We are honored to have the Journal of Southern Religion host this group forum on The Color of Christ, from scholars for whom we have so much respect and admiration. We are thankful for their time, care, and challenging critiques.

We ask readers to forgive the length of this response. The questions and points get to the depth of how and why we do scholarship and only a long answer would take seriously the points raised here.

Since we cannot respond to each particular question, we have lumped the critiques into three categories: selections and formats (which we titled “Choose You This Day”); evidence (which we titled “The Evidence of Things Unseen”; and gaps (which we title “Hidden Since the Beginning of the World”). Our conclusion honors the Paul Harvey with “(Not) the Rest of the Story.”

“Choose You This Day”: Inclusions, Exclusions, and the Art of Historical Narrative Arcs

In 1770, America’s first African American poet Phillis Wheatley ventriloquized evangelist George Whitefield (whom she had ventriloquize Jesus) to write that Africans in the New World could “chuse” to walk in God’s path. If they did so, they could become “sons, and kings, and priests to God.” In a realm where African Americans had few choices, this was an important one (perhaps the most important one to Wheatley). The choices she had, and the ones we have more than 200 years later, are distinct and historically contingent. This is true even of scholarship. The choice of sources, groups, and formats is different today than it was fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. For this reason, any book that transverses more than 400 years of history in our era of massive amounts of secondary and primary data must account for its choices.¹

As Wheatley intoned, choice mattered—a lot—when it came to Jesus. Where, how, and with whom shall we walk? As Stephen Prothero and Richard Fox have pointed out, Jesus has been ubiquitous throughout much of American history.² Our approach was to balance inclusion with influence. We were committed to demonstrating the various and complex ways that people interact (as individuals, families, and groups) so we felt compelled to include as many participants as we could. Yet we always had our eyes on the influence certain groups and particular images could and did obtain. This is why, for as much as we focused on diversity, we also stayed attuned to infrastructure improvements, technological developments, commercial adventures, capital acquisition, and time. The Color of Christ shows that particular people at certain times were able to harness those factors more than others to control the production and distribution of imagery, as well as the interpretation of that imagery. This invariably accounted not only for which images of Jesus have obtained notoriety, but also for which ones we highlighted.

But before the issue of inclusion can be reckoned with, the problem of format must be explained. The Color of Christ is an historical monograph: not a poem (like Wheatley’s), not a survey, not a website, not a novel, not a painting, and not an edited volume of essays. The monograph format lends itself to certain voices and kinds of narrative arcs. We proceeded chronologically with the following convictions: figures act within particular contexts; prior events, experiences, and structures influence those contexts; and actions (that are built upon the past) then influence possibilities, behaviors, and choices for future individuals and groups. This may all sound rudimentary to historians, but it is important to establish for the multiplicity of readers of The Color of Christ.

Chronological narrative was not the first version of The Color of Christ. In embryo, the idea was conceived as a collection of essays where different scholars would probe the confluence of race and religion vis-à-vis particular Christ images (such as Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” or the Christus).

After we ditched the collection idea and decided to write our own monograph, we structured it thematically. Distinct chapters followed iterations of red Christs, black Christs, and white Christs from the colonial period to the present. The result was a mess. While it showcased many of our key points (such as the ways many people of color followed and created images of white Christ figures and the ways many so-called white individuals turned to non-white representations of Jesus), it had too many problems. Scholars may have liked it, but general readers would have ignored it. The thematic approach had us marching over the same historical terrain repeatedly. The manuscript also segregated people of different racial and religious classifications in ways we know lived realities did not follow. With the help of excellent external peer reviewers, we scrapped that approach and turned to what we know best: chronology, change over time, and causation.

Jennifer Graber points this out nicely: Color of Christ is a narrative history with historically organized chapters. Our chronological approach stemmed in large part from our training as historians. Our scholarly discipline drives us to the central elements of change over time and of what forces make (or inhibit) change.

This should not indicate that it lacks theory or critical analysis. We subjected each topic and subject to concepts within critical race theory, past and current trends in religious studies, cultural anthropology, childhood psychology, and sociological insights. Foucault is not quoted, but his writing on metaphysics and materiality influenced us. You will never read us parsing out Martin Buber’s I-it and I-Thou theories, but they drove us and compelled us to revise him, and to focus our book on we-Thou relationships where groups create images of Jesus that then influence individuals.

