Spray-Tanned Warrior Jesus
Following the wrong Christ
“The misleading depiction of Jesus as warrior, man’s man—as unsympathetic, lonely, and harsh was always a caricature. That White Jesus is always eventually exposed as a straw man, an Oz shouting behind a curtain, a former president reliant on spray tan and tax fraud. Jesus as he was and is offers something much more powerful and relatable.”—Angela Denker, Disciples of White Jesus
Angela Denker and I go way back. Before Jesus and John Wayne released, and (if I remember right) before her Red State Christians released, we were in an online writer’s group together. We’re still in that group, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Angela is an ELCA Lutheran pastor, a journalist, and columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. She’s been reporting on Christian nationalism at the grassroots level for a long time now, and she has just released her second book, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. Building on her first book, it dovetails with some of my own research in Jesus and John Wayne.
Which is to say, if you liked Jesus and John Wayne and Red State Christians, you’ll love Disciples of White Jesus.
I reached out to Angela to ask if she’d like to share just a bit here at CONNECTIONS, and she’s provided this wonderful little excerpt:
In October 2023, I was teaching a course on Christian nationalism for a group of Midwestern church leaders and politicians, and I came face-to-face with square-jawed Jesus.
Leading up to that evening’s class, I received multiple messages from students asking me if I’d seen the meme making the rounds on the internet that week: a fake court sketch of former President Donald Trump in a New York City courtroom, on trial for financial fraud, seated next to a white-robed Jesus with long, flowing, blondish-brown hair—looking suspiciously similar to Mel Gibson, an ironic choice given the latter’s alleged history of anti-Semitism.[i]
The sketch was originally shared on Trump’s Truth Social network by internet personality Dom Lucre, but it probably wouldn’t have gained so much traction had it not been “re-truthed” by Trump himself, with Lucre’s eyebrow-raising caption: “This is the most accurate court sketch of all time. Because nobody could have made it this far alone.”
In the sketch, Trump is rendered in full color, while Jesus is more sepia toned, making it tough to ascertain for certain what he is intended to look like. But his appearance is definitely more European than Middle Eastern, complete with well-groomed facial hair, a furrowed brow, and light-colored hair.
The students in my course were anxious to talk about this meme because they could sense it held within it a powerful purveyance toward Christian nationalism: the idea that Jesus directly supports and sanctions right-wing American political figures, specifically Trump.
For young, white Christian men and boys however, depictions of Jesus might hold an even more subtle power, a particular identity around which to shape and presage their own identities. As any attentive observer might notice, the most popular (and usually correct) answer to any pastor’s children’s sermon or any Sunday school teacher’s interlocution is: JESUS!
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, WWJD bracelets were popular among certain sets of Youth Group kids. But while our parents and youth pastors focused on teaching us what Jesus might do (namely: not engage in premarital sex or come out as gay), we likely neglected the more important question: Who Would Jesus Be? There were plenty of others willing to answer that question, however, and their influence on young, white Christian boys and men throughout the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is clear to see.
***
While most artistic and stained-glass depictions of Jesus show pastoral and peaceful scenes, a certain set of Christian leaders, pastors, and right-wing politicians were much more interested in showing a different side of Jesus throughout the second half of the twentieth century: the angry side. They said they were interested in this side of Jesus because they’d noticed that Jesus had been popularly depicted too much as a weakling or as overly emotional, and they wanted to bring back men and boys, with all their militant masculinity, into the church.
The Bible is rife with stories about Jesus’s asceticism and nonviolence, such as the many instances when he would leave the crowds and the city to go away by himself to pray, when he rejected the devil’s offers of worldly power (Matthew 4:1–11), and when he commanded Peter to “Put your sword back in its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”[ii] Christian and political leaders wishing to emphasize a more militant Jesus therefore had only a few Bible passages to emphasize, and you’ll notice they again and again reference only two main ones: (1) Matthew 21:12–13, when Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple; and (2) the book of Revelation’s depictions of Christ’s return at the end of the world.
