Foreword to "When God Became White" by David P. Gushee
I am so excited about my forthcoming book, When God Became White which explores the historical origins and theological implications of how Jesus became white and God became a white male.
I am honored that Dr. David P. Gushee wrote the Foreword to my forthcoming book, When God Became White. Below is a portion of his Foreword.
In the book you are about to read, Grace Ji-Sun Kim does three very important things. First, she offers a sustained critique not just of whiteness but of white maleness as an ideology and a theology. Second, she tells parts of her own story as a Korean immigrant first to Canada and then the United States. Third, she offers a way of thinking about God that can contribute to the dismantling of inherited theology that she seeks.
I want to say a word about each of these elements.
Critique of the white male God. The reader would do well to understand the multiple dimensions of the critique. Dr. Kim is arguing that, at least after the conversion of Constantine and the Romanization, then Europeanization, of an originally Middle Eastern Jewish movement called Christianity, that religion came under the dominance of European men of power both political and religious. Eventually, in the colonial era, these men carried their particular version of Christianity all over the world. Gradually, they came to define themselves as racially white over against other “lesser” races of people that they were encountering, conquering, enslaving, and killing. They also came to define their God as someone remarkably like themselves—the greatest of all white male conquerors.
The whiteness that Professor Kim is critiquing, and the white male God that she is trying to dismantle, is this ideological God who, perhaps in somewhat more subtle ways than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, remains the God not just of today’s white male Christians but of many believers of color whose minds and souls have been colonized by the white male God of conqueror-enslaver-dominator-missionary Christianity. This is a God who supports both continued oppression of people of color but also their own self-abnegation.
A Korean immigrant’s painful journey. In what I experienced as the most deeply affecting parts of the book, Dr. Kim describes significant parts of her own difficult journey. This is the story of a young girl brought with her family from Korea to Canada and plunged with her family into a life of poverty and culture shock. The initial involvement and then conversion of her family to a rigidly conservative, white-missionary-influenced version of Christianity is also powerfully recounted here. These stories put flesh on the bones of Professor Kim’s account of the white male God. For it was this God whom her family was led to worship and serve. It was this God who underwrote the severe patriarchy of her family system. And it was breaking with this God that has been such a painful but liberating transition in Dr. Kim’s own life. One sees the many losses that she has sustained in finally sloughing off the authoritarian white male God with whom she spent her childhood and adolescence and who apparently still rules in her family or origin. (*Please pre-order When God Became White to read the entire Foreword by David P. Gushee).
***Please listen to Dr. Gushee on Madang Podcast where he shares his important book, Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies.
“Racism hurts the oppressor too. It distorts our sense of self-worth, damages human relations, and creates distance in the relationship with God."
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