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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
When Western Christians think about God, the default image that comes to mind is usually white and male. How did that happen? Christianity is rooted in the ancient Near East among people of darker skin. But over time, European Christians cast Jesus in their own image, with art that imagined a fair-skinned Savior in the style of imperial rulers. Grace Ji-Sun Kim explores the historical origins and theological implications of how Jesus became white and God became a white male. The myth of the white male God has had a devastating effect as it enabled Christianity to have a profoundly colonialist posture across the globe. Kim examines the roots of the distortion, its harmful impact on the world, and shows what it looks like to recover the biblical reality of a nonwhite, nongendered God. Rediscovering God as Spirit leads us to a more just faith and a better church and world.
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For Theodore, Elisabeth, and Joshua, and to their future filled with hope and love.
May they know a better and a more just world apart from whiteness.
Contents
Foreword
David P. Gushee
In the book you are about to read, Grace Ji-Sun Kim does three very important things. First, she offers a sustained critique not just of whiteness but of white maleness as an ideology and a theology. Second, she tells parts of her own story as a Korean immigrant first to Canada and then the United States. Third, she offers a way of thinking about God that can contribute to the dismantling of inherited theology that she seeks.
I want to say a word about each of these elements.
Critique of the white male God. The reader would do well to understand the multiple dimensions of the critique. Dr. Kim is arguing that, at least after the conversion of Constantine and the Romanization, then Europeanization, of an originally Middle Eastern Jewish movement called Christianity, that religion came under the dominance of European men of power both political and religious. Eventually, in the colonial era, these men carried their particular version of Christianity all over the world. Gradually, they came to define themselves as racially white over against other “lesser” races of people that they were encountering, conquering, enslaving, and killing. They also came to define their God as someone remarkably like themselves—the greatest of all white male conquerors.
The whiteness that Professor Kim is critiquing, and the white male God that she is trying to dismantle, is this ideological God who, perhaps in somewhat more subtle ways than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remains the God not just of today’s white male Christians but of many believers of color whose minds and souls have been colonized by the white male God of conqueror-enslaver-dominator-missionary Christianity. This is a God who supports both continued oppression of people of color but also their own self-abnegation.
A Korean immigrant’s painful journey. In what I experienced as the most deeply affecting parts of the book, Dr. Kim describes significant parts of her own difficult journey. This is the story of a young girl brought with her family from Korea to Canada and plunged with her family into a life of poverty and culture shock. The initial involvement and then conversion of her family to a rigidly conservative, white-missionary-influenced version of Christianity is also powerfully recounted here. These stories put flesh on the bones of Professor Kim’s account of the white male God. For it was this God whom her family was led to worship and serve. It was this God who underwrote the severe patriarchy of her family system. And it was breaking with this God that has been such a painful but liberating transition in Dr. Kim’s own life. One sees the many losses that she has sustained in finally sloughing off the authoritarian white male God with whom she spent her childhood and adolescence and who apparently still rules in her family or origin.
Theologizing a post-white-male God. Professor Kim offers suggestions of how to think theologically in a way that can combat this inherited ideology-theology, so destructive in its consequences both for oppressors and oppressed. The reader will see that her basic moves—developed more fully in others of her works—are to identify strands of the Bible in which God is imagined in ways that are nongendered and nonpatriarchal. She identifies the Shekinah strand of the Hebrew Bible, the Hokhmah/Sophia wisdom strand suggested in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, and the overall biblical theme of God as Spirit as three such moves. She emphasizes themes like visibility, dignity for all, inclusion, and community. She suggests that we think of breath, light, wind, and vibration when we think of God. In these suggestions she finds points of connection with Korean words and concepts as well. The God she invites us to imagine is not absent from Scripture but is downplayed in much dominant Christian theology.
This book makes a significant contribution to contemporary Christian theology and has substantial implications for ethics as well. I urge even—especially!—those who may not feel ready for the strength of the critique Dr. Kim offers to ask God to help you lay down any spirit of defensiveness and instead to be open to the breath of inspiration and new life.
Introduction
White Christianity
I am going to say something that may sound extreme, but if you stay with me, you’ll understand why it’s true. Everything is connected to race.
