American white Christian nationalism, a dormant social virus, has resurrected with the MAGA movement. But do white Christian nationalists really know Jesus? They want the United States to be a Christian nation that embraces white racial superiority and traditional moral values. Their “Savior” may not be a good fit for their ethos.
Professor Terry Bouton noted something interesting about the January 6, 2021 protesters: “a wide range of people were indulging the celebration of extremism, including casually discussing executing traitors, including ‘country club Republicans.’”
“But the closer you look, the murkier things become,” wrote Philip Gorski for Georgetown University's Berkley Forum. “Christians waved Trump flags. The ‘Proud Boys’ kneeled and prayed. One man, decked out as a cosplay crusader, clutched a large leather Bible to his chest with skeleton gloves. What looked like apples and oranges turned out to be a fruit cocktail: white Christian nationalism.”
Was Jesus A Christian?
If you drive a Lincoln, is your car is an Emancipator? If you call yourself a Christian, was the man your religion is named after also a Christian? The answer to both questions is no.
“[W]hat we've learned from the gospel stories is not that Jesus was not Jewish,” notes Paula Fredriksen, William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. “Quite the opposite. He's completely embedded in the Judaism of his time.”
‘Of course, Jesus was a Jew,” writes Shaye I.D. Cohen, Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. “He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues.”
Was Jesus White?
I entered the term “Jesus” into the Google machine and clicked on the “Images” link. More than 300 pictures popped up. All but a handful showed a white man, likely of Northern European descent. That’s the image most Americans carry in their heads. Ask somebody to picture Jesus in their mind and they’ll probably conjure up somebody who looks like Jim Caviezel.
I’m sure that’s how American White Christian Nationalists picture Jesus. Can they handle the truth?
“Despite the lack of physical descriptions of Jesus, we can make several essential, foundational statements about his physical appearance,” wrote Dr. Erin K. Vearncombe for earlychristiantexts.com. “Most importantly, Jesus had brown skin. Jesus was a Jewish man from the region of Galilee in the first century CE. As a Jewish man from first-century Galilee, he would have had dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and, likely, a shortish beard.”
Dr. Vearncombe adds, “Jesus’s brown skin should not come as a surprise” and “should be a commonly recognized fact.” “The white Jesus looking calmly, through blue eyes, towards the viewer, arms outstretched in blessing, has and continues to cause untold human damage” he wrote. “That Jesus has serious racist and anti-Semitic consequences.”
“White Jesus needs to exit, stage right.”
Was Jesus Straight?
White Christian nationalists will not tolerate, and actively hate, the LBGTQ community. That intolerance helped drive Bradley Onishi, a former pastor, to leave his church.
“They want to go back to a time when they understand there to be two genders,” he told Sky News, “a clear patriarchal structure to the family, a restricted approach to immigration, black people and other people of colour knowing their place in the country, socially and politically." "They will tell you that being gay is wrong, in all cases,” he added.
All cases?
“After much reflection and with certainly no wish to shock,” wrote Paul Oestreicher in The Guardian, “I felt I was left with no option but to suggest, for the first time in half a century of my Anglican priesthood, that Jesus may well have been homosexual.”
“Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. Unusually, he was unmarried,” he noted. The object of Jesus’ affections, Oestreicher speculates, was the Apostle John, based on Jesus’ last words in John 19: “Jesus saw his mother and the disciple he loved standing near her. He said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that moment the disciple accepted her as his own mother.”
Unmarried, associating exclusively with men, and professing his love for a male apostle? Work the math.
American white Christian nationalists, bubbling with religious chauvinism, racism, and homophobia, quite possibly kneel and pray and pledge their allegiance to a queer, dark-skinned, Jew.
To quote Alanis Morisette: “Isn’t that ironic?”