Photos: Wikimedia Commons.
There’s an irony in our politics that I just can’t shake, and it all comes back to a picture of Jesus a whole lot of folks refuse to let go of.
Look around at the Christian right, especially the loudest Christian nationalists beating their chests on cable news and online. You’ll run right into this stubborn, dead-set claim that Jesus was a white guy.
They’ve got him painted up with pale skin, neat flowing hair, and European features, looking like he just walked out of a Renaissance painting instead of ancient Judea.
It’s been treated like gospel truth on Sunday school walls forever, but watching people dig their heels in today feels less like an honest mistake and more like folks trying to remake God in their own backyard image.
The actual history isn’t complicated. Jesus of Nazareth was a Middle Eastern Jewish guy living under Roman occupation. He was olive- or brown-skinned, with dark hair, dark eyes, and Semitic features.
That’s why seeing folks like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani on the political stage really grabs you!
Put aside party squabbles for a minute and just look at them. Really look. Their heritage and faces give us a much better idea of what a first-century tradesman from the Levant actually looked like than any European portrait ever will.
If the historical Jesus hopped off the Red Line or showed up at O’Hare today, he’d look a whole lot closer to them than to the fair-skinned picture in a church lobby.
But for a lot of people on the religious right, that kind of skin tone and Middle Eastern heritage gets treated like an automatic red flag.
The bigger disconnect goes past looks, though. It’s about the work.
Look at the everyday nuts-and-bolts policies El-Sayed and Mamdani push. They talk about making sure working folks can actually get to a doctor, keeping transit fares affordable so people can get to their jobs, stopping landlords from throwing families out on the street, feeding hungry kids, and putting a check on runaway corporate greed. Their whole focus is on the sick, the struggling, and the people on the bottom who don’t have clout.
Open up the Gospels, whether it’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and that’s the exact heart of Jesus’s ministry.
In Matthew 25, Jesus lays it out plain. Whatever you did for the least of these, whether it was putting food on a hungry person’s plate, handing a warm coat to someone without one, caring for the sick, or taking in a stranger, you did it right to him.
The Beatitudes lift up the meek, the peacemakers, and the merciful.
Mary’s song in Luke talks about God filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty-handed.
Jesus spent his whole time calling out the big shots and religious leaders who cared more about strict rules and hoarding power than simple human mercy.
Yet the noise coming from the Christian right sounds nothing like that. Instead of the grace, humility, and fierce care for working-class and marginalized people you get in the Gospels, they thump on the harshest, most punishing parts of the Old Testament.
It’s an obsession with payback, who’s on top, and policing everybody else’s personal life, usually aimed right at the people Jesus stood up for. A political crowd that wraps itself in the name of Christ constantly votes down healthcare, fights against free school lunches, shuts the door on refugees running for their lives, and pats the richest guys in the room on the back.
It leaves you with a wild contradiction. People worship an imaginary white savior while flat-out rejecting both the actual heritage of the real Jesus and the core moral teachings of the Gospels.
Meanwhile, leaders who share his Near Eastern roots, and who fight for practical policies grounded in real mercy, get written off as outsiders.
It tells you that for a lot of people, insisting on a white, nationalistic Jesus isn’t about faith at all. It’s about protecting their own comfort and keeping control.
Because if you have to look in the mirror and admit Jesus was a brown-skinned Jewish carpenter whose main order was to serve the poor and welcome the stranger, you’d have to rethink your whole operation.
