyond Eurocentric Biblical Interpretation: Reshaping Racial and Cultural Lenses," in Afrocentric Interpretations of Jesus and the Gospel Tradition: Things Black Scholars See That White Scholars Overlook, ed. Thomas Bowie Slater (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015), 1–24; and the collected essays in Thomas Bowie Slater, ed., Afrocentric Interpretations of Jesus and the Gospel Tradition: Things Black Scholars See That White Scholars Overlook (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015). These scholars emphasize that Jesus was a North African Jewish man from Galilee, and that the historical evidence does not yield the level of specificity required for portraiture.

3. On classical conditioning and religious imagery, see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), Lectures I and II, on the role of sensory experience in religious formation. More recent work in cognitive science of religion, such as Justin L. Barrett, Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds(West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2011), supports the view that visual representations shape theological understanding in ways that operate below conscious reflection.

4. Greenwald and Banaji, Blindspot, 47–68. See also the replication studies confirming that implicit bias is robustly influenced by repeated visual pairings even when explicit beliefs are egalitarian.

5. Elizabeth J. Vanman, "The Effects of Christian Religious Imagery on Anti-Black Attitudes" (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2016). The abstract notes that "three out of five experiments provide evidence that exposure to Christian religious imagery—specifically subliminal exposure to images of Jesus Christ depicted as White—leads both White and Black individuals to express greater racial bias against Blacks. The observed increase in Whites' and Blacks' anti-Black attitudes from exposure to White Jesus remained significant even when controlling for participants' self-reported religiosity."

6. On the second commandment's prohibition of making, see the classic treatment by J. Douma, The Ten Commandments: Manual for the Christian Life, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1996), 86–112. Douma emphasizes that the commandment addresses the imagination's role in conceiving images of God.

7. On the complexity of early Christian attitudes toward images, see Robin M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–25. Jensen notes that explicit depictions of Christ appear in catacombs from the late second century, but primarily in burial contexts, and that a strong literary tradition opposing images persisted alongside these depictions. The incarnation argument for images emerges later, systematized by John of Damascus in the eighth century. See also the nuanced discussion in Robin M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), on the contested nature of early Christian visual culture.

Bibliography

Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. New York: Delacorte Press, 2013.

Barrett, Justin L. Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2011.

Douma, J. The Ten Commandments: Manual for the Christian Life. Translated by Nelson D. Kloosterman. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1996.

Felder, Cain Hope. "Beyond Eurocentric Biblical Interpretation: Reshaping Racial and Cultural Lenses." In Afrocentric Interpretations of Jesus and the Gospel Tradition: Things Black Scholars See That White Scholars Overlook, edited by Thomas Bowie Slater, 1–24. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015.

Greenwald, Anthony G., and Mahzarin R. Banaji. "Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes." Psychological Review 102, no. 1 (1995): 4–27.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902.

Jensen, Robin M. The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Jensen, Robin M. Understanding Early Christian Art. London: Routledge, 2000.

Reve, Nomvuzo. "The Legitimacy of Jesus: An Afrocentric Reading of the Birth of Jesus." MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995.

Slater, Thomas Bowie, ed. Afrocentric Interpretations of Jesus and the Gospel Tradition: Things Black Scholars See That White Scholars Overlook. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2015.

Vanman, Elizabeth J. "The Effects of Christian Religious Imagery on Anti-Black Attitudes." PhD diss., Tufts University, 2016.