One drawback to the chronological approach is jamming people and events into broader contexts that may not represent them or their time as the people themselves would. For instance, did Wovoka and his Ghost Dance followers see themselves as having anything to do with post-Civil War Reconstruction (where we situate them)? Or, did Mormons see themselves at all connected to the civil rights debates when they erected the Christus (where we situated them)?

Another drawback is that we could not tarry long with any particular image to discuss the multiplicity of its meanings. Without doubt, there are many, many meanings within any visual image—whether art, sculpture, or song. The excellent works of David Morgan and Kirk Savage demonstrate those points marvelously, and each image, film, or statue we discuss should be studied more deeply for its mass of meanings.³ We agree wholeheartedly with Laurie Maffly-Kipp in that emphasis.

Another reviewer (Christophe Ringer of Vanderbilt University) at another venue put it this way, The Color of Christ is a saga with contingent sagas within it. In an age when any metanarrative must be questioned, we are glad to see the one we constructed already dissected for analytical purposes. Certainly there are other ways to tell the narratives of race, religion, and their multitude of intersections. Ours was consciously chosen to highlight the broader points we were trying to make about race and religion in United States history: that no story can be told in a racially segregated fashion; that continental and regional histories are crucial if we want to claim to study the United States; that scholarship on religion must take race and critical race theory seriously (even if one’s subjects never mention key words or terms in racial lexicons); that technology and modes of production are essential; and that religion is not purely about ideas in the abstracted mind, but also about experiences of the body, which are considered to touch deeper recesses of emotions and souls and that are linked to material objects.

Professor Graber is also right to mention that inclusion is not the same as incorporation. The Color of Christ follows the particular narrative arc of the American nation-state (a history largely defined by and for certain groups). This makes some stories emblematic and others more difficult. For instance, when some white Americans of the late twentieth century had visions of Jesus as a lone figure and with no other supernatural items in view, how exactly is this distinct from Native American visions that contained so many other envisioned beings? Put simply, each is complicated in its own way, but our narrative doubtless explains the first better than the second. Although we endeavored to respect those differences as best we could (such as examples from Shekomeko natives singing about the bloody side wounds of Jesus, or Hurons envisioning Jesus as Manitou, or of Cherokee encountering Jesus as one of their “little people,” or the recent artist Norval Morriseau portraying Jesus in sacred robes), we could not detail each of these moments. We look forward to reading the works of others who not only analyze more comprehensively those stories, but also approach them from the historical trajectories of the person or group.

Graber also asks where could The Color of Christ have begun if we started from the perspective of Native Americans. Within the narrative, there are a number of such places and the narrative flow would have been quite similar. We could have begun with Wovoka, his shell game of personal, spiritual, and religious identity, the violence over the Ghost Dance, and then one of his followers shocked that he could ever die. We could have begun with the cognitive dissonance and spiritual confusion Native American boys felt when sitting in a boarding school, having their hair cut short to become “civilized” as they peered at a painting of a white Jesus with long hair who represented the paragon of civilization. Or we could have started with Native American responses to The Passion of the Christ or the Jeremiah Wright media spectacle to address why discussions of their racial pasts and present are so often left out in public discussions.

And now to the particulars of choice, as Phillis Wheatley explained, which are so important. Darren Grem asks why we included more on Mormons, for instance, than Latinos? Put most simply, this is a book about Jesus, not about Mary. Regarding Latino/as, we were influenced by Thomas Tweed’s, Robert Orsi’s, and Robert Treviño’s works on the Madonna that showcase clearly the profound impact of Marian art in various Catholic communities. To fully respect Latino/a cultures and history, we would have had to include much more on the histories of the Madonna—not just for them, but for others as well (including the pop singer “Madonna” herself). Even more, The Color of Christ is not principally about political, economic, or numerical might; it is about how different factors have driven how Americans represent Jesus and how those representations then rebound to influence political, economic, and social factors.

