Brief: Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus (Pt. 1)
In this first installment of Antifascist Christianity: Black Jesus, Matthew revisits Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s journey from the theological classrooms of Berlin to the Black churches of Harlem — where he encountered a Jesus entirely unlike the imperial figure of his upbringing. Bonhoeffer arrived in New York a servant of white European Christendom, and left transformed by the radical, suffering, and liberatory presence of Black Jesus.
Matthew connects Bonhoeffer’s awakening to today’s spectacle of white nationalism in worship — from the triumphalist religion on display at Charlie Kirk’s memorial to the enduring cultural power of “white Jesus” as theology for empire. Drawing on Reggie Williams’s Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen’s The Black Antifascist Tradition, the episode traces how colonialism created a Christ built to bless domination, and how the Black church reclaimed him through solidarity, suffering, and resistance.
The contrast between the fortress hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God and the spiritual Were You There becomes the turning point in Bonhoeffer’s faith — from triumph to trembling, from power to empathy.
Part 2, out Monday on Patreon, explores how liberal Christianity tried to stand between these poles, and why it failed.
Show Notes
Hope, Jeanelle K., and Bill V. Mullen. The Black Antifascist Tradition. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2023.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Revised and Updated Third Edition. Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. Preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Williams, Reggie L. Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014.
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He had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you know.
Five, six white people, pushing me in the cloud.
I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
All you gotta do is receive the packet.
Don't have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.
The Chinatown Sting Hey everybody, this brief is called Anti-Fascist Christianity, Black Jesus Part One, with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for our subscribers.
My name is Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue Sky.
The podcast is on Instagram and Threads under its own handle.
And you can support our Patreon as well.
Also, you can catch me personally over on TikTok at Antifascist Dad.
And my new podcast project called Antifascist Dad should also be findable on your favorite podcast app.
This is the third of several two-part series that I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity.
And all of it fits into the woodshed series where I collect a bunch of useful resources and stories for these very shitty times, and I hope they help.
Now, the first anti-fascist Christianity episode series rolled out back on Labor Day Weekend, and it told the story of German theologian and would-be assassin of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeff, who learned his anti-fascism in the black church of the Harlem Renaissance and his road trips to the Deep South in 1930.
And then the second two-part series looked into the life of Simon Vey, grounding their anti-fascism and spirituality in their neurodivergent experience.
With this installment, I'm turning back to the Bonhoeffer moment to fill out a key chapter, which is that he arrived in the U.S. to attend Union Theological Seminary as a servant of the white Jesus of a crumbling imperial Europe.
But then he left New York as a celebrant of the black Jesus known by enslaved people and colonized people.
So today I'll unpack the origins of white Jesus versus the revolutionary response of black Jesus, which I think maps pretty directly onto the binary of fascism and anti-fascism, both religiously and geopolitically.
Then on Monday, I'll get into the more complex and squishy territory of white liberal Christianity because that's what Bonhoeffer was coming out of with his 1920s Berlin-based theological training.
And he eventually recognized that that is what prevented the German church from responding effectively to Nazism.
And these are the same themes that Martin Luther King Jr. called out among white pastors in his letter from Birmingham Jail, tagging them for wanting respectability and piety, for wanting to preserve their illusory vision of an orderly civilization where they administered the sacraments of normalcy more than they wanted justice.
To make this all as plain and punchy as I can, liberal Christians are to Christofascists what liberal centrists are to fascists.
They want to emcee the rituals of state, hoping to exert a positive influence.
Okay, I want to ground this exploration of black Jesus in the present moment with a snapshot of how white Jesus moves in our world today.
Back on September 21st, a hundred thousand people gathered inside and in an overflow space at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona for Charlie Kirk's memorial service.
I was one of the millions who tuned into the live stream, and two things kept me watching longer than I wanted to.
The first one was like the emotional vapidity of the kitschy Praise music.
But the other was the fact that as a cradle Catholic, lucky enough to grow up with some sense of the social gospel, the Jesus that lives in my head was unhoused, poor, likely illiterate, courageous, empathetic, and certainly odd and inscrutable.
And so it was really disorienting to watch a stadium full of mostly well-off white people say his name over and over again, like a spell while the world burns around them.
And they also would sing it.
What a beautiful name it is.
what a beautiful name it is the name of jesus christ my king what a beautiful name it is Nothing can stand, I guess.
What a beautiful name is Jesus.
