ACTION-REFLECTION CYCLE 1

Action research, especially insider action research, often does not have “a clear

beginning,” and “research questions are often formalized versions of puzzles that practitioners have been struggling with for some time” (Herr & Anderson, 2015, p. 92). Knowing how to get started is not an easy task. McNiff (2013) writes that often there is little more justification for making the decision of where to start than simply asking: “I wonder what would happen if…” (p. 29). It became clear in the meetings with my parish-based dissertation committee and in the initial interest sessions held with the participants that though many of them had experience with anti-racism trainings and tackling issues of race, only a small handful had any experience engaging in this work in conjunction with questions of religion and theology.

Given the make-up of the group and the gaps in their perspectives that many of them initially articulated, I decided the first action-reflection cycle needed to communicate the overall concerns and aesthetic format of the classes quite clearly. I chose to begin with Edward Blum and Paul Harvey’s (2012) The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. This text explores in great detail how images of Jesus (both White and non-White) have been deployed for competing purposes in the history of the United States, both to support and challenge White supremacy. It is comprehensive in scope, beginning with the colonial era and moving to the present day. It provides an in-depth analysis of the connections and co-constitution of race and religion. As Blum and Harvey (2012) put it: “In the form of Jesus, these two forced [the combustible combination of race and religion] became deeply intertwined” (p. 15). They engage in this analysis in a way that is understandable for a general audience and one that is

quite tangible, given its focus on art and film. Given that tangible quality—and perhaps what drew me to it as a practitioner—is how “visual” the book is, even though there are only 19 images actually included of the dozens discussed, not to mention the films. They describe in great detail the evolution of the image of Jesus and why that evolution mattered. This analysis is ultimately tied to the written word. I decided that I wanted to bring this book to life, so to speak. To put it in McNiff’s (2013) framework, the question I asked was: I wonder what would happen if I turned Blum and Harvey’s (2012) text into a museum, into an aesthetic encounter?

Thus began the long journey of preparation for the first session. I went through Blum and Harvey’s book slowly and methodically, writing down every piece of art or film mentioned in the text, as well as any other primary source materials. First, I began searching for each of the art images online, and I was able to find online versions of all but a few of them. I began putting the images into a chronological sequence to construct the outlines of an exhibition. I then realized I had far too many images. Here was where the act of curation really began. The text itself was ultimately the guide for the first round of selection, because Blum and Harvey emphasize certain images as being particularly emblematic of the issues at hand. In order to further narrow it down, I eliminated any images that I could not locate in a high-resolution form, because I intended to enlarge these images for the exhibits.

Somewhere along the way, I also decided I wanted to try and make aspects of this exhibition even more tangible. I had previously come across some of the 19th _{century Sunday} School cards that Blum and Harvey mention on eBay, so I went back and searched for them and found hundreds of them from the late 19th _{century for sale. I ordered 45 of them, most of which} featured a White Jesus, to include in the exhibition. I also ordered a print of Janet McKenzie’s Jesus of the People from the artist, because I have long admired her work. At this point, though, I

wanted to see what else I could find that was affordable, particularly the images contained in books. In the weeks leading up to the first session, I was able to track down and purchase on eBay several first edition books from the 19th _{and early 20}th _{centuries mentioned by Blum and} Harvey, so that the participants could pick them up and engage with them in a way that a

reproduction of a single page cannot simulate. I wanted to heighten the aesthetic (and historical) experience as much as possible.

At this point, I either had a reproduction of the piece of art or an original source, so I grouped them into exhibits based on chronology and/or theme. For each of the pieces of art, I printed enlarged versions (either 11” x 17”, 11” x 14” or 8” x 10” size depending on the

proportions of the image) and framed them. I then created labels for each of the exhibits overall and the individual items in the exhibits, either summarizing the Blum and Harvey text or using direct quotations. These labels were intended to give a sense of the overall narrative in a

condensed form, providing just enough background and narrative to contextualize the art, books, and other materials. I printed these labels and placed them in acrylic wall-mount sign holders for the exhibition.

The films were another matter. I struggled with how to incorporate them into the

exhibition. I knew, given the space and technological limitations of the church, that I was going to be unable to show them in the space where the other exhibits would be placed. Film is also incredibly difficult to convey in text, so even though Blum and Harvey’s descriptions are quite detailed, I knew I needed to see them to make an informed decision on how to utilize them. I ordered eleven of the films and began selecting clips from the films that exemplified the

arguments made by the authors and connected well with the themes of the other exhibits. Using iMovie, I constructed an 18-minute montage of the films, interpolated with short, explanatory

frames of text. I planned to make this video available in another space at the church after the participants went through the exhibition. I also uploaded it to YouTube as a private video, and I shared the link with the participants, so that they could also view it at home.