Since we did not have room for this, we leave it to others to further the discussion and hope to have a forum at the blog Religion in American History on it. (At our talk at Vanderbilt University, moreover, a listener similarly challenged our lack of focus on Asian American imagery of Jesus, or Asian American history more generally; while the book discusses that history more than the listener realized, it is certainly not a primary focus, and we plan to have also a forum at Religion in American History on it to further develop this aspect of the book)

Professor Grem’s question could be fashioned from another angle: how could we separate Jesus imagery from those that depict his family and friends? Family historians, for instance, could revise our entire work to show how Jesus in community was telling and when he was isolated into “Head of Christ” paintings, it spoke to a spiritualized individualization that has a history. These rich and complex stories need more storytellers and we look forward to hearing them.

In that same vein, our desire to respect the sources we included and not to devalue others with little thought led us consciously to avoid messianic figures who were rarely conflated with Jesus. A prime example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the figure Matthew Avery Sutton has recently identified as crucial to Fundamentalist conservative political culture of the 1930s and 1940s as an “anti-Christ” figure whose New Deal liberalism served as their antithesis.⁴ Vis-à-vis Jesus, one could study the resonance between political cartoons of FDR that presented him as a tall man among child-like organizations or people and the depictions of Jesus with little children (representations we study as they emerged from the Gilded Age in song and art). Again, this is another avenue for scholarly work that we eagerly anticipate done by others.

There are many other examples from politics and culture we could have included. There is the cinematic character of Neo (or the “One”) from The Matrix (1999). When we are first introduced to the sci-fi messiah, a drugged-out program hacker exclaims, “my own personal Jesus Christ” and then “you look a little whiter than usual.” Or, even more recently, although Jesus is never visualized in the film Prometheus (2012) (spoiler alert) it is his crucifixion that led humanity’s original creators to wish to exterminate them, and this unseen Jesus is presumed to be white by the film’s visual effects.

In the end, we acknowledge that our format, structure, and selections limited how much we could include, but we also believe that moving chronologically and paying close attention to who and what made change over time showcased how racial concepts and religious cultures wrapped themselves so tightly together in the bodily form of Jesus that to try to separate them in scholarly studies only warps what happened in the past.

“The Evidence of Things Unseen”: The Omnipresence of Race and the Embodiment of Religion

Only a few decades after Phillis Wheatley’s use of George Whitefield to appeal to “Africans,” the Pequot Methodist William Apess tried to construct a “looking-glass” for white Americans to see what seemed unseeable: how emerging racial categories, discriminations based upon classifications, and perspectives on human differences were being built upon claims about the race and body of Jesus. In his “Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” he castigated white Christian men for refusing marriages between Native American men and white women, for segregating church life, and for limiting life chances for people of color. To Apess, the creation of Jesus as white and the rejection of him as “colored” was essential to white power.

Racial dominance was contingent upon that which could no longer be seen: Jesus himself.⁵

We followed Apess by trying to create looking-glasses for Americans to see race and religion in new ways. The Color of Christ examines the material to understand how others considered the immaterial. We focused upon the embodied to comprehend concepts considered by many to be disembodied. In short, we looked for the ways race has been imbued with religious values (in part, made omnipresent and timeless) and how religion has been fashioned with racial tools (mapped onto and into bodies which are defined, classified, and placed into hierarchies).

Professor Maffly-Kipp is right to point out that we conflate “race as a social category, a phenotype, and a theological statement.” And that is exactly a central point of the book (as is embodied in the image from the photographer William Gedney which graces the cover of the book). As scholars, we recognize the distinctions between social categories, presentations of bodies, and theological viewpoints. We recognize the fluidity of symbols. But many of our subjects do not and they often fold them together seamlessly. Children do not recognize the distinctions; laypeople do not necessarily as well. The Color of Christ is intended to show that notions of groups, bodies, and beliefs have been so intertwined that it is impossible to make sense of one without considering the others. This is another reason certain pieces of evidence are highlighted and others are not.