What a beautiful name it is.
So yeah, this went on for hours.
Now, in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University of Montreal, psychologist Leon Jacobowitz James coined the phrase semantic satiation to describe this phenomenon, which I think we can see in effect here.
It's where a repetition of a word or phrase causes it to temporarily lose its meaning for the listener, and it makes the speech appear to be meaningless sounds or just strings of letters.
The words become content-free, devoid of meaning.
Now, this happens, James said, through something called reactive inhibition or the loss of meaning intensity in relation to sensory motor activity.
And I think what this boils down to, at least to my layperson's understanding, is that there are only so many things you can put your concentration on at any one time.
If you are really pouring yourself into the sound or the kinetics of a word, you just have less brain juice to consider its meaning.
So this is a value neutral phenomenon that happens in all kinds of contexts and across political and cultural divides, but I think when we detect it happening in a stadium like this, it's particularly chilling because Jesus, as a term seems empty of all meaning and yet filled with incredible power.
Well, maybe not all of the meaning is gone because it does seem that the word retains some kind of sense of certainty and fulfillment.
And you can see this in the raised hands, the nodding heads, the closed eyes that are squeezing out tears.
I guess if I could sum up what I think is being felt and expressed through the repeated name of Jesus here, I think of words like fulfillment or accomplishment or triumph.
And a lot of the context supports this because when the repetitions do stretch out into verses and they actually say other words, the common tropes are about Jesus having solved every problem and vanquished all enemies.
And I think this sense of completeness is the biggest deal.
There's nothing left for the worshiper to do.
Now, if the core feeling is accomplishment or triumph, certainly the avoidance of pain, even at the memorial of a fallen saint, I imagine it could freeze the devotee in time that there would be nothing in the future to work towards.
And all that is past is actually serving the validation of this present moment.
And that's perfect, I think, for this crowd, because it's honestly the religion that white people in power need.
They need everything to be rationalized, accomplished, forgiven.
They need God to reassure them that they are right.
And that reassurance might relieve them of whatever justice work they might imagine having to do.
Now, they might obviously do charity work in their own neighborhoods, but they can go to that funeral and dissociate on the name of Jesus and then get back into their SUVs and drive home past roadblocks where ice goons are slamming Brown people face first into the ground.
Who is the Kirk Jesus and where did he come from?
When I open up this amazing book by Reggie Williams, it's called Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus, Harlem Renaissance, Theology, and an Ethic of Resistance, I get a clearer sense of who the Kirk mourners are praying to.
Quote, the white Christ is the theological muscle, he writes, of the power structure of the color line and its global manifestations, colonization, imperialism, nationalism, and white terrorism in America.
But where does white Jesus come from and how integral is he to the political power structures of the global north?
So Williams is really important in this episode, so I'll lean on him quite a bit.
But there's two other books that are kind of in the background that I want to ping.
The first is Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
And it's a book that marks the split between Marxism and the revolutionary thought emerging from black experience, dating back to colonialism and the African diaspora.
Robinson coined the term racial capitalism, meaning that capitalism was not a revolutionary break from the past, but it actually emerged within the feudal order, which was already thoroughly infused with racism.
And through this lens, the later work of Marxism is then positioned as an internal critique of European bourgeois society.
But black experience offers a challenge to the very foundation of Western civilization.
And I find this really supportive to Williams and his work on the Harlem Renaissance because what Bonhoffer discovers at Abyssinian Baptist is not just a new way of doing Christianity, but a different orientation to the project of civilization altogether.
In other words, Bonhoeff's earlier debates within various forms of Lutheranism are like the hair splitting of European Marxists who spent more time in cafes than in the labor halls.
But when he hears that gospel music, his orderly world just breaks apart.
Now, the other book I'm leaning on in the background is The Black Antifascist Tradition by Janelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, who argue that black people were historically premature anti-fascists, recognizing the threat of fascism rooted in racial capitalism and white supremacy long before its formal rise in interwar Europe.
They trace the black anti-fascist tradition back to Ida B. Wells and their anti-lynching campaign, but also to pan-Africanist and communist organizing against colonialism and figures like Mussolini.
So I'm going to quote from a longish excerpt from Williams for the bulk of this episode.
It'll be slightly abridged, a little bit paraphrased, and I'm going to break in a whole bunch with comments.
Williams says that white Jesus was born from the symbiotic relationship between European theology and the practice of modern colonialism.
