Does God Actually Look Like Elon Musk?

Taking another look at Forbe's popular' headline

On 14th June 2018, Forbes ran a headline:

‘Science Reveals the Face of God and it Looks like Elon Musk.’

The scientific study Forbes was referring to - ‘The Real Faces of God in America’ - was conducted by scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who asked over five hundred Americans to pick faces which resembled God’s own.¹

The results showed what the researchers dubbed an “egocentric bias” in the way Americans imagine God, along the lines of age, attractiveness and (less so) race. The composition impression, Forbes thought, looked a little like Elon Musk.

Erick Mack’s comparison of ‘God’ and Elon Musk (14.6.2018)

I will leave the reader to judge whether Forbes called it right. (I personally would have said Chris Pratt.) Certainly, I am sure that Musk himself would concur.

The point that we tend to imagine God like us, however, is an intriguing one. And it goes back to ancient times. As the philosopher Xenophanes once mused:

“One God there is ‘midst gods men and supreme, In form, in mind, unlike to mortal men... But men have the idea that gods are born, and wear their clothes, and have both voice and shape.” (Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 5.4)

Aristophanes goes on to describe how each race of people imagines God like itself. (Even cattle, Aristophanes asserts, would imagine a cattle-shaped God if they could).

Or, to paraphrase on an (apocryphal) saying of Voltaire: God made man in his own image, and man has returned the favour ever since.

Imaging Jesus as One Like Us

When I first came across the headline, I was finishing my doctoral research on the physical appearance of Jesus, and I couldn’t help but think that an “egocentric bias” has applied - in many ways and in many ages - to Christ as well.

Around that time, I visited Jerusalem with a group of friends. (The official reason was to give a paper on whether Jesus was short, but I managed to persuade a posse of Oxonians to tag along for fun.) While there, we visited the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Jesus’ home-town. And I was at awe at what we found.

Lining the Church courtyard, Catholic Churches from around the world had sent in their depictions of the Madonna and child. From the Philippines, Jesus and Mary looked like traditional deities; from China, they wore hanfu; from Ethiopa, there was a dark Jesus; and from El Salvador, an Argentinian one.

An image I took of Madonna and child, from China.

There was startling beauty in the way that believers of different ethnicities were able to picture Jesus as one like them. I could not help but feel that it embodied the profound truth of the Incarnation; that God has ‘pitched his tent’ among us (Jn. 1:14).

It is also made me think of how the Gospels’ silence on Jesus’ appearance - the focus of my research - has presented an invitation to fill in the gaps of his appearance. As Eric Auerbach famously noticed, biblical narrative is often “fraught with background.”² We the reader use our imaginations to colour it in.

Perhaps this is part of the Bible’s enduring value.

A Shadowy Jesus

Yet for all this beauty, there surely lurk dangers in the ‘shadowy’ Jesus. For if our images of Jesus betray an “egocentric bias,” it surely matters whose ego is filling the Gospels’ silence.

While the Church of the Annunciation represents the beautiful diversity of our humanity - that we are all one ‘in Christ Jesus’ - the Church’s images of Jesus have not always been so diverse. In view of the colonial heritage of Western Christianity, the ‘normative’ image of Jesus is distinctly Western.

Of course, I don’t think the Dutch masters should be blamed for depicting Jesus as a Dutchman, nor Italians for depicting him as Italian. As far as I am aware, there is nothing particularly exceptional about this anachronism. Yet I do think we should be sensitive to the negative impact a ‘white Jesus’ can have.

On the one hand, such depictions can lead us to forget the fact of Jesus’ Jewishness. Of course, Jesus was not the ‘white saviour’ or Caucasian Christ we have often made him out to be. He was a Middle-Eastern Jew, with dark honey-coloured skin.

Some scholars believe that Egyptian mummy portraits give us a good indication of the complexion of Jesus.

