It Started With Police And Then Confederacy Statues: Some Are Calling To Defund White Jesus
Some confederate statues across the country are being taken down by local governments or toppled by protesters, but according to writer and activist Shaun King, more statues need to be removed — and they are in the church.
King announced that he supports the destruction of statues that depict a white Jesus.
On Twitter, King pointed out that historians believe Jesus likely had the appearance of people who typically lived in the Middle East during that period, rather than the white man often depicted in Christian imagery, Newsweek reported.
“Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down,” King tweeted. “They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been.”
“In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark,” King added. “Tear them down.”
King followed the post up with another, saying that “white Jesus is a lie” and a “tool of white supremacy” created to help white people use Christianity as a “tool of oppression”. He added that white people would never have accepted a religion “from a Brown man.”
King later clarified that he was only advocating that statues of a white Jesus be torn down in response to a tweet from PragerU, a nonprofit co-founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager.
King posted an image of a darker-skinned Jesus that appeared in a 2002 Popular Mechanics article, which scholars believe may be a more accurate image of Jesus.
Twitter went crazy with back-and-forth responses. Onyx Paradigm @C_Rich75 tweeted, “Since we’re removing statues, monuments & flags. Can the Black church remove ALL images of white Jesus?”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. @DonaldJTrumpJr (yes, the president’s son) retweeted a post of a confederate statue burning, adding the text, “A fast glimpse of what every town in America will look like if Biden and the leftists take over.”
Sébastienne Lawton @SebastienneL tweeted, “Are they going to pull down statues of Jesus now because we gave him white skin & blue eyes?”
For many scholars, Revelation 1:14-15 offers a clue that “Jesus’s skin was a darker hue and that his hair was woolly in texture,” according to History.com. “The hairs of his head, it says, ‘were white as white wool, white as snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace,'” Black Enterprise reported.