{"id":683,"date":"2025-11-03T18:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T18:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/?p=683"},"modified":"2026-03-16T19:31:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T19:31:53","slug":"black-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/?p=683","title":{"rendered":"Black Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Or the Original Deep Fake (White Jesus)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

excerpted from<\/em> Circumventing Your Religion to Find My God(s)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe it was that picture of The Last Supper<\/em> I found in the basement \u2014 the one stored away around the same time my God stopped being my father\u2019s 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\u2019t exist in first-century Jerusalem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I woke up this morning, Sunday \u2014 the most segregated day in America \u2014 thinking about Jesus. Not in the \u201cI better get my butt to church before service starts\u201d or the sudden urge to shout hallelujah kind of way, but in the why isn\u2019t the man in that picture Black like me?<\/em> kind of way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first deep fake in recorded history wasn\u2019t digital. It was doctrinal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original content creators had names like Peter, John, and Matthew.
King James was the first to go viral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walk into 100% of white churches around the world and there he is \u2014 White Jesus. On the cross. At the table. Feeding the multitudes. He\u2019s in the stained glass, the Sunday School coloring books, and the Christmas plays. And if we\u2019re honest, he\u2019s in 90% of Black churches too. We inherited the image right along with the hymnals and hand-me-down theology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if Jesus ever showed up on the Roman police blotter, the description would\u2019ve read something like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Male. Approximately six feet. Hair like wool. Bronze skin. Jewish. Liberal tendencies. Possible leftist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That man wouldn\u2019t have passed the background check at most evangelical churches today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who Was Really at That Table<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jerusalem wasn\u2019t a European suburb.
It was a crossroad between Africa and Arabia \u2014 full of brown, sunbaked men who spoke Aramaic and sweated through linen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every painting that came later wasn\u2019t documentation \u2014 it was domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Original Algorithm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Europe needed a god that looked like Europe.
You can\u2019t colonize half the world if the people you\u2019re oppressing see themselves in the divine. So they rewrote the code \u2014 the algorithm of holiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time the Bible got its King James remix, the brand was global. White Jesus<\/em> had gone platinum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was the perfect product.
He didn\u2019t disrupt. He didn\u2019t protest. He didn\u2019t march or flip tables. He blessed the plantation, sat quietly on the ship, and forgave the master before the whip hit skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s how you make God marketable \u2014 you make him manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The colonizer\u2019s Christ was safe.
Not a liberator, but a logo.
He didn\u2019t free the people \u2014 he kept them in line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Deep Fake Lives<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward two thousand years and the deep fake is alive and streaming in HD.
You see him every Sunday \u2014 perfectly lit on the jumbotron, eyes blue enough to see sin from space. He\u2019s quoted by politicians who don\u2019t feed the hungry, prayed to by people who\u2019d crucify him all over again if he showed up talking about immigrants, justice, or the poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their Jesus waves flags and endorses wars.
Their Jesus shows up in courtrooms, not soup kitchens.
Their Jesus builds walls, not tables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the real one?
He\u2019d be standing outside those walls \u2014 with the sick, the poor, and the unwanted \u2014 reminding us he never asked for a megachurch, just a meal to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resurrecting the Truth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 an Afro-Asiatic Jew who lived under occupation and dared to speak truth to power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when you realize that, when you really sit with that, it\u2019s not just theology \u2014 it\u2019s revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the image of White Jesus<\/em> didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if the lion ever gets to tell his own story, the hunter\u2019s tale falls apart.
The same way that picture in my basement fell apart \u2014 the day I realized it wasn\u2019t Jesus\u2019 face that had been hanging on our wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe that\u2019s why it got packed away.
Because once you see the fake, you can\u2019t unsee the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from my upcoming book, Circumventing Your Religion to Find My God(s)<\/em> \u2014<\/strong>
a journey through the myths, mistranslations, and manufactured gods that shaped our faith and stripped it of its color.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"local","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-race","category-religion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blackmanwrites.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/BlackJesus-Crop.png?fit=1530%2C809&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":771,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions\/771"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackmanwrites.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}