Seriously, What's The Deal With ‘Manifest Destiny Jesus’?
Confronting the insidious myth of a white supremacist savior.
The mainstream image of Jesus Christ is a pasty white guy. He doesn't even have much of a tan. Yes, J.J. painted a Black Jesus in an episode of "Good Times"and Madonna might have hooked up with a Black Jesus in her"Like a Prayer" video, but Jesus is usually presented as a blonde surfer dude, who the disciples might've nicknamed “Moondoggie."
When I was a child, family members would point out the Bible verse that described Jesus as having hair like wool and “feet like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace" (i.e. a dark brown complexion like someone from the Middle East). This didn't wear down my religious skepticism, because a Jesus of any other shade is still a scam. It's like when a corporation makes its CEO a woman or a man of color without actually changing any of its awful policies.
I've been contemplating the conflicting images of blonde surfer Jesus and Soul Brother Jesus after watching the Seattle-area documentary Manifest Destiny Jesus from filmmakers Josh Aaseng, Daemond Arrindell, and T. Geronimo Johnson, who also serves as narrator. Aaseng and Arrindell met author Johnson in 2017 when they adapted his novel Welcome to Braggsville to the stage. I know Aaseng from our time at Seattle's Book-It Repertory Theatre, where he was literary manager and later associate artistic director. He adapted and directed an amazing version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 2015. Aaseng's a white guy from Montana, but he nonetheless questioned the popular conception of Jesus as white.
He told South Seattle Emerald:
"I was in New York City during 9/11, and I started thinking, 'Jesus looks more like Osama Bin Laden than he does Mel Gibson,'" Aaseng said. "There is this complete fantasy of what Jesus looks like and how mind-altering that is for the people who think that's an accurate representation of Jesus."
As Black men, Arrindell and Johnson have lifelong experience confronting the perverse fact that so many Black Americans worship what is arguably the idealized image of their oppressor. Johnson describes white Jesus as an "extension of our bondage," and the documentary features the searing line from James Baldwin about how "Black people are victimized by an alabaster Christ."
Christianity is part of America's legacy of slavery, and there were always two racially distinct interpretations of the scripture: The still-prominent white prosperity gospel that claims rich white people have earned the favor of God because they are rich and white, which is convenient. An incredibly on-the-nose demonstration of this nonsense is when Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia frets about an “entitlement culture" while chilling on his yacht as his broke-ass constituents appeal to him from tiny kayaks.
However, enslaved Black people had a different brand of Christianity forced upon them: Submit to the horrors inflicted upon them in this life and perhaps, if they're very good, they'll enjoy salvation in the next one. There was no indication, however, that the white enslaver was destined for hell.
Theologian James Crone called the crucifixion a first-century lynching. I've resisted that comparison on the grounds that Jesus's brutal death and eventual resurrection were supposedly his grand plan. No Black person ever wanted to be lynched. But perhaps I've looked at this from the wrong angle. White liberals especially have an unfortunate tendency to romanticize Black suffering. Slavery, segregation, and even today's racial oppression aren't indelible stains on American history but part of some benign narrative where the nation is in a state of perpetual self-correction. America was always great, even when it's a slave state, because eventually slavery will end. Go, America! Untold numbers of Black bodies must suffer for generations so Abraham Lincoln can end up on Mount Rushmore. Black people are forever dying for America's endless sins.
When I moved to Seattle almost decade ago, I lived in the Central District, which was what realtors would call a "neighborhood in transition." Manifest Destiny Jesus features interviews with Black people who grew up in the neighborhood and watched as white Amazon employees "discovered" the area. The documentary makes a clear link between gentrification and colonization. Even the terminology, while racially coded, is similar. White "settlers" arrive and set about “civilizing" a place where "savages" live. White people think nothing of saying a neighborhood is “improving" when in reality they mean it's getting whiter. Meanwhile, the very presence of Black people in sufficient numbers implies an area in decline, one white people are warned to avoid. It's a "critical race theory" everyone grows up learning.
This is deliberate, of course, as redlining barred Seattleites of color from "good" neighborhoods — segregation through real estate covenants that explicitly forbade selling or renting property to anyone who wasn't white.
There's an interview with a Black man who recalls how his father, despite having worked for decades to save up for a down payment, was told that buying a home in West Seattle in 1955 was an “unrealistic option for a negro." Instead, he would have to settle for a neighborhood that the city actively oppressed by refusing to invest key resources (consider which neighborhoods have the most convenient public transportation routes, newer schools, well-maintained grocery stores). My own father was my son's current age in 1955. This was not so long ago.
The image of white Jesus is directly connected to European and American imperialism. The documentary's title is a reference to a church in Columbia City, another rapidly gentrifying Seattle neighborhood. The church features a stained-glass window bearing the image of a white Christ seemingly directing his followers westward. A pastor visiting the church once asked, “What's the deal with Manifest Destiny Jesus?"
Johnson states that the racial wealth gap and the myth of Black inferiority is the product of a racist feedback loop that we must break to move forward. Evidence from local schools boards implies that white America will choose the ostrich's head in the sand option, but the people willing to at least try can start by watching Manifest Destiny Jesus .
You can view the documentary online here through the end of October.