According to Grem, unlike our treatment of Latino/a culture, our examination of Mormonism is extensive and he credits this to the so-called Mormon moment. But The Color of Christ was written with no forethought to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential aspirations. Our attention on Mormonism stems from its theological insights (or whatever one wants to call them, “revelations” or “creations”) and notions of corporeal bodies. Joseph Smith claimed to have a theophany. He agonized over representing it in written form, and even described what he deemed “indescribable.” As Mormonism developed, its focus on the body in a century when bodies were being bought and sold, moved and violated, was crucial. We take Mormon theologies quite seriously, and when they collapsed divides of heaven and earth, claimed there is no spiritual matter (but only physical), and viewed not only Jesus, but also God the Father, as incarnated beings with physical bodies, we were compelled to analyze how that theology played out in the terms of an America growing in its obsession with defining, separating, and creating hierarchies about bodies.

This brings us to the Christus, only mentioned within one paragraph of the book. Since Jamie Reno’s story on The Color of Christ in The Daily Beast and then the more academic discussion in our cover story for the “Review” magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there has been a great deal of discussion about this white marble Jesus first erected in Salt Lake City in the middle of the 1960s. Responses have been vociferous on all sides. Many thoughtful scholars and believers have responded that the Christus had nothing to do with race, that it is purely white marble. Others, such as those we spoke to in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia, thought it was obvious that the image was racialized and has current racial meaning. Public discussion indicates to us that the Christus speaks to the power of insider/outsider differences when it comes to matters of religion.

To say that the Christus is white only in the color of its marble is to slight other racial markers: the long, straight, flowing hair; the forked and straight beard; the thin nose. In the 1960s, would anyone have called this individual “black” or “African”? Obviously, not. The broader point is this: while Americans in other places in the country battled over images of Jesus (painting icons much like the Christus with black paint or setting up new, darkened images of Jesus), LDS leaders erected a gigantic, muscular Jesus with long straight hair. It is not the case that we have “no evidence,” as Maffly-Kipp charges. The Christus is the evidence. It is not necessary for Mormons at the time to consider it or to say it is racially-charged for it to be so. The fact that the statue was first designed by a European does not address what it meant in the 1960s.

Certainly, the Christus has had and has other meanings. It was an icon to “Mormon Christianity” as John Turner has explained. But it was also a huge, white marble Jesus with flowing long hair placed at the heart of a religious tradition that until 1978 segregated African American men from many sacred tenets. For us to interpret this as having something to do with race seems almost over-determined.

Let’s consider this from another tack: Thomas Jefferson may not have considered his phrase “all men are created equal” to have racial meaning in 1776, but it certainly did to Richard Allen and David Walker. Would we be wrong to point out that “men” in the case of the Declaration did not include all men? If we offered a feminist critique of the word “men” in this context, would we be told it had nothing to do with gender and that we had no evidence? If we wrote a history of how capitalism infused American culture and included sections on language (such as “borrowed time”) or sports (such as football versus baseball) or childhood development (such as the resonance between baseball cards and stock trading), would we be challenged for missing the times when capitalism really affects society?

The Christus is emblematic of the much larger point we were making: that notions of Christ’s whiteness became so normative that backlash is almost inevitable when one points out the whiteness or offers another image. None of this should suggest that the Christus or any other image of Jesus cannot have other meanings. Encounters with whitened Christ figures, as we document time and again in the narrative, can lead to profound anti-racist behaviors or to experiences that are not particularly racialized (such as dealing with a drug addiction or the death of a loved one).

The privilege of saying that race matters more in certain circumstances than in others is a racialized privilege that some people have and others do not. For instance, neither Blum nor Harvey feel the experience of driving as racialized because they are deemed white by society (and the police). But if they had different phenotypes, they may worry when a police officer pulls up behind them or if they passed by la migra.The benefits from whiteness can be there even when we do not speak or acknowledge them, and defenses of the Christus as “non racial” or beyond race seem to fit that kind of myopia.

This brings us back to Professor Maffly-Kipp’s points. Scholars may want to look at more than just our paragraph on the Christus. In Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus, he makes almost the same exact point about the Christus and writes, “Mormons have always imagined Jesus as a white man.”⁶ The Color of Christshows this was not the case. At first and in the official version of the first vision, Joseph Smith provided no racial markers for Jesus or God. The whitening of Jesus for Mormons was a historical move, and Mormons could have chosen other avenues (as they did in other long-standing European cultures, such as in marriage).