At the other end of the spectrum, we cannot ignore the damage done by the (iconographic) divinisation of whiteness. One psychological study, for example, found that exposure to a white Jesus among black people led to more favourable attitudes to whites.³

According to one South African scholar, “white hegemony is kept alive... by an iconography that has shown over time that the self-determination of Africans is not to be sought in themselves, but that Africans are to be gratified with the benevolence of some whites.”⁴

Feminist theologian Mary Daley thought that when God becomes man, man becomes God. We might equally say that when God becomes white, white becomes God. At its worse, a white Jesus can become an instrument for white supremacy.

Jesus the Emperor?

And it is not only Jesus’ ethnicity which has been eclipsed by our Western ego. Often, our images of Jesus have sought to legitimate a peculiar kind of (imperial) power.

Take the classic depiction of a bearded Jesus with long, flowing hair. It might surprise you that the earliest images of Jesus do not show such a Jesus; it wasn’t the fashion of the time. So where did it come from? A long-bearded Jesus sprang up in the fourth-century, when the Emperor Constantine was consolidating his Christian state.

A traditional depiction of Christ as pantakrator, ruler of all.

For Constantine, it was convenient to depict Jesus enthroned, with a flowing toga, gold tunic and long-beard, since this iconographic palette reminded its viewers of Zeus. As a suitable Zeus-substitute, Constantine could bask in Jesus’ powerful rays.

Of course, an imperial rhetoric is not absent from the Gospels.⁵ Like a Roman Emperor, Jesus is divi filius (‘Son of God’), born supernaturally, descending from royalty, now to be worshipped. Although his victories on earth are more spiritual than military, his parousia is promised by the evangelists to be a fearsome sight.

Yet, at least with regards to the question of appearance, Constantine’s hyper-masculine portrayal rubs against portions of Jesus’ teaching. Often, it is those dressed like Constantine’s Christ who are faced Jesus’ ire. Long robes, in Jesus’ teaching, are a cipher for religious pretence; and purple and gold are a sign of decadence.

It is difficult to escape the irony that Constantine’s Christ might be rejected by Jesus.

A ‘Woke’ Jesus?…

As we come to land, I can hear a few of you mumbling under your breath. Surely, my critique has not stretched beyond a hit-piece on the ‘white Christ.’ And does this not involve its own kind of “egocentric” bias - invalidating a variety of traditional portrayals which have provided consolation to so many?

Take, for instance, Warner Sallman’s famous depiction. One can say that it’s a whitewash. One can criticise its intention to present Jesus as ‘virile and manly.’ And one would certainly not be the first to call it kitsch. But is it not also a Jesus who comforted many American soldiers during the Second World War?

Warner Sallman’s The Head of Christ (1940) was intended to depict a Jesus who was virile and manly.

My tentative suggestion is not that we need to get rid of a white Jesus. But rather that we need to be careful to attend to the ‘egocentric’ Jesuses we create. One does not have to be a follower of Foucault to recognise the pitfalls alongside the promises in our “egocentric” bias. Images of Jesus are not a zero-sum game.

The danger, from my perspective, is not an imperial-looking, white Jesus, per se. The danger is that such depictions are not fit for purpose; when they no longer serve as icons into truth; when they are even a positive barrier to encountering Christ.

There is a profound truth that we can see God in ourselves. It is quite a different matter when we see ourselves as God.

1. See Joshua Conrad Jackson, Neil Hester, Kurt Gray, “The faces of God in America: Revealing religious diversity across people and politics,” PLos One 13 n.6 (2018): 1-13.

2. See Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Thought, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NH: Princeton University Press, 2003; 1st ed. 1946, Francke), 3-23.

3. Simon Howard, Samuel R. Sommers, “Exposure to White Religious Iconography Influences Black Individuals’ Intragroup and Intergroup Attitudes,” CD&EMP 24 n.4 (2017): 510.

4. R.T. Tshaka, “If the Colour of Jesus is Not an Issue, Why Are You so Incensed at the Suggestion that Jesus is Black?” SHE 46 n.1 (2010): 4.

5. See Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Tyranny, Boundary and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel,” NTS 21 n.73 (1999): 7-31.