On many church walls, Jesus has fair skin, light eyes and European features. For a good number of Black men, that picture said something before any sermon was preached: this Savior belongs to someone else. This guide asks whether that image has pushed Black men away from the faith, and who Jesus actually is once it is set aside. It draws on Chapter Three of the Jude 3 Project curriculum Unspoken, “The Whitewashing of Christianity,” and it centers on one practice: placing the inherited picture beside the biblical text and the historical record to see which one holds up. You can use it alone over one or two sittings, or with a group in a single long session.
The curriculum gives a direct answer. Yes, the image has been a real barrier, and the brushstrokes are only part of it. The Unspoken lesson says plainly that “what makes European Jesus so damaging is what’s attached to it historically.” The Jesus of Scripture is a Jewish man from Nazareth who was falsely accused, rejected and executed. He does not belong to the people who used his picture to bless conquest.
Name the claim precisely
Three separate claims tend to get blended together.
- A historical claim: Europeans painted Jesus as one of themselves, and those images traveled with colonization, slavery and segregation.
- A cultural claim: for many Black men, that image made Jesus seem foreign and powerless to help, a god of the people who oppressed them.
- A theological claim: the Jesus in that picture differs from the Jesus in the Gospels in ways that matter more than skin tone.
Each needs its own kind of evidence. The first is checked against the historical record. The second calls for testimony and careful listening. The third is tested against the text. A group that mixes them up will either dismiss real pain because the theology is sound, or abandon sound theology because the pain is real.
The curriculum draws its account of Black men’s experience mainly from Rev. Terence J. Gray’s 2019 book We Want a Different Story. Gray describes a pattern and the narrative behind it, not a uniform verdict from every Black man. Plenty of Black men have followed Jesus faithfully under those very pictures, and the Black church kept the faith alive under far worse conditions than bad art. The picture is also rarely the only reason men walk away. Some leave over intellectual questions, others over hypocrisy or harm they suffered in a church. Those reasons deserve their own hearing, and this guide does not pretend a better image would answer them.
For a group leader: Ask people to sort their first reactions into the three claims before discussing them. It keeps a historical point from being heard as a personal accusation.
Where the picture came from
The lesson traces a chain of events, and the order shows how an image picked up its meaning.
Drawing on Ibram X. Kendi, the curriculum dates the first recorded anti-Black racist ideas of the modern era to a Portuguese chronicle finished in 1453, which describes Africans as ugly, beastlike and better off enslaved. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued what came to be called the Doctrine of Discovery, encouraging European rulers to claim new lands and bring their peoples to the Catholic faith. By 1706, the lesson notes, Cotton Mather was arguing that God had sent Africans into slavery so they could learn from Christian masters.
The curriculum observes that across this span, ideas about Black people moved from a false biological claim to a theological one. A belief about inferiority came first, and Christian language was recruited to defend it. So the image of a white Jesus was put to work blessing a racial order that already existed.
The lesson then turns to the picture itself. It reports Dr. David Wilhite’s observation in the Unspoken documentary that the Christianity European missionaries brought back to North Africa came wrapped in European culture, with converts expected to take European dress and names. It also reports Dr. Esau McCauley’s account of German biblical scholars who tried to make Jesus universal by stripping away his Jewishness, which in practice left a European figure.
In America, the curriculum points to the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Drawing on Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, it describes how the film casts the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and ends with a white-skinned Jesus appearing to bless the nation. It also cites Jemar Tisby’s argument that famous images of a white Jesus reinforced the American racial hierarchy among Christians. A man who grew up knowing that history had reason to wonder whose side that Jesus was on.
The fair objection
A careful skeptic will push back here, and so will a careful believer. Every culture has painted Jesus to look like itself. Why single out the European version?
The curriculum grants the premise. It notes that sixteenth and seventeenth century images of Jesus resemble Ethiopians and Indians. The difference lies in what traveled with the image. An Ethiopian icon was not carried onto conquered land as a sign of who now ruled it. The European image often was. The curriculum lists four things attached to it: colonization, subjugation through missionaries, terror against African Americans, and church history that went unacknowledged.
That last item answers a second objection: if Christianity was used this way, it must be the oppressor’s religion. The lesson pushes back with history the white image hides. It reports Dr. Wilhite and Dr. Vincent Bantu’s teaching that Ethiopia was the first Christian nation, and it describes Martin Luther consulting an Ethiopian church leader, Michael the Deacon, about his articles of faith. This is why Jude 3 Project holds that calling Christianity a white man’s religion is historically inaccurate: the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe.
