See: http://www.brin.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/No-75-December-2021-1.pdf
The link is to the December 2021 edition of Counting Religion in Britain. Its first entry is about an opinion poll on what is acceptable when Jesus’s ethnicity is depicted. The poll was an online survey by YouGov of a national cross-section of 1,714 Britons carried out on 14– 15 December 2021. These were the headline figures:
- 58% of the public think Jesus is usually depicted in images as a white person and 22% as Middle Eastern.
- When asked which racial group he could be depicted as being from, 68% believed Middle Eastern was acceptable, 63% white, 44% black, 40% as South Asian, and 37% as East Asian.
The questions were also put to a sample of 1,023 black, Asian, and minority ethnic adults on 8–16 December 2021. In this case:
- 60% felt it acceptable to depict Jesus as Middle Eastern. In a sub-sample of respondents who were Christian, the result was the same.
More details, including full data tables, can be viewed here.
The linked article – Matthew Smith’s What race can Jesus be? – contains the following paragraphs:
“The image of Christ as a man with white skin and blue eyes would appear to be at odds with what is likely, given the biblical account of his family hailing from the Middle East.
Nevertheless, Britons are far more likely to say they usually see Jesus being depicted as White (58%) than Middle Eastern (22%).
This is despite the fact that a Middle Eastern Jesus is the one that makes most sense to Britons. Two thirds (68%) say it would be acceptable to depict Christ as having Middle Eastern racial characteristics, compared to only 9% who disagree.”
The article also gives age-related data. “There is a noticeable age difference on these two characterisations: while opinion is near identical across all ages for a Middle Eastern Jesus, younger Britons are less accepting of a White saviour (51% of 18-24 year olds, 61% of 25-49 year olds) than their elders (66-67% of those aged 50 and above).”
Some ideas for basing teaching on the research now follow.
- As with the representations of Muslims and Islam in the British media research, decide where to include the material in your curriculum. It could be in a topic on Christianity, Jesus, religion and the arts, or religion and social or community cohesion.
- Within a lesson, it also has various possible uses (introduction, main task(s), plenary, or summary). In the outline given below, the idea is that pupils will be initially engaged by images rather than statistics.
- You could begin by presenting a series of images of Jesus, varying by ethnic or other appearance, and asking pupils to respond to each. Where is it from? What is the artist trying to convey? What else strikes you? Which is most likely to ne historically accurate and why? In looking for images, you might start at Jen Jenkins’s superb RE:engaging collection of (mainly) Christian iconography from different traditions it/6AcFrY2 We are very grateful to Jen for this resource.
- Then introduce the YouGov poll, talking briefly through some headline data before giving pupils a more detailed datasheet to discuss in pairs or groups. Why do you think British people are much more likely to see Jesus depicted as White than Middle Eastern? Why is there a big difference between the Jesus most British people would expect to see and the depiction of Jesus that makes most sense to them? Why do you think younger people are less accepting of the idea of a White Jesus?
- Finally, take and discuss feedback of ideas from pairs or groups. This could precede a concluding discussion on why all this matters. Is it only a question of historical accuracy, or is more at stake? For Justine Ball, a dominant White depiction of Jesus “does not allow an opportunity for all children regardless of their background to see themselves in the teaching resources used and is something which suggests that a colonised curriculum is present in RE”. See Justine Ball, An approach to decolonising teaching about Jesus in primary schools.
Justine’s piece describes her own research in this area and makes practice recommendations, including that we should not only consider what we present, but what we leave out; that Jesus’s Jewish context should be referenced; and that “the artwork that teachers use should not only reflect the worldwide global nature of Christianity, but also reflect the multicultural nature of Christianity in the UK.”