It’s telling that references to an angry and militant Jesus have such thin scriptural backing, bringing to mind Trump’s shameful June 1, 2020, photo op at Washington, DC’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, during the height of protests and riots following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police just days before. Following law enforcement’s use of tear gas and other riot control tactics against mostly peaceful racial justice protesters, Trump arranged a walk-up to the church, holding up a Bible next to the church’s sign (of note: the church did not approve this presidential photo op). Observers noted that Trump was holding the Bible upside down, and when he was asked if it was his Bible, he famously responded: “It’s a Bible.”[iii]
When poring back over the intense effort to remake Jesus in the image of a short-tempered, violent, power-hungry, white man—one could ask the same question, remembering the aforementioned meme of Jesus in the court room next to Donald Trump.
Is that Jesus?
It’s a Jesus.
***
When tracing the ways that images of Jesus impact the identity formation of young white Christian men, it’s instructive to look back at some of the initial writing, ideas, and books aimed at young men from the ‘90s and early aughts. When I was in high school and college, all the girls my age were encouraged to give our brothers and boyfriends one book, John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, published in 2001. In the book, Eldredge suggests that Jesus should be pictured less like Mister Rogers and more like William Wallace, of Braveheart fame.[iv] In this bestselling book that many a teenage girl was advised to give to her boyfriend, Eldredge goes to great pains to depict Jesus as a “fighter” battling for “our freedom.”[v] You’ll notice it’s not a far leap from that kind of language about Jesus to rhetoric that suggests Trump is in the service of the same kind of Jesus, “fighting for our freedom.”[vi]
In another troubling passage, Eldredge contrasts Jesus to a “pale-faced altar boy with his hair parted in the middle, speaking softly, avoiding confrontation, who at last gets himself killed because he has no way out.”[vii] Wild at Heart was first published in 2001, just a year before the Boston Globe published its groundbreaking report on sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. It’s troubling to read Eldredge’s depiction today, shaming a “pale-faced altar boy,” because even if unintentional, Eldredge’s description of that altar boy brings to mind a male victim of sexual abuse. It’s no wonder that generations of young, white Christian boys and men who were given this kind of literature and rhetoric from their parents and church leaders carried deep shame about instances of sexual abuse, especially within the church, by clergy.
This type of shaming of “weak” boys and men is part of a consistent pattern in rhetoric within Christianity that seeks to prioritize violent and powerful masculinity and gender hierarchy above all other teachings. Just as Eldredge wasn’t above shaming boys who served the church as altar boys, Kristin Du Mez points out in Jesus and John Wayne that right-wing leaders were willing to go so far as to commit major theological heresy, and champion a hierarchical Trinity with a subordinate Jesus, in order to maintain their ironclad commitment to complementarianism and male headship.[viii] Instead of one God in three coequal persons, a hierarchical Trinity places one, solitary God at the top, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit subordinated below. To make the Trinity hierarchical would be to upend an entire Christian theological history of coexistence and relationship and coequality and creation, as referenced in John 1:1–5, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
It’s here, of course, that Christian leaders always run into trouble when they attempt to base their definition of militant masculinity on the example of Jesus. For every drawing of Jesus in military fatigues, or carrying a gun, or charging into battle like William Wallace—Christians have to come to terms with the myriad of texts where Jesus insists upon nonviolence, humility, and the primacy of love. It’s for this reason that complementarian theologians run into problems with their Trinitarian theology.
So what might a biblical instruction based on Jesus’s actual example look like for our boys? We can start, as many churches and Christian institutions have done, by basing our images of Jesus—to the best of our abilities—on what Jesus likely actually looked like. He would have been short, at least by modern standards, and with dark brown skin and Semitic, Middle Eastern features. The unavoidable conclusion of performing this exercise—that Jesus is decidedly not a white man—strikes a huge first blow into the foregoing conclusion that Jesus sits atop a social and historical hierarchical history of the world, as many white conservative Christians assume (you might recognize this ideology as that of white supremacist groups as well). The more accurate depictions of Jesus’s skin color also raise conversations and questions about assumptions many white Christians make about Black and brown men. Reminding young, white Christian boys and men that Jesus is not a white man forces them to take Jesus and put him into a seat often occupied by people who are oppressed and marginalized, and whose strength and power are seen more often as a deviant threat than as something to be emulated and admired.
