Mass-produced images of a White Jesus fused whiteness with sacred authority

Evidence

Allurement—those pictures of holy figures—had long been considered a sinful trick of Satan and “devilish” Catholics. No more. Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. … As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 410

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the book’s core thesis: a racist idea (White Jesus) produced to serve cultural self-interest, here propagated through mass media.
• SEED: Angle: how a technological shift (the printing press) quietly drove the racialization of sacred imagery — the material infrastructure behind a racist idea.
• CANDY: A tract explicitly needed ‘something to allure the listless to read’ — nice period detail.