If an institution blessed injustice, that needs to be named without softening. The harder question is whether the injustice followed from the teaching or contradicted it. Only reading the text can settle that.
Reading the texts the picture left out
Read these passages slowly, ideally aloud. For each, ask what the passage actually says, and which part of the inherited picture it corrects.
Philippians 2:5-11
Paul wants a church to be humble toward one another, and to make his point he describes Christ. “But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). The older phrase “made himself of no reputation” is often rendered “emptied himself” in other translations.
Paul describes a Lord who set aside status. The colonial picture showed one who claimed it. The curriculum argues that colonization often brought Christianity with white supremacy, a misplaced sense of power and entitlement, “the very things Jesus put to the side.” Paul is teaching about Christ’s humility, not race. The application is fair because the colonial picture made the opposite claim about how Christ uses power.
Acts 17:22-31
In Athens, speaking to people who do not share his Scriptures, Paul says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). The lesson draws two points: all peoples come from one origin, and the variety of nations is part of God’s design rather than a ranking. On that reading, no people gets to set the template for humanity.
Isaiah 53:2-3 and Acts 8:26-35
Isaiah describes the suffering servant: “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). The passage says nothing about skin color. It describes a servant who looked unimpressive and was rejected: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). The idealized, glowing portrait is the opposite of this figure.
In Acts 8, an Ethiopian official riding home is reading this chapter of Isaiah, and Philip begins there and preaches Jesus to him. The New Testament itself links Isaiah’s servant to Jesus here. The scene also shows the gospel reaching an African within the church’s first years, long before any European missionary sailed south.
Hebrews 4:15
“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). The lesson, following Gray, lists ways Jesus knows the pain the white image ignored: lies about his identity, a society that treated him as a criminal, an unjust political and legal system, public execution by cruel men. Gray’s point is that the Western caricature stood idle while people were oppressed, while the Jesus of the Gospels endured oppression himself. Gray also insists the cross forgives both the oppressor and the oppressed, which keeps this reading from becoming simple retribution.
A practice: put the picture on trial
This takes about thirty minutes on paper, alone or in pairs.
- Write down, as concretely as you can, the image of Jesus you grew up with. Where did you see it? A wall, a Bible cover, a film, a funeral program? Describe it without judging it yet.
- Next to it, list what that image communicated beyond appearance. Powerful or lowly? Near or distant? Interested in your neighborhood, or not? Use only what you actually remember.
- Choose two of the four passages above. For each, write one sentence stating what the text claims about Jesus, staying close to the words.
- Compare the columns. Mark every place where the image says something the text does not, and every place the text says something the image left out.
- Write one sentence you could say to a Black man who has written off Jesus because of that picture. State his objection well enough that he would recognize it as his own before you correct anything, and point him to the Gospels.
For a group leader: Some people will have little to say in step one, and others will find it painful. Keep sharing optional. Ask volunteers to read only their step-five sentence aloud, then talk about which sentences would actually be heard.
Questions for discussion
- The curriculum separates the image from what was attached to it. Do you find that distinction convincing, or does it let the image off too easily?
- Gray describes a pattern among Black men. Whose experience does it match in your own circle, and whose does it miss? What explains the difference?
- If other cultures painted Jesus to look like themselves, is there any form of that practice you would still call healthy? Where would you draw the line?
- Read Acts 17:26 again. What does “one blood” rule out, and what does it leave open?
- Why might the history of the Ethiopian church be more persuasive to a skeptic than any argument about Jesus’s skin color?
- The lesson cites a popular resource that describes Christianity as mostly a European story. Where have you absorbed a version of that idea without noticing?
- What would it look like for a church to show the Jesus of Philippians 2 in how it uses its own power?
What to carry out of this
The Unspoken lesson insists that “Christianity is neither a white or black faith, but a global faith.” The European portrait is not the standard for who Jesus is. Swapping in a different ethnic claim on him would repeat the same mistake. Jesus was a Jewish man from Nazareth, a town one of his future disciples doubted when he first heard of it (John 1:46). He belongs to every people because no people owned him.
The leader’s summary of the chapter says, “We serve a Jesus who chose not to identify with the rich and powerful, but for the marginalized.” If that is true, a man who turned away from the Jesus on the wall may have turned from a figure Scripture also refuses, even if other reasons remain to be heard.
The chapter closes its group session with John 12:32: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Read that verse beside Isaiah 53 this week, and ask yourself which Jesus you were shown growing up, and which Jesus the people around you see in you.