Lie #14 – God Is a White Man

from Helena Sorensen Aman:

Lie #14: “God is a white man.”

Silly, right? We can look at this lie and say, “Of course that’s not true! God is a spirit and is therefore beyond race and gender.” But use a feminine pronoun for God and watch discomfort ripple through a room full of Christians. Create an icon of a dark-skinned God and see how quickly you’re labeled a “liberal.” Because of the choices of male translators (and centuries of Christian art), God as “He” (always, only) is deeply entrenched in Christian thinking. It has left us with the idea that while everyone is made in the image of God, some of us are more the image of God than others. We’ve told countless women, children, and people of color that God looks like their abusers and oppressors, that there is no other way to connect with God than to swallow their trauma responses and “trust.” We have failed to see God in the enslaved, in the refugee. We have lost desperately needed images of God as Mother. We have normalized, for huge portions of the world, the experience of being peripheral to the story of God. Actually, if you take into account the pervasiveness of the image of God as a white guy on a throne, the world we find ourselves in makes a lot of sense. God help us.