Civil-Rights Activist Shaun King calls out white supremacy in Western Christianity

Shaun King
Civil-Rights Activist Shaun King |

Shaun King, an American writer and civil-rights activist shared a post on Twitter demanding images of white Jesus be torn down.

"They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been," King shared in his Twitter post. 

"In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went? EGYPT! Not Denmark. Tear them down," King added.

In a post that followed right after, he wrote, "They are a gross form of white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down."

Many different cultures depict Jesus as their own ethnicity like Ethiopia depicting Jesus as black and Asia depicting Jesus as Asian to essentially help locals resonate with the biblical character.

However, this cultural adaptation should not disregard the fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth as a Galilean.

In Revelation 1:14-15, the physical appearance of Jesus is described in a verse, "The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters."

The eyes of Jesus were like blazing fire and the feet of Jesus were like bronze glowing in a furnace which only further confirms his Middle Eastern birthplace and respectively--ethnicity.

Reactions on Twitter were dominated by angry tweets shaming Shaun for attempting to expose Christianity after exposing police brutality and racism in America.

Shaun King was also a pastor and founded a church in Atlanta called Courageous Church during which he launched a number of charity sites to raise funds for disaster reliefs. He is currently a writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project.