Whiteness was embedded into religious depictions of Jesus without explicit statement

Evidence

Greeley emerged as their presidential candidate. The arch-enemy of the Confederacy became the arch-friend of the Confederacy, similar to the nation’s most famous preacher, whom Frederick Douglass sarcastically called the “apostle of forgiveness.” Seeking to reunite White northerners and southerners through Christian Whiteness, Henry Ward Beecher published the first American biography of Jesus, The Life of Jesus, the Christ, in 1871. “There is absolutely nothing to determine the personal appearance of Jesus,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother. And yet Beecher included in the book five depictions of the perfect God-man named Jesus, and they all depicted a White man. Henry Ward Beecher gave White Americans a model for embedding Whiteness into their religious worldviews of Jesus Christ without ever saying so out loud, just as southern and northern Whites were doing with their political worldviews. It went without saying for racists that White people were the best equipped to rule the United States under the heavenly guidance of the White Father and Son. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 672

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s theme of how ideology gets encoded in cultural artifacts without being spoken — visual depiction as implicit racism. — connects to: White Christianity’s function was protecting white racial innocence — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 69