Far-Right Raging at 'Non-White' Jesus

GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

White people are furious that the archbishop of Canterbury said Jesus shouldn't always be white | indy100

The raving right in Britain are incensed at Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby's statement of the obvious on BBC Radio 4's Today Program that Jesus was not a white man.

Welby made this statement in response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement's campaign to have statuary and representations of racists and removed and the general review and reassessment of institutionalised racism in society, following another casual killing of a black man by white police in America.

How Jesus would have looked. Compiled from skull measurements and contemporaneous depictions of people in the region in the 1st century CE

If he really existed, Jesus would have been a typical Canaanite - the people where were ancestral to the modern Palestinians and would almost certainly have had brown skin, black hair and brown eyes, not the white-skinned blue-eyed blond, epitome of an Aryan "master-race", as normally depicted in Western Art, at least since the Early Middle Ages. So, incidentally would his mother have had.

The conviction that, as a 'perfect' human, Jesus would have been a white "Aryan" is the product of the fundamental racism that assumes Europeans are the perfect product of directed evolution, and that all other 'races' are inferior.

Extraordinary hearing @JustinWelby on @BBCr4today comparing taking statues down at Canterbury to removing statues outside KGB in Russia & sympathy for getting rid of white Jesuses. With feeble leadership like this does @churchofengland have a future? Drop Bishops from H of Lords?

— David C Bannerman (@DCBMEP) June 26, 2020

Amongst those foaming at the mouth at the idea that Jesus was not a member of the 'master race' is rabid Eurosceptic Conservative politician, David Campbell Bannerman, formerly deputy chairman of UKIP and a UKIP MEP (who still styles himself as an MEP even though the UK left the EU and has no MEPs).

The comments in reply to Bannerman's tweet are illustrative of the racist opinions of many on the regressive Christian right in the UK, some of whom still seems to believe, in common with American conservative evangelicals, that Christianity is synonymous with white supremacism.

For example:

Parishioners leaving in droves..The @churchofengland @JustinWelby No longer represent our Christian faith..

---

Most people in the Church have long despaired of the lack of inspirational leadership, and half hearted support for Christian faith and values coming from church leaders especially @JustinWelby. Christian belief requires affirmation and faith not compromise and retreat.

---

He is deliberately persuing [sic] Marxism like so many of his clergy.

---

CoE is in dire straights until it can pull itself out of the wet, retreating mindset into the forceful, affirmative Jordan Peterson defence of Christianity

---

Why doesn't he just join a Mosque and be done with it.

---

The African bishops will keep him in check.

---

That’s the point. To Get Rid of The Church of England! I think it’s getting near that time when Farage needs to raise his annoying (For The Torys [sic]) head again. He is The Best PM this country never had.

---

No wonder the @churchofengland is going downwards very fast. @JustinWelby is a disgrace if he is sympathetic to removing statues of WHITE Jesus. Jesus WAS white. He was a Jew. Perhaps Welby is quietly antisemitic.

It seems the only part of "Darwinism" the extreme Christian right ever embraced, and did so with enthusiasm, is the perverted "Social Darwinism" that Darwin himself would have felt abhorrent.

---

Tweet Link