Race might be considered a social construct, but we can see how race affects culture, history, religion, employment, laws, and ideas. Race influences how we act and behave daily. It forms our perceptions of each other and affects how we act in different circumstances. The societal views of immigrants, Natives, and refugees have a profound impact on our ability to relate to people of different races. It has also greatly influenced Christianity and our understanding of God.
When I began to realize the enormous impact of race, I knew it was important for me to study race, racism, and ethnicity to understand how we have come to construct a white Christianity and a white God. This is how I began my explorations for writing this book. My own life has been impacted by race relations because it has ultimately defined me, had a negative influence on me daily, and has formed my own understandings of a white Christianity and a white God.
When I was growing up in the 1970s in London, Ontario, we began elementary school each morning by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and singing the national anthem. It was very clear to me as an immigrant child that Canada was a Christian country and that I needed to become a Christian if I was going to fit into my new home. Our family did not have any religious affiliations when we first immigrated in 1975. But a very nice young Korean couple started asking my older sister and me to go to church with them. My sister and I eventually began attending and had a lot of fun at church. We met other Korean kids our age and we made lots of new friends there.
Soon, my parents started attending church with us as other Korean immigrants encouraged them to join us at the local Korean church. They were happy to meet other Korean immigrant families at the church and it became a community for us. We did not know anyone when we moved to Canada, so the church became our extended family. We held birthday parties, weddings, anniversaries, and any other celebrations at church. It was a place for us to become a family with other Korean immigrant families.
Through attending church, our family eventually became Christians. We ended up attending a Korean Presbyterian church on Sundays, but mid-week and on Friday nights, my parents dropped my sister and me off at a white Baptist church and a Christian and Missionary Alliance church for Bible studies, fellowship, and worship. Church soon overtook our lives; everything was planned around church events.
I made lots of friends at these different churches. Part of the purpose for attending so many different churches was that, in a way, it provided free English classes. My parents were worried that our English wasn’t good enough for us to excel at school, and they thought by being immersed in white churches, we would learn to speak better and to understand the white culture we were living in.
I was definitely informed by this experience. The churches all impacted my perception of God, who Jesus was, and what I was supposed to do with my life. When I think about my childhood and how I raised my own three children, I see a world of a difference. One day when I was trying to wake my youngest, who was a teen at the time, I nudged him over and over until he said, “What?!” I told him to hurry up and get ready for church. He complained, “Again?” I said, “What you do you mean again? This is the first time going to church this week.”
If my children understood the number of churches I went to during a week, they would be happy they only had to go to church once a week.
I was an Asian immigrant girl who grew up with a white Jesus. And that wasn’t just at church. We had a white Jesus hanging on the wall in our living room—the extremely popular Head of Christ by artist Warner Sallman. I never found out where my dad got this famous print, but I am certain he didn’t buy it. We were too poor to buy even food and basic clothing, never mind nonessentials like decor. I am sure my dad must have found it someplace near the garbage or some stranger at his factory gave it to him for free.
My mother was a strong woman of faith, and she loved the picture of Jesus and admired it with a huge smile. She felt the best place to hang this print of Jesus surrounded by a cheap, fake wood frame was over our couch so you could see him when you entered the apartment. She thought if you sat on the couch, the “blessing” of Jesus would come down on you. Sallman’s picture of a white Jesus was prominent in our home, and I believed that is how Jesus really looked.
My mother treated this print image as if it were a holy art piece and carefully packed it every time we moved. That image was one of the first things unpacked in the new place. In every place we lived, she hung it behind the living room couch so we could see the image of Jesus every day and any visitors to the home would see it immediately.
The white Jesus on our wall was a depiction to me of how God looked as well. I pictured God as an old white man, just as everyone else did. There was no reason to question that notion. It was everywhere: in paintings, stained-glass windows, and storybooks. I never questioned it. I didn’t even think twice about whether Jesus was white or not. It was not in my consciousness to question anything that was taught by my mother or the church. Both pushed a white Jesus, and I just took it as the truth.
I have no idea where my mother’s beloved white Jesus picture is now. It is probably in a dump somewhere. My sister threw out many of our belongings every time we moved homes. But the damage is done. It is so difficult to rid ourselves of these deeply embedded images of a white male God that were engrained in us at home, at church, and in society. But, I have now come to see the consequences of believing in a white male God.