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To elaborate, on problems with his work as opposed to his personality:It is *essential* to Paul's thesis that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human being before he was transmogrified after death: that is why we can have faith that God will do the same for all of us; Carrier's interpretation requires complete misunderstanding of everything that Paul is saying. Similarly it is essential that Paul is *not* the founder of the movement but is appealing to all the people who knew Jesus was holy even before he did.Paul's belief that the resurrected Jesus was no longer fleshly was his innovation, to make his experience of Jesus in a visionary seizure "just as good" as the immediate post-crucifixion encounters by the disciples who had known him in life. I find particularly revealing the passage where he tells the Galatians, "I know that my condition was a sore trial to you, but you treated me as if I were an angel or the Lord himself, because you knew that it was my illness which started me preaching the gospel in the first place" (his condition would appear to have been temporal-lobe epilepsy, which I had when I was younger but, as sometimes happens, grew out of: the blinding light, which I used to call the Eye of Sauron, and the commanding voice speaking enigmatically, are familiar experiences). The followers of James (who produced copious literature, more and more of which is being recovered) utterly rejected this. In the "Hebrew Matthew" (which we don't have in full, but Jerome and Epiphanius give lists of the ways in which it differed from the Greek Matthew: it lacked the "Fulfillments" material, such as the virgin-birth story and other bits where OT passages are reinterpreted as predictions of Jesus, and had a different ending) James has a fish dinner with Jesus, emphasizing that he was still an eating and drinking (and presumably pooping) human, and there is nothing about him walking up into the air, instead he just remained with the disciples forty days (and it doesn't say what happened then; presumably then he died, for good-- the Ebionites thought that him just standing up again, at all, after being crucified was miracle enough without gilding the lily).Before Christianity became a principally Gentile movement, it was crucial to the story that Jesus was a male-line heir of the Davidite royal family (and James the next in line). "Spiritualizing" this very biological genealogical assertion is one of the things I find ludicrous. Take a KJV and count how many times the word "begat" occurs, and note also how many "Darwinian" blessings (your descendants will be greatly multiplied; you will always have a man to stand before me) and curses (the bad man will have "all those who piss against a wall" cut off-- that is, the whole male line extincted, or in very bad cases "all those who piss against a wall, and all who undergo confinement" that is, all descendants of either gender). The society was utterly obsessed with family trees, and no, it was not possible for somebody to just pop up and claim to be a Davidite heir when everybody around would say "Huh? Your father and grandfather weren't." The other cases of Davidite heirs being killed are the context that Jesus has to be understood within (in particular, the murder of James was an important precipitating incident in the spiral of violence sparking the Jewish Revolt).Carrier also takes advantage of people's unrealistic expectations about ancient sources. We hardly ever get contemporary narrations about anything: we may get contemporary letters, but those tend not to explain anything at all about the background of the people or events mentioned, because the receiver of the letter already knows all that; more usually, we get chronicles written decades after the fact about events which are in danger of being forgotten. Tacitus and Suetonius writing in the 2nd century give us our first accounts of Nero's reign; Josephus gives us our first account of Herod. In this case, the interval from the crucifixion to the publication of Mark is treated as a very long time, which it just isn't: lots of people are still alive from 35 years ago, and both Rome and especially Alexandria in ~70AD had lots of Jewish inhabitants who would know all about events in Judea of the mid-30s. It would be very difficult to account for nobody saying "Huh? There was no such execution that you are talking about."
The text doesn't claim to be by anybody in particular (which I take as a sign of honesty: the author isn't pushing his own importance) but if you think the ascription was invented, then: why falsely attribute the book to a minor figure? From the 2nd century we get gospels attributed to Peter, and to Mary Magdalene, etc.And the tradition here is not a late one: Papias was writing c. 100AD when he describes a gospel of Mark that appears to be the text we have (he details the story of the jar of expensive ointment, for example), as opposed to his description of the "gospel of Matthew" as a collection of sayings, not a narrative like Mark, and in "Hebrew" (he probably means Aramaic laced with some Hebrew words, as in much Jewish religious literature; Papias himself is a Greek-speaker), by which he must mean "Q" as a standalone document (something we wish we had a text of); neither the third nor the fourth gospel has yet appeared at the time he was writing. As with the interval from the crucifixion to the publication of Mark, the interval from Mark to Papias describing it is so short that many people would still be alive.Also, the tradition gets support from internal textual analysis of the kind that ancient forgers just did not know how to fake. Mark is said to have gone to Italy as Peter's secretary, escaped from the "Great Fire" arrests (as Peter didn't) and to have preached in Aquileia (inland from Venice) before going to Alexandria. In the middle of Mark scholars have long noted an "Ur-Mark" in which passages are linked one to another by tag-words (a chain of "bread" references, and "salt") despite dissimilar subjects, and this is typical of long oral recitations as a mnemonic trick (Papias complains that the stories in Mark are not in proper order)-- notably, part of this underlying text appears to have been composed in Italy, since it explains the lepta (an Eastern coin) in Italian equivalents and uses "legio" rather than a Greek word for legion.We do not get the tradition that Mark had been present during at least part of the ministry until c. 170AD in the Muratorian Canon, where the second gospel is said to have been written "from what Peter told him, and from what he saw himself." This is indeed late, but: if they are making up something to bolster the authority of the book, why wouldn't they just make Mark an eyewitness of everything, instead of conceding that much of his knowledge was secondhand?