One wonders what William Apess would say to those who claim the Christus has nothing to say about race. What would an “Indian’s Looking-Glass for Mormons” look like? Is the point of our scholarship to close windows or to open them? Or are we to build them?

The Mormon examples, and many other points more fully developed throughout the book (like our detailed attention to Jesuits, Moravians, and southern folk artists, unmentioned in any of these reviews), should lead to more work on American racial and religious imaginaries in the world. In this regard, we echo Reggie Williams in his call for more scholarship, as well, on how these American images and debates then played a role in theological developments beyond the United States and material experiences with the sacred throughout the world. In many parts of the world, Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ,” Jim Caviezel’s depiction of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, and Campus Crusade’s film “Jesus” (with its accompanying website catch phrase, ”because seeing is believing”), are venerated as capturing the image of the supposed son of God.

“Hidden Since the Beginning of the World”

More than one hundred years after Apess’s essay, Martin Luther King Jr. was presented explicitly with the problem of Christ’s whiteness. A writer asked him in 1957 why God would make Jesus white. In his answer, King offered his emerging political theology: it was the content of Christ’s character that mattered and not the color of his skin. But King then proceeded to acknowledged that Christ’s skin “was white.” Another reader responded that he was “disturbed” by King’s claim and asked for the evidence. King had none. Although King had read the Bible and knew there were no references to Christ’s whiteness there, and although King was busily challenging white supremacy in various forms, the notion that Jesus was somehow white seemed to be hidden so deeply within him that he even voiced it in response to a direct question about Christ’s race. By honing in moments like this, The Color of Christ tries to reveal the moments when racial perspectives have wrapped themselves in religious guises and presented themselves as existing, proverbially, from “the beginning of the world.” We endeavored to mine the gaps between utterances and assumptions, much like the hidden ones King exposed in his answers.

Many of the reviewers used the words “gap” or “gaps” when referring to The Color of Christ. Some praise us for filling the gaps of Prothero’s and Fox’s marvelous works. On other occasions, the groups or approaches we did not extensively cover are used to point out gaps in our work. In their recognition of what we missed (usually for reasons listed above), they may have missed our ultimate objectives—again, perhaps reading sometimes through the lens either of media presentations of our work or the well-worn historiographical thoroughfares we travel upon at times but run away from at others.

We were trying to examine those things hidden by many typical approaches to U.S. religious history. Search Mark Noll’s epic works for anything on childhood development or comedic culture or James Cone’s studies for how white Jesus figures could be used by blacks and whites alike to advance the liberation of people of color: you will be left disappointed.⁷ It is not that they should have studied these facets, but the overall thrust of American religious history and its emphasis on religion as something of the mind has kept other powers and forces hidden.

Similarly, The Color of Christ was a resurrection program for whiteness studies among historians. Like it or not, one element of the study is the seeming ubiquity of whiteness and white power. To seek to rush it away is to ignore why certain people are targeted by the police and why others are not and to refuse to listen to voices past and present who speak truth against its power. If American historians abandon whiteness studies and they continue to neglect the role of religion in its constructions and re-constructions, they will miss much of why racial notions continue to survive despite the academic onslaught against the constructed concept of race.

We agree completely with Maffly-Kipp that one of the “most interesting” questions is this: “Is it possible for whites, in a racist society, to portray a white Jesus that is not stamped with the oppressor’s mark?” That, in fact, is a major element of the book. As we write on page 8 of the introduction: “The white Jesus, however, was never a stable or completely unifying symbol of white power. … Drawing Christ as white, moreover, could undermine the very authority of whiteness. Christ’s words of justice and mercy and his sacrificial crucifixion ran counter to white power and privilege. … This book charts the places where Christ’s whiteness was secretively transformed to undermine white power or to create experiences that mediated and challenged racial discrimination.”

The Color of Christ most certainly engages with the familiar topics of our disciplines: the roles of religion in the Spanish, French, and English adventures in the Americas, emergence of black Christianities, the politicization of religious values, the role of religion in the civil rights crusades and the rise of the New Right.

