Coloring Jesus: Racial Calculus and the Search for Identity in Twentieth-century America

Abstract

Though typically seen as representing two ends of an ideological spectrum, the Shrine of the Black Madonna Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church and the Christian Identity movement both filter their biblical exegesis through the prism of racial imaginations shaped by American culture. This article argues that while each movement is commonly classified as propagating extremist perspectives, they are engaged, in fact, in hermeneutical strategies that have an ancient pedigree and are grounded in practices of social exclusion and separation commonplace in the Bible. Though the social boundaries created by both groups bear no apparent relation to the social and cultural realities of the ancient Israelites, their theologies—often shocking to some—are more profitably understood as ordinary and even predictable patterns of thought within a broad array of Christian imaginings.