Changing their gods and changing their names was one way to achieve this. The neophyte consciously opted for a better life in terms of personal dignity and freedom. In converting to a new way of life, earlier generations sought to escape caste oppression and the humiliations inflicted on them by their native religious establishment. The same can be said of the ways in which Christians in Asia see themselves.
There’s an old saying regarding immigration: “The second generation always tries to remember what the first generation always wanted to forget.” This is why when, in more recent times, contemporary Christian artists have attempted to give churches an indigenous look (modeling them on temple architecture, for instance) or to give Jesus a dark, indigenous face, and Mary an indigenous saree, these very innovations have met with resistance or disdain from Christians themselves. If it was foreign and Western, it was certainly better. For such depictions, like church architecture, ritual vestments