What I didn’t know then that I know now is how influential that picture was on my own theology and faith development. That image of a white Jesus was imprinted on my brain and body so that I could not even question whether Jesus actually looked like that. It was a given, as it was the most famous picture of Jesus. I went to visit family in Korea twice during my youth, and even my family members there had the same picture of the white Jesus in their homes. The Korean churches also had the same picture of white Jesus. Furthermore, when I traveled to India during my seminary years, all the churches that I visited had this same white Jesus picture. This confirmed to me that this must be the real Jesus, as it is universally understood to be the image of Christ.
I just took it for granted that Sallman’s Head of Christ must be the real thing. I never questioned it until much later in my adult life. This was also partly due to the reverence that my mom had for the cheap printed copy of the image in our home. She would look at it as if in prayer. To her it was an indication that ours was a Christian home, and this meant the world to her.
My mom was a very conservative evangelical Christian. Though we attended the First London Presbyterian Church, the denomination didn’t mean much to her or our entire family. We were more concerned about preserving our conservative Christianity in any way, shape, or form. She loved this image of a white Jesus, and thus everyone else in the family was expected to love this image too. In Korean culture, you don’t question parents or elders; you just obey. To question the validity of this painting felt bad, as if I were questioning my mother’s beliefs and understandings.
My family’s story is the same as many of my Christian friends. Sallman’s image may not have been as prominently displayed as it was in our house, but it was in their homes to signify that they were Christians. We all lived with this white representation of Jesus.
Living in white spaces as a nonwhite person is exhausting. It is so depleting that it sucks the life out of you. I have experienced racism throughout my life. I have tried to understand racism and how it functions, and I have learned that the only way to fight it is to address whiteness and dismantle it.
After growing up in an environment that reinforced the whiteness of God, not just with the Sallman’s image but also through other biblical and church teachings and practices, it was a devastating revelation that these images of a white Jesus might be wrong and even intentionally created to reinforce white supremacy in Christianity, society, and culture. This book is about the religious journey I took to make sense of my own experiences and place them in context. It explores the emergence of a white Jesus and what the implications of this are on racialized minorities. In this process, I came to understand how whiteness has corrupted our understanding of each other and God. If we are to overcome the devastating effects of whiteness, we need to move forward and adopt a theology of visibility so we can embrace the other and live in peace with our neighbors.
I hope my questions and challenges of a white Christianity will help you in your own explorations of faith, spirituality, and God. Please join me on this inner journey of unpacking whiteness, white Christianity, and a white God.
WHITENESS
For centuries, the classification of race has been a powerful tool for white male lawmakers, leaders, church ministers, and the privileged to maintain their power and the status quo. But how did it start? Why was one group able to claim so much authority and wield so much control over other groups? And what could have been done to stop them?
In exploring whiteness we come to see how Jesus became white and the faith of his followers took on a profoundly racist bent. From the early Christian beginnings under the Roman Empire to the conservative Christian right of today, a white male God has been at the center. This projection of their own identity onto who God is by powerful white men has tainted the instructions found in the Bible that we are to love all people equally.
Those in power believe that they are divinely placed there and have been ordained to lead the church and to define the God we are to follow. They suppose that their understanding of God is the truth, they preach their understanding as truth, and they fail to recognize that they are attributing their own self-serving desires to God.
The whitewashed “good news” spread throughout the world thanks to colonialism, crusades, and missionaries who infected others with whiteness under the guise of Christianity. The propagation of this myth of a white God and a white Jesus has had a devastating effect that has rippled across the globe through generations. Whiteness helps readers understand the origins of this distortion of our shared history and identify the ways in which their own experiences as well as those of minorities have been deeply affected. This book also identifies why this myth of a white God must change and where change starts.
BOOK OUTLINE
This book is composed of nine chapters. Chapter one is “Encountering Whiteness.” Race has become a powerful tool for lawmakers, leaders, church ministers, and the privileged to maintain their own power and the status quo. To understand how the world is stratified and structured according to race, we need to unpack the origins of whiteness and its implications for the church, Christianity, and theology. This chapter provides a historical and social overview of how the concept of race emerged and was sustained to firmly hold power for white male European enslavers.