But more deeply, The Color of Christ tries to make sense of what sacred imagery in a race obsessed land means to children who have yet to learn how to say grace. It tries to connect how and why jokes about Christ’s body emerged only in the 1970s and exploded throughout American culture in the 1990s and then the new millennium (and why there are so few jokes, if any, about Jesus being Native American). The book tries to explain how the sexualized blood of Jesus in the colonial period drew attention away from the skin and hair of Jesus figures for Indians and Moravians alike. And it seeks to tell stories about America by linking technologies, cultural expressions and forms, personal experiences, and material objects in and around the body of Jesus.

Those who want to find insights to the well-trod questions of colonization and puritanism, the revolution and new republic, slavery, abolitionism, and land wars, imperialism, economic depressions, civil rights movements, and new political conservatism will find them here. But our hope is that our emphasis on childhood and technology, embodiment and the spirit, and laughter and tears will allow historians of American religion to pivot and face other topics, human experiences, and historical trajectories. These are the powers and forces hidden, too often, in American religious history and in critical race theory.

(Not) The Rest of the Story

When one of Howard Thurman’s white professors at Rochester Theological Seminary recognized his immense intellectual talents, he cautioned Thurman: “You are a very sensitive Negro man,” the well-meaning scholar began, “and doubtless feel under great obligation to put all the weight of your mind and spirit at the disposal of the struggle of your own people for full citizenship.” But, and this was an important but, “let me remind you that all social questions are transitory in nature and it would be a terrible was for you to limit your creative energy to the solution of the race problem.”

Thurman may have appreciated the concern, but was left to wonder: “what kind of response could I make to this man who did not know that a man and his black skin must face the ‘timeless issues of the human spirit’ together.”⁸

This is one of the tricks of studying race and religion throughout American history. “Skin” became a contingent factor in the “timeless.” The Color of Christ endeavors to unpack how “skin” is unavoidable when approaching “spirit” (both of which have so many meanings that change over time).

But this is not the rest of the story, even the moral rest of the story that one can take from The Color of Christ. We documented many moments in American past where people stopped looking at one form of Christ’s body and fixed their gaze on another: actual living human beings.

We leave readers to find their own moral meanings within The Color of Christ, but one for us is that obsessions with the body of the supposedly divine can blind us from seeing the actual bodies of hurting, striving, and living people. Another lesson would be that faith has been and is too powerful to escape embodiment in our culture. James Baldwin suggested that when we make new faces of Jesus, our goal should be to make “Christian love a reality.” With minds, eyes, and hands moved in that direction, images of Jesus can certainly be made to move beyond racial structures and prisons.⁹

Furthermore, the goal of The Color of Christ was never to be the last word on any of these subjects. We wanted to provide scholars and everyday people with resources to analyze the swirl of sacred imagery around them, and to have analytical tools to ask new and exciting questions. We did not want jargon or almost-impenetrable academic-ese to get in the way. We expected LDS members to defend themselves against the whiteness of the Christus, yet we also hoped that they would ask new questions about the racialization of their theologies and expressions of the sacred. We expected African Americans to rehearse their struggles over what kinds of images to have, yet we also hoped they would reckon with the distinctions between now and previous decades.

Megachurches, televangelism, economic growth, and new immigration have all transformed many African American churchgoers’ lives and we wanted those folks to have a more robust history to draw upon. We expected white evangelicals to claim that race no longer matters, yet hope that when they select books for their children, movies for missionary use, and how they display their nativity scenes, they may think of the portrayals and what it means for baby Jesus to have blue eyes.

And to our fellow southern historians, we wanted to offer them examples to include religious struggles and forces throughout the key moments of how that history is often taught. Conceptions of Christ in the South—from whites and blacks, slaveholders and slaves, musicians and artists, preachers and skeptics—are central to the book, for nowhere in the United States has Christ played a more central role than in the South.

We thank the reviewers here for asking so many of the questions we ourselves wrestled with and look forward to the works of others who do the heavy lifting and bear the burdens of uncovering more of the complex yet incomplete history traced in this book.