This is the time when theology was merged with the colonial system to provide religious authority for centering the world on a European imagination, making Christ a European man, and to offer an apologetics for domination and authoritarianism.
Now I'll break in here to say that as I'm reading this, I'm remembering the downstream effects of this domination in my own church life, because by the time we get to the late 20th century, the more explicit conditions of colonial history have been obscured by globalization.
White Jesus no longer has to prosecute the colonial cause.
He slides into his liberal phase, for lack of a better word.
He's there to simply bless and sanctify the whole project.
And for me, most depictions of Jesus, despite the social gospel inputs I had on board, were all remnants from the 19th century or earlier.
So this Jesus was a guy who looked like he could be my older brother by ethnicity and heritage, but he was stepping out of a Victorian or Renaissance Easter pantomime.
As a white kid, I never had the sense that Jesus was actually foreign from another time and place.
I never thought of him as poor or unhoused.
When I was an altar boy, I was very impressed with how clean the priestly vestments were, how neatly they hung in the sacristy or were folded in the oaken drawers.
There were whole orders of nuns who were responsible for the laundering and ironing of vestments.
And all of this concealed the fact that the robes were meant to mimic the simple, probably ragged and filthy tunic of an iron age carpenter who may never have had access to running water, much less soap.
But white Jesus was like the golden child who'd grown up to be the golden person living in the golden city or suburb, wearing his clean Sunday best robes.
He was the peak outcome of a proud society.
But as a kid, I had no idea what that society was built on.
Now, in the book I have coming out this spring, I recount a little bit about how it all started to dawn on me.
In St. Michael's Cathedral here in Toronto, to which my strict all-boys school was attached, there's a famous statue of the building's namesake, St. Michael, on the right side of the main altar.
Saint Michael, the archangel, is sculpted in heroic form and decked out in armor.
The armor looks Roman, which is really weird because the Romans didn't like Jesus at all.
In fact, they arrested him, they crucified him.
But Michael also looks like Thor from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with wings.
Now, if you let your eyes wander from his blue eyes and long blonde locks, and you follow the spear in his hand down towards its point, you'll see it's buried in his victim, who he towers over.
And the victim also has wings, but his lower body is the body of a serpent.
His face is both terrifying and terrified as he dies, pierced through the heart.
This is Lucifer, the evil fallen angel who tried to challenge the power of God and his angels.
This was an awesome sight when I was eight years old, but one day I realized that Lucifer had a particular look about him.
His skin was almost black, and his face looked Arabic.
And I started to wonder were there white and black angels in heaven?
Did the white ones always win?
So getting back to Reggie Williams, he writes, the imperialist European imagination dispersed throughout the world in the practice of colonialism and sanctified by a white Christ, also theologically justified the European invention of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the color line that belted the planet, subjugating people of color to whites only power structures.
Okay, let me break in here to talk about the color line.
This is an idea that shows where black Jesus and white Jesus are not only theologically opposed, but geopolitically constructed.
And it all goes back to Du Bois.
Now, W.E.B. Du Bois had tried to attend the League of Nations Conference in 1919 that produced the Versailles Treaty and set the terms for German humiliation and eventual backlash.
He went as part of a contingent of 25 leaders of the NAACP, which he'd helped found, and they caucused with global black leaders in the hope that in the wake of Europe having shown its whole ass by turning its colonial war machinery against itself in this terrible great war,
and now deciding to relieve Germany of its colonial holdings, that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for to petition for global South independence altogether.
This was the moment they thought where they could ask for democratic freedoms.
Du Bois was even theorizing like an Ethiopic utopia, all kinds Of grand, beautiful ideas, but he and all other black and colonial leaders were denied participation in the conference.
They asked for an audience with Woodrow Wilson, and they were refused.
Now, with Wilson, there wasn't much hope.
He was the most southern aristocratic racist president in the 20th century.
They asked to be admitted to discussions on world peace, and they were locked out.
And so, as Europe lay in ruins, its leaders recommitted to this colonial divide because the sunken costs were too great.
Like that's what they had been fighting over anyway.
And so the color line, which Du Bois traced all the way back to the dawn of colonialism, was etched more deeply.
And it was at this point that he and his comrades turned their attention even farther east to the Bolsheviks, and in turn, recognizing that the Europeans and even the American communists were ignoring questions of colonialism and black liberation, Lenin himself stood up at the second common turn to tell the whole assembly that revolution anywhere in the world means fighting for black and colonial freedom.