Chapter two is on the problem of whiteness. Whiteness is not factual but has been used as a tool of destruction in communities of color in so many dangerous ways as it leads to white privilege and white supremacy. Whiteness is not a race, and due to its dangerous use, it needs to be eliminated from society if we are to achieve any form of liberation and freedom for all groups of oppressed people of color. White supremacy believes that whites are superior over people of color, and it upholds unjust social structures that exist to benefit white people.
Chapter three, “Becoming a White Christianity,” is where I discuss the long history of how Christianity became white and maintained its whiteness. White Christianity spread throughout the world through the “good” work of white missionaries who went to Asia, Africa, South America, and all parts of the world to share what was essentially the “good news” of whiteness. As we study the history of Christianity’s whiteness, we need to question and reexamine what its implications are for people of color, immigrants, and refugees who come from all over the world to the United States.
The fourth chapter, “A Missiology of Whiteness,” examines how whiteness was part of the white missionary’s message when they went to Asia to share the good news of Jesus Christ. The message of whiteness and the good news were so intertwined that at times, the messages became one. Asians accepted this white gospel and never questioned it. The acceptance of a white Christian message is in part due to Orientalism, which views Asia in a stereotyped way that embodies a colonialist attitude. Orientalism emphasizes, exaggerates, and distorts Asians as compared to Europeans. This has big implications for Asians and how the West perceives and treats the East.
The fifth chapter, “Christianity and Whiteness,” examines how racism and discrimination go hand in hand with whiteness and Christianity. My own immigration story shows how whiteness has shaped my rejection of my Asian culture and identity and accepted a white Christianity. I was literally pushed to accept a white culture that emphasized the goodness and priority of whiteness in Christianity. This results in white supremacy, white Christian nationalism, and a white Christianity, to the detriment of people of color.
Chapter six focuses on how we got a white Jesus. When we question the identity of Jesus, we see that over time Jesus became white, and this has great implications for church and society. As Christians continue to worship a white Jesus, we must discern how we can correct this error as it affects all aspects of society, whether one is religious, Christian, or not.
Chapter seven highlights the dangers of worshiping a white God. White Christian power reinforces a white masculine almighty God. The patriarchal notion of God creates a context where racism is a bold part of the everyday life of the church. As the center of Christianity, God being white implies that whites are the center of humanity and that God’s concerns and God’s desires center on white people at the expense of people of color. This has damaging consequences for people of color who experience grave injustices due to racism, discrimination, and xenophobia.
Chapter eight, “The Problem of a White Gendered God,” looks at how a male God has subjugated women. In addition to the whiteness of God is the gendering of God as a man. In light of sexism, sexual violence, and atrocities committed against women in society and in Christianity, it is necessary to move away from this gendered white understanding of God. A gendered white male God legitimizes and promotes patriarchy, and subordinates and problematizes women in church and society. A nongendered God loves all, welcomes all, and empowers disempowered women.
Chapter nine works toward liberating whiteness. Through the invention of a white Jesus and a white male God, the reality of a white Christian empire is steeped in many different problems, which have spread throughout the world. Today, Christians need to engage in racial justice work to reverse the damages of creating a white Christianity and a white Jesus. We need to challenge the white male Christian empire and work toward an all-embracing kin-dom. A liberative way of understanding God is to view God as Spirit. Spirit is genderless and nonwhite, which helps all of us to learn to embrace one another. We need to heed the Spirit’s urgent call to engage in this justice work before more people are murdered, disenfranchised, oppressed, and pushed to the underside of society.
The last chapter, “Embracing a Nonwhite and Nongendered God,” deals with the applications of how to move forward in dismantling whiteness and a white male God. It offers tools and actions that we can all take to make a difference in our lives, church, and society. Through rewriting liturgy, discipleship, and justice work, we can work toward a better world where all are equal, and all are accepted as created in the image of God. This is a source of much hope as we seek a day when we can embrace God and embrace one another.
Note: when we explore the history of colonialism and whiteness, we necessarily must address the realities of atrocities that have been perpetrated against vulnerable peoples. Some material, especially in chapter three, includes accounts of sexual assault, violence, and trauma. My hope is that reckoning with the legacy of the past will aid us in confronting present realities.