Beyond Jesus’s physical appearance, when teaching young white boys and men about Jesus and also about the kind of masculinity Jesus evidences, we can lean into the actual Bible stories of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Jesus’s first appearance in the Bible is as a newborn baby, completely reliant on the care of those around him, vulnerable and inarguably needy. God does not avoid this aspect of humanity but emphasizes it in the incarnation of Jesus, being born not just a vulnerable baby but one who is born to poor, unmarried parents, part of a minority, oppressed ethnic and religious group.
As for Jesus as a young boy, we only have a story about his intellect and desire to learn about God in the temple.[ix] Jesus did not shun being known as a teacher and as someone who had lots of questions and a desire to learn more. His disciples called him “rabbi,” or teacher, not “boss” or “master” or even “coach.” Jesus prioritizes his friendships throughout the Bible, including to women.
By offering young boys and men a window into a nonmilitant, peaceful, loving, caring, friendly, hopeful, vulnerable, needy, well-adjusted, occasionally tearful Jesus—we can offer young, white Christian boys and men a much fuller, healthier, and more accessible vision of masculinity: one that’s more reflective of the wide spectrum of masculinity and femininity occupied by both boys and girls.
The misleading depiction of Jesus as warrior, man’s man—as unsympathetic, lonely, and harsh was always a caricature. That White Jesus is always eventually exposed as a straw man, an Oz shouting behind a curtain, a former president reliant on spray tan and tax fraud. Jesus as he was and is offers something much more powerful and relatable.
If you’d like to read more, you can pick up a copy of Disciples of White Jesus online at my little Bookshop, or even better, at your favorite local bookstore.
[i] P. J. Grisar, “Absolutely Every Anti-Semitic Thing Mel Gibson Has Ever Said,” Forward, June 24, 2020, https://forward.com/culture/449521/mel-gibson-anti-semitism-timeline-winona-ryder/.
[ii] Matthew 26:52.
[iii] “‘It’s a Bible’: Trump outside Church,’” YouTube video, 1:10, posted by The Independent, June 1, 2020.
[iv] Eldredge, Wild at Heart 24.
[v] Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 26–27.
[vi] Sarah D Wire, “At Far-Right Roadshow, Trump is God’s ‘Anointed One,’ QAnon Is King, and ‘Everything You Believe Is Right,’” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-10-12/reawaken-america-trump-maga-qanon-christian-nationalism.
[vii] Eldredge, Wild at Heart, 31.
[viii] Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 298.
[ix] Luke 2:41–52.
P.S. Still no dog names to report, but I’m still sifting through all of the fabulous suggestions and we’re trying several out, a few hours at a time.
I wrote and taught a men's study using Eldredge's book in the early aughts. A few years later I suffered a nervous breakdown (the first of several) that landed me in a behavioral hospital. I mark that breakdown as the beginning of my (what is now called) deconstruction. I don't blame Wild at Heart for my mental health struggles, but the theology it teaches is certainly indicative of what I was taught growing up. "Men don't cry. Men are tough. Men are meant to be leaders, and rely on no one." I swallowed those lies and regurgitated them for others for nearly 40 years. I've spent the majority of the last 17 or so clawing my way out, and fighting against those messages.
Thank you, Angela Denker for your work in bringing this topic to light. And thank you, Kristin Du Mez for sharing her work. I'll be picking this up asap!
Thankful for women who remind me that I am a white, male disciple of a non white Jesus, not a disciple of a white Jesus. I am seeking, though not always succeeding, to be "like minded" not "white minded" (Philippians 2:5-8)