When God Became White

Book Review: “When God Became White” by Grace Ji-Sun Kim

When God Became White by Grace Ji-Sun Kim shows the development of how Western Christianity shaped the narrative of God along lines that became more patriarchal and, ultimately, racist, than it had been.

I find it a little difficult to review this book. On the one hand, it provides quite a bit of stories and short, pithy points that will help readers looking for an introduction to these topics to come to a better understanding of how we got to where we are, particularly in the United States, with a white male patriarchal Christianity. On the other hand, as I read the book, I longed for deeper exploration of some of the topics.

For example, the book makes great points about mission work and how the whiteness of missionaries impacted perception of Christianity and race worldwide (61ff, see in particular 68 and following). Similarly, the author touches upon the fact that race is a humanly invented concept that relies upon social distinctions and contrast and that has historically been defined and redefined (27ff). But, while the latter points are utterly essential to the central thesis of the book–that whiteness has negatively thwarted Christianity in a number of ways–these historical impacts aren’t tied into the greater point, leaving the reader at times with the assumption that with the spread of Christianity came the spread of the concept of whiteness. But this goes against the very brief historical outline presented in the book and also against deeper studies like The History of White People. For me, it seems the thesis would be greatly strengthened with deeper exploration of the developing definition of whiteness and its moving goal posts alongside the differing depictions of Jesus and God and how these two interrelate. As it stands, the interrelationship is assumed, not argued for, and from that assumption comes many of the other theses of the book. And while I’m deeply sympathetic to these theses and the central concepts of the book, it felt like it needed a stronger backbone to link the concept of whiteness to Christianity, especially in light of the acknowledged historical development of that concept.

Much of the argument in the book relies, in fact, upon anecdotes. These are great for illustrative purposes (such as the famous portraits of white Jesus found ubiquitously in churches and grandparents’ foyers) to show the impact of white Jesus on our faith lives, but it doesn’t do as much to show how we can dismantle this or what historically happened to get from the Ancient Near Eastern God/Jesus to what we have today. Is it possible I was hoping for a different book than the one I got? Yes, that’s probably at least part of it. I wanted more depth. As it stands, though, this book does introduce readers to a number of important topics and difficulties with Christianity and the way it has changed into a white gendered God.

When God Became White is a pithy read that makes a number of great points. It doesn’t go deeply into some of the points contained, and relies maybe a bit too much on anecdote, but it remains a read well worth the time to struggle with the points it makes.

All Links to Amazon are Affiliates

Links

Be sure to check out the page for this site on Facebook and Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies and more!

Book Reviews– There are plenty more book reviews to read! Read like crazy! (Scroll down for more, and click at bottom for even more!)

SDG.

——

The preceding post is the property of J.W. Wartick (apart from quotations, which are the property of their respective owners, and works of art as credited; images are often freely available to the public and J.W. Wartick makes no claims of owning rights to the images unless he makes that explicit) and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author. All content on this site is the property of J.W. Wartick and is made available for individual and personal usage. If you cite from these documents, whether for personal or professional purposes, please give appropriate citation with both the name of the author (J.W. Wartick) and a link to the original URL. If you’d like to repost a post, you may do so, provided you show less than half of the original post on your own site and link to the original post for the rest. You must also appropriately cite the post as noted above. This blog is protected by Creative Commons licensing. By viewing any part of this site, you are agreeing to this usage policy.