1
Encountering Whiteness
We have been using the classification of race to benefit those with power in this country since its inception. It has become an essential tool for lawmakers, leaders, church ministers, and others in the privileged class to maintain the status quo. The only way we will understand just how effective racial categorization is for those who hold power is to look at its origin—the history of racialization and the troubles it has caused people of color. The concept of race emerged and was sustained for European plantation owners to justify the existing power dynamic, and through this lens we can begin to understand the problem of whiteness.
IMMIGRATING TO WHITENESS
It was my dad’s idea to leave Korea in 1975 and take his young family with him. Korea had suffered the devastating destruction from the Korean War, yielding a climate that was economically and politically difficult and frighteningly unstable. The Korean economy was struggling, and my dad felt it was in the best interest of his two young girls, ages six and five, for him to take his family and immigrate to America. In the 1970s it was easier to gain access to Canada than to the United States, as fewer Koreans wanted to live in Canada. Thus, my dad chose this easier route with the intention of moving to the States soon thereafter.
We immigrated in January 1975. We landed in Toronto, and within weeks, we moved to London, Ontario, a small city two hours west of Toronto. We moved to a run-down apartment, which was bug infested and dirty. I remember January being icy cold. London is located in a snow belt area, and so much snow fell in 1975 that there was snow up to my waist. Often, as I walked to school, I would lose my shoes in the deep snow and have to retrace my steps to retrieve them. I hated the cold, and my small, frail body could not take the harsh winter winds and freezing cold temperatures. We didn’t have any family or relatives besides the four of us, which left me feeling terribly alienated and alone.
Starting kindergarten in the middle of the year caused anguish, dread, and deep pain. What should have been the best school experience with days full of games, singing, making new friends, and no homework was neither easy nor enjoyable for me.
I went through two profound challenges in the first two weeks of kindergarten. The first was a deep culture shock, which shook me to the core of my being. Everything was new to me; I couldn’t adjust to the cold, the language, the city, and our new apartment. As a society, we believe that children are able to adjust quickly to new situations, cultures, and contexts, but that was not the case for me. I didn’t know any English and felt deeply ashamed, miserable, and frustrated for not being able to understand or speak this new language during my first few months of school. Before we immigrated, my sister and I pretended to speak English and played wild make-believe games with each other. We had no idea it would be so difficult to learn the language and adapt to the new environment.
My second challenge was encounters with racism. I looked very different from all the white kids in my class, and my looks and my Koreanness were an easy target for their ridicule. It didn’t matter whether I understood English or not; I felt their hatred and ridicule without comprehending a word they said. Kids would place their fingers on their eyes and pull them out or sideways and laugh and make fun of my small Asian eyes. They would also mimic Chinese intonations and phonology and yell out “ching chong” or “ching chang chong.” These hateful ethnic slurs and pejorative terms were used to mock me and make me feel small and unworthy. The taunts and eye pulls were not a one-time event either; they occurred almost daily during recess and lunch break. Teachers saw what the other kids were doing to me, but they ignored it. It was racism, and it seemed to be sanctioned by the adults.
I wanted to get rid of my Koreanness, but I couldn’t. I could not remove the yellow skin I was born in. I could not change my smaller and thinner eyelids to look like the white girls in class. I knew that I could not single-handedly stop the racism that I was experiencing daily.
My dad used to tell me all throughout my childhood and even into my adulthood how lucky we were to have immigrated to North America. But I couldn’t see how it was better. Our family lived in a run-down apartment building ironically named Frontenac Apartments. In Montreal, one of the most upscale hotels is called Château Frontenac, but our two-bedroom apartment was nothing like the elite, beautiful, and romantic hotel. It was a dirty, run-down building known for being a place where immigrants lived for a short while until they found somewhere better. There were probably around ten Korean immigrant families living in these Frontenac apartments during the seventies and eighties. One by one, they all moved away, and we were one of the last families to leave because my parents didn’t have the money to find to a better place.
I was afraid the cockroaches would crawl up my legs while I slept. I was afraid of stepping on them in the dark if I went to the bathroom during the night. I was afraid they roamed over our plates, bowls, and cutlery. I was afraid I’d never get away from them, and that was a difficult thing to get over as I grew up.