Now, despite the snubbing from Wilson and his gravitation towards Marxist inspiration, Du Bois still managed to write in 1920 in a little book called Darkwater, his profession of faith.
Quote, I believe in God who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell.
I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular and alike in soul or the possibility of infinite development.
Damn, he was a good writer.
But in a preview of his own hints at the vibe of black Jesus, the very next verse pings the Sermon on the Mount.
Quote, especially do I believe in the Negro race, in the beauty of its genius, the sweetness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall yet inherit this turbulent earth.
So back to Reggie Williams and his picture of the religious landscape at that time.
The whole Christian intellectual tradition in the West, including Germany, was impacted by the centering project of European colonialism, and the identity of the world's population was impacted by the Europe as center color line.
The assembly of the Western Theological Academy began in this diseased imagination when native peoples in discovered lands received Christianity as a primarily evaluative practice, equipped to merge brutality and callous indifference to suffering with intellectual formation.
Okay, there's a lot there.
Let me unpack one notion.
Christianity as an evaluative practice in colonialism meant that indigenous people encountered it as a system designed primarily to classify and assign value to human beings.
And in this hierarchy lies the fatal contradiction of white Jesus theology.
Because if love your neighbor as yourself was to be taken seriously, you've got a real problem if you start ranking people out.
Now, in the first few months of this podcast, when anti-vax people started quoting Rudolf Steiner from a 1919 essay on his idea that the Spanish flu was caused by radio waves, or that if we went down the route of vaccinating everybody, pretty soon the Jewish medical establishment would create a vaccine that would disable any spiritual instinct within children.
So because all of these new age wellness cranks came out and started quoting Steiner, I went back into the literature and I said, hey, you know what?
Steiner was a fascist apologist.
He had this whole hierarchy of races, and based upon his juvenile scan of Indian philosophy, he thought that as human beings evolved from lifetime to lifetime, their skin got lighter.
Nobody cared about that argument.
And all of it was true, but I think what it failed to contextualize is that there's no real ideological difference between what Steiner was saying and the overall classification and evaluative strategy of European theology, predating him by hundreds of years.
So I think that if I had the chance to do this again, I would say that Steiner was merely the latest in a long line of religious bigots who believed that spirituality involved a hierarchy of colored bodies, because they were ultimately serving colonialism.
Now, I think this revision is important, and it can be extrapolated to many other aspects of the way in which I've approached conspirituality.
There's this sense sometimes, I think, that somehow weird blood and soil nationalistic ideas sprang up whole cloth from the interwar period, maybe with some prior roots in romantic literature, but actually all of the religious justification for aggression and nationalism and bigotry and scapegoating were all right there.
Not only in the right wing, but embedded in the most mainstream liberal institutions of Europe, because all of those institutions were already serving colonialism.
So if anything made Steiner stand out, it was just that he sounded a little bit old-fashioned, maybe, and of course the Akashic Records thing.
So back to Reggie Williams once again.
The project of theology and colonialism was split in this assembly.
It was primarily doctrinal and conceptual, lacking content for Christian conduct.
That split was necessary to justify the domination of foreign human bodies that accompanied classifying human beings by race, securing the advantages of whiteness, and accommodating the practices of colonialism.
Okay, this idea of lacking content for Christian conduct really hits me hard.
And I'm gonna return to that theme on Monday in my discussion of the function of the liberal white church that I grew up in and how it really did not provide any content for conduct.
Here's Williams again.
To African Americans, this white Christ represented a type of Christianity that aligned with and instigated black suffering.
This Jesus could be viewed as sadistic.
He was a transcendent pedagogue who stood at a distance, coming near only to chastise the sinner with misery.
And this fed into the popularly pejorative images of indolent, lawless, licentious black people who made suffering natural and inevitable.
They called it upon themselves.
It was even theologically appropriate to their lives.
But white Jesus is not just a pedagogue.
And this figure was familiar to Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran minister steeped in the hymns of Martin Luther, but also coming of age in the post-World War I era in which German self-regard desperately needed new confidence.
So Bonhoeffer grew up singing Einfesteburg in his robust voice.
The translation goes, a mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing, our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing, for still our ancient foe does seek to work us woe, his craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate on earth is not his equal.
And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him, his rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.
One little word shall fell him.