After assembling all the materials, I installed the exhibition in the Parish Hall at St. Stephen’s on the day of the first session. This space is the largest one available at the church, other than the Nave. In fact, it was the original church building, but once the current church was constructed, it was converted into this large space used for parish events and gatherings. It is also a space that is frequently rented out by community events (and is used as a polling place), due to its large size. The installation took approximately four hours. I kept an informal log, and from the beginning of the process through the installation, the preparation for this session took approximately 60 hours. The exhibition was open from 4:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on October 5, 2017, and all the participants (except one who had a family emergency) came at their leisure to walk through the exhibits.

Here is a brief description of the contents of each of the exhibits, with information summarized from Blum and Harvey (2012), except where noted:1

Exhibit 1 – “An Age of Iconoclasm”: Novae Franciae accurate delineatio (1657), a map of the Great Lakes region that contains an image of an Indian family kneeling in prayer beneath the cross; a framed blank piece of paper to represent Puritan iconoclasm; a painting by Anthony Roll of Jesus of Lübeck (1546), a slave ship in use during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Exhibit 2 – “Jesus in the Revolutionary Era”: two paintings by Moravian artist Johann Valentin Haidt, First Fruits (1760) and Lamentation over the Body of Christ (1758) – the first depicts a

1 _{I am unable to include pictures of these exhibits. Most of the artwork is protected under copyright and cannot be}

White Jesus returning in glory as king with people from all nations gathered at his feet, including prominent depictions of Indian and Black families, and the second depicts a pale White Jesus with prominently bloody wounds; a page called “George Washington as Sacred Figure,” which contained a series of images where Washington was a stand-in for Jesus in several religious scenes.

Exhibit 3 – “Jesus in the Early Republic”: a first-edition book from the American Tract Society (ATS), The African Orphan Boy and Other Books for Children (ca. 1840s) which contains a short biography of Jesus with several depictions of him as White, along with reproductions of White Jesus images from other ATS publications.

Exhibit 4 – “Perpetrating a Fraud: Publius Lentulus”: a copy of a fraudulent letter from sometime in the 10th_-14th _{centuries that describes Jesus with phenotypical markers typically} associated with Whiteness. Though known to be a fraud by the Puritans and early Americans, over the course of the 19th _{century it was “rediscovered” and taken to be authentic in an attempt} to “prove” the Whiteness of Jesus. This letter was accompanied by an image of a White Jesus, painted by William S. Pendleton in 1834 that was meant to be a depiction of Christ as described in the letter.

Exhibit 5 – “Jesus and Slavery”: excerpts from slave catechisms that couched the idea that slavery was a natural condition and that Christianity taught a life of service to a master, earthly and heavenly—all couched in the context of religious instruction; a series of images and ideas created by slaves to counter this instruction, including games, spirituals, and the Jesus as Trickster image (where Jesus is depicted as a small figure who could sneak past White masters and teach the slaves true messages of freedom); finally, an image from the illustrated edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where a White Jesus looks disapprovingly at a

White master who has directed a slave to be whipped by two other slaves (As Blum and Harvey note on p. 118 , Jesus admonishes but does nothing to stop it in this image).

Exhibit 6 – “Jesus and Reconstruction”: the political cartoon Reconstruction which shows a White Jesus saying, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” surrounded by American public figures from the North and South reunited in his presence.

Exhibit 7 - “Henry Ward Beecher’s The Life of Jesus, the Christ”: a first-edition copy of this book from 1871 that was the first American biography of Jesus and depicts five heads of Jesus, all from European artists and all White images.

Exhibit 8 – “Jesus and Industrialization”: 45 original Sunday School lesson cards from the turn of the 20th _{century, one of the first examples of a cheap, mass-produced image of a White Jesus} that was nearly ubiquitous in churches across the country; an original copy of the fourth-edition of The Crucifixion, by An Eye-Witness (1911) which was widely distributed and contained the Publius Lentulus letter presented as historical fact with an image of a White Jesus on the frontispiece.

Exhibit 9 – “Critics of the White Jesus”: a copy of an 1893 article in the Cleveland Gazette that argues that if Jesus were alive at that time, he would not be White, but would be subjected to segregation as a Black man; two paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ and Nicodemus on a Roof (1899) and Savior (c. 1905) that are among the first depictions of Jesus with dark skin and a black beard, with his face veiled in layers of dark shades and brown paint.

Exhibit 10 – “Jesus and Imperialism”: an original 1915 postcard bearing Harold Cropping’s painting The Hope of the World, which was a visual form of the popular song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” and depicts a White Jesus surrounded by children of various races (all the children are clothed and either stood by Jesus or were held by him, except for one, a nude

Black boy laying down in front of Jesus with his face obscured); a contemporaneous, first- edition book, Christ and the Fine Arts (1938) that contains a praise-filled interpretation of the image (of note, however, in the text is a narrative when a Black educational leader questions why the Black child is naked and not touching Jesus, to which the teacher responds: “Because your race is one of the most backward of all the races of the children of men” (Maus, p. 599)). Exhibit 11 – “A Nordic Jesus”: an excerpt from New York lawyer, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which claims that Jesus was a member of the Nordic race—a text used by Congress in formulating immigration restrictions of the 1920s; Henry Stanley Todd’s The Nazarene, or Christ Triumphant which depicts a Nordic Christ, White with blond hair and blue eyes—an extremely popular painting that went on a tour throughout the country following its appearance at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933—along with two reviews from the time praising the image for its “accuracy.”