We had no new furniture except for the twin beds my mom bought for my sister and me. Everything else was hand-me-down furniture or came from Goodwill or the dumpster. My dad would bring trashy furniture into our apartment to salvage, so when my mom bought the two cheap beds, there was a firestorm in our household and my parents fought for days about her spending the money. Ultimately, my sister and I were allowed to keep our beds, which was a treat as we had been sleeping on the floor on top of blankets for years.
Nothing in this place that was supposed to be the land of opportunity was easy, and some things were really painful. I told my dad that I wished I had grown up in my homeland. I wished I didn’t have to explain myself to everyone: that I was born in Korea, ate different foods, and spoke a different language in our home. I didn’t want to keep explaining why I looked different and why I had a Konglish (Korean/English) accent. I could not understand why he felt we were better off with this kind of life than what we would have had back home.
RACE
Words are vital. Words convey our thoughts and ideas to the outside world. Words also form our thoughts and concepts about the world and ourselves. Those who hold power have the capability to change minds, ideas, and processes of thinking through words. This is the power of words.
The study of race reveals how those who hold power have such enormous ability to change worldviews, affect laws, change behaviors, and even change our understanding of God. This is the impact of words, and powerful people must be mindful of their power as we discuss race and race making (how race is created), and the consequences of both. The notion of race is based not on biology but on social meanings that are created and re-created due to changing contexts. The concept of race was created mainly by Europeans in the sixteenth century and is based on socially constructed beliefs about the inherent superiority and inferiority of groups of people. Studies on race critique the notion as lacking any scientific clarity and specificity, as it is informed by historical, social, cultural, and political values and not any biological terms.1 However, white people have tried to argue that race is based on biology as some have tried to measure brain size and prove that their brains are larger and hence they are superior to others.
No person of any race or ethnicity has a biological or spiritual claim to being better than anyone else. Race has served to separate society into different levels for the benefit of a few people who have been defined as white, to the misfortune of anyone considered nonwhite or of color. “Although race is something imagined (or constructed), its effects are real. From lifespans to salary to where you live, race has a measurable impact on a person’s quality of life.”2 We need to recognize the problem of this concept of race and bring it into our mainstream conversation and thought.
We have socially constructed the category of race based on perceptions of different skin color. We have created an inequitable social and economic relationship that is structured and reproduced through skin color, class, gender, and nation.3 Race was created by and for white people and in service of white supremacists. As a social construct, it has huge ramifications on American society, economics, politics, and religion. Race is not a benign category; it is an oppressive structure and understanding. For people in positions of power, race became an important term as it played a role in the construction of law or rules for social interaction between white people and people of color.
ENSLAVEMENT HISTORY AND RACIAL IDENTITY
American race relations emerged from the intersection of three significant events in history: the conquest of Native Americans, the forced importation of Africans, and the coming together of Europeans, Asians, and Latinos.4 The intersection of these significant events led to the need to divide and distinguish people according to race. This was carefully accomplished by those in power to serve themselves and maintain their power.
We can get a clearer understanding of how racism, white supremacy, and discrimination are maintained in our society by looking into the changing dynamics of racial identity. Racism is part of the daily lives of people of color, and I experience it all too often. We can see how racism is used to subordinate people of color as we begin to comprehend how white identity emerged in our society.
Before the seventeenth century, Europeans did not think of themselves as belonging to a white race. Instead, they viewed themselves as belonging to different parts or regions in Europe and had a very different perception of race and racialization. But once this concept of white race was shown to be advantageous to Europeans and enslavers, it began to reshape and redefine their world. The impact of this is still felt today. Europeans have only recently started to think of themselves as belonging to a white race,5 and it has only come as they realized they could profit financially, socially, politically, and religiously. White race and white identity have not been constant but have changed over time to accommodate the variances of social change and context.
Race and ethnicity are sometimes used interchangeably by the general public, but we must note that they are two different terms. Race is a categorization of people into groups based on shared physical or social characteristics. Races are often viewed as distinct and different within a society. The term race became more common during the sixteenth century when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds. Ethnicity