And then in some versions, this other verse appears, which is super important.
the commander is called Christ Jesus.
He carries the word of the kingdom of heaven as the strongest sword in faith.
Neither sword nor spear is as powerful that is made at all times and still penetrates through death and life.
Now, when I was a choir boy, I sang this at the top of my lungs as well.
And it was rousing, it was triumphant.
And in my imagination, I kind of linked it up with maybe Minus Tirith, the fortress capital of Gondor and Lord of the Rings.
And looking back, it was a weird memory.
Because what had I personally won?
Whose triumphant side or team was I on?
And why was I on that team?
So this hymn floated into my sphere on a swell of organ music, and I didn't know where it came from or what it meant.
And here's my guess, which is that at some point a person can meet a psychological fork in the road with this stuff.
The old nationalist or imperial material continues to buoy you up, make you feel good, so long as you don't think too hard about it.
Or it starts to sound hollow.
Now, for me, it was the latter.
And I don't know why.
Maybe it had something to do with the contradiction between this vision of a mighty fortress and the life experience that people within this fortress could be cruel, petty, and venal.
Something was sour about it, hypocritical.
So as a teenager, I recall feeling increasingly uneasy with Christian and Catholic doctrine and rules.
But also, I think on a deeper level, this smugness that I must be right or self-justified, it started to feel bad.
And in moments of fatigue or depression, this feeling of triumphalist fervor could still burble up and sort of carry me away.
But if I was grounded in my own personality, I would hear the initial chords swell and I would feel a little bit nauseous.
I would definitely want to check out.
But when I think of my classmates from that time, I don't know if any of them developed strongly leftist politics, which I believe on the affect level are based on the feeling that no, history is not over.
God has not won this.
The world is in terrible suffering, and we have a lot of work to do.
And I wonder whether they never really met that fork in the road, whether they never felt the nausea of skepticism rise.
Maybe forever and always a mighty fortress was a mighty fortress that they could return to in their minds like a bulwark against dissatisfaction, against disillusionment.
But I also think that that feeling can be a life raft.
Because here's a paradox: Ein Festgeburck was so etched into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's mind from childhood that it came back to him in prison as he was awaiting execution.
One biography records that he loved to sing it briskly with a jaunty rhythm with his fellow prisoners.
I imagine there was some outdoorsy German youth energy vibes going on as well.
And I think this pride and defiance is understandable if it's going to be your last song and the SS is standing outside your prison door.
It might be a bit of a troll, actually, singing about being safe in a fortress when you are locked in a prison.
But there was another hymn that Bonhoeffer loved, one of many that he brought back on those 78s from New York.
It was the spiritual, were you there?
And I think it's in the contrast of these two hymns that we find the question and answer of Bonhoeffer's life, as the white Jesus encounters the black.
And it goes like this: "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there when they pierced him in the side?
Were you there when the sun refused to shine?
Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
There is no fortress in this hymn.
This is a pure confession and identification with the person executed by the state.
It is the opposite of battle and victory.
It is pure loss, and it is absolutely present, intimate, and challenging.
And the challenge really is were you there?
Means, are you here?
Or from what basis are you acting as a person in the world right now?
How engaged and locked in are you?
So who in the end is the black Jesus that Bonhoffer met and saw in Harlem?
According to Reggie Williams, Black Jesus is defined primarily by his solidarity with the oppressed and his identity as a figure of suffering.
He is a co-sufferer.
Also, because of that suffering, he is hidden, invisible to the white world, because white Jesus was constructed to legitimize their racialized social imagination and to justify white supremacy.
This counterfeit Jesus relegates the black Jesus to the shadows, which is where the marginalized live.
From that space, Harlem Renaissance thinkers sought to reclaim Jesus by imagining his historical connection to persecuted minorities as one who was also subjected to an abusive empire.
This allowed a faith to be born and shaped in the heat of oppression and suffering and connected the dissonant strands of grief and hope in the experience of black people.
And we're talking about a concrete and active inspiration.
Black Jesus does not bring Christianity as an opiate or a distant abstract faith.
Instead, he invites black Americans to show fidelity to the church by demonstrating solidarity with social outcasts, even if it costs them their lives.
Okay, so I'll pause there for today, and I'll come back on Monday with an exploration of the squishier compromises of liberal Christianity in relation to black Jesus, because I think they have a lot to tell us about this season of squishes we're in.
