Or the Original Deep Fake (White Jesus)
excerpted from Circumventing Your Religion to Find My God(s)
Maybe it was that picture of The Last Supper I found in the basement — the one stored away around the same time my God stopped being my father’s God. The famous da Vinci version. You know it. White men in Italian robes sitting at a long table with silver plates and glass goblets that didn’t exist in first-century Jerusalem.
I woke up this morning, Sunday — the most segregated day in America — thinking about Jesus. Not in the “I better get my butt to church before service starts” or the sudden urge to shout hallelujah kind of way, but in the why isn’t the man in that picture Black like me? kind of way.
The first deep fake in recorded history wasn’t digital. It was doctrinal.
The original content creators had names like Peter, John, and Matthew.
King James was the first to go viral.
Walk into 100% of white churches around the world and there he is — White Jesus. On the cross. At the table. Feeding the multitudes. He’s in the stained glass, the Sunday School coloring books, and the Christmas plays. And if we’re honest, he’s in 90% of Black churches too. We inherited the image right along with the hymnals and hand-me-down theology.
But if Jesus ever showed up on the Roman police blotter, the description would’ve read something like:
Male. Approximately six feet. Hair like wool. Bronze skin. Jewish. Liberal tendencies. Possible leftist.
That man wouldn’t have passed the background check at most evangelical churches today.
Who Was Really at That Table
Jerusalem wasn’t a European suburb.
It was a crossroad between Africa and Arabia — full of brown, sunbaked men who spoke Aramaic and sweated through linen.
They didn’t sit in chairs behind a banquet table. They reclined on cushions, eating with their hands from clay bowls, surrounded by oil lamps. No forks. No wine glasses. No marble floor. Just bread, lamb, herbs, and a shared cup.
But when empire took over the story, it repainted the scene.
Turned fishermen into philosophers. Turned brown skin into alabaster. Turned a rebellion into a religion.
Every painting that came later wasn’t documentation — it was domination.
The Original Algorithm
Europe needed a god that looked like Europe.
You can’t colonize half the world if the people you’re oppressing see themselves in the divine. So they rewrote the code — the algorithm of holiness.
By the time the Bible got its King James remix, the brand was global. White Jesus had gone platinum.
He was the perfect product.
He didn’t disrupt. He didn’t protest. He didn’t march or flip tables. He blessed the plantation, sat quietly on the ship, and forgave the master before the whip hit skin.
That’s how you make God marketable — you make him manageable.
The colonizer’s Christ was safe.
Not a liberator, but a logo.
He didn’t free the people — he kept them in line.
The Deep Fake Lives
Fast forward two thousand years and the deep fake is alive and streaming in HD.
You see him every Sunday — perfectly lit on the jumbotron, eyes blue enough to see sin from space. He’s quoted by politicians who don’t feed the hungry, prayed to by people who’d crucify him all over again if he showed up talking about immigrants, justice, or the poor.
Their Jesus waves flags and endorses wars.
Their Jesus shows up in courtrooms, not soup kitchens.
Their Jesus builds walls, not tables.
But the real one?
He’d be standing outside those walls — with the sick, the poor, and the unwanted — reminding us he never asked for a megachurch, just a meal to share.
Resurrecting the Truth
The real Jesus was born in a region where the air is hot and the people are brown.
He was a man of the margins — an Afro-Asiatic Jew who lived under occupation and dared to speak truth to power.
And when you realize that, when you really sit with that, it’s not just theology — it’s revolution.
Because the image of White Jesus didn’t just change faith. It changed politics, power, and perception. It told the world that salvation was pale and sin was dark. That proximity to whiteness meant proximity to God.
But if the lion ever gets to tell his own story, the hunter’s tale falls apart.
The same way that picture in my basement fell apart — the day I realized it wasn’t Jesus’ face that had been hanging on our wall.
Maybe that’s why it got packed away.
Because once you see the fake, you can’t unsee the truth.
Excerpted from my upcoming book, Circumventing Your Religion to Find My God(s) —
a journey through the myths, mistranslations, and manufactured gods that shaped our faith and stripped it of its color.