Exhibit 12 – “Jesus and Economics”: a first-edition copy of The Man Nobody Knows (1925) by Bruce Barton, which describes Jesus an expert businessman and capitalist extraordinaire; a first- edition copy of The Call of the Carpenter (1913) by Bouck White, which retells the story of Jesus as a member of the working class and a social revolutionist and contains an image on the frontispiece of a White Jesus as a working carpenter in the modern era; a series of mock “wanted posters” by socialist artist Arthur Young, depicting a White Christ as a member of the socialist movement in the United States.

Exhibit 13 – “Jesus as Black”: a collection of paintings from the Harlem Renaissance depicting Jesus as Black, explicitly connecting his crucifixion with lynching: Christ in Alabama by Prentiss Taylor (1932); The Lynching by Julius Bloch (1932); Jesus and the Three Marys by

William H. Johnson (1939); Cotton Crucifixion by Clementine Hunter (1970); and a poem “Christ Recrucified” (1922) by Countee Cullen.

Exhibit 14 – “Sallman’s Head of Christ”: a painting by Warner Sallman inspired by a Moody Bible Institute professor who called for a more “manly” Jesus, by far the most popular image of Jesus in the 20th _{century, that had been printed more than 500 million times by the 1990s – Jesus} is White with long flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes.

Exhibit 15 – “Jesus and Civil Rights”: a copy of a sermon pamphlet by Carey Daniel, “God the Original Segregationist” (1954), which argues that true Christians would refuse to send their children to desegregated schools or attend integrated churches, connecting segregation to the pro-slavery argument connecting the Black race with the “curse of Ham”; a picture of the stained glass window damaged in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963 (the face of the White Jesus in the window is blown out); a picture of the new window sent to the church by Welsh artist John Petts which depicts a Black Jesus with outstretched arms on an imagined cross with the words “You Do It To Me.”

Exhibit 16 – “Jesus of the People (1999)”: a painting by contemporary artist, Janet McKenzie, which was a commissioned image by the National Catholic Reporter – Jesus is depicted as a person of color and is androgynous.

Exhibit 17 – “Jesus” (2002): a copy of the image that appeared on the cover of Popular Mechanics, which was a new image of Jesus produced by forensic anthropologists who were trying to reconstruct how Jesus would have mostly likely “really” looked using a first-century Israeli skull.

Exhibit 18 – “Contemporary Images”: 20 global images from the past 10 years depicting Jesus in a wide variety of ways.

Exhibit 19 – “Contemporary Bibles and Books for Children”: a sampling of recent Bibles and books for children that depict Jesus, again in a wide variety of ways.

The exhibits closed with the following questions: What do images of Christ suggest today? What, if anything, has changed? Does the image of Christ still matter? If so, how should it inform our theology?

Film – clips from From the Manger to the Cross (Marion & Olcott, 1913); Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915); The King of Kings (DeMille, 1927); King of Kings (Ray & Bronston, 1961); Jesus Christ Superstar (Jewison & Stigwood, 1973); Jesus of Nazareth (Grade & Labella, 1977); Jesus (Heyman, Skyes, & Krish, 1979); The Passion of the Christ (Davey, Gibson, & McEveety, 2004)—Jesus is played by a White actor in all of these films; these are followed by a clip from the first film where Jesus is played by a Black actor, Color of the Cross (Halsband, Levostre, Murray, & La Marre, 2006); I continue with a series of images from films after the Blum and Harvey book where Jesus is depicted as other than White, The Gospel of John (Leader & Batty, 2014), Risen (Aiello, Liddell, Shilaimon, & Reynolds, 2016); and The Shack (Netter et al., 2017); I concluded the montage with the 2013 Fox News clip where anchor Megyn Kelly says it is a “historical fact” that Jesus was White.

Again, I close with questions: So, what is the connection between Jesus and race? And what does this history teach us about the connections of race and theology?

I also wanted to get a sense of the participants’ thinking about their images of Jesus prior to going through the exhibition, so upon arrival, I asked the participants to go into the Davis Room, a space adjacent to the Parish Hall. One half of the Davis Room is set up with couches and chairs, and the other half of the room contains a large conference table. When the

following questions on a sheet provided to them: What does “theology” mean to you? What does “incarnation” mean to you? What is your image/are your images of Jesus? Where do you think your image(s) of Jesus come from? How, if at all, have they changed since childhood? After writing their reflections, they entered the exhibition in the Parish Hall. Participants took between one-and-a-half and two hours to go through the exhibits. Upon leaving, they each received a copy of Howard Thurman’s (1976) Jesus and the Disinherited, along with a journal guide. I remained in the reception area just outside the Parish Hall so as to not be intrusive or to give the participants the impression they were being “watched,” but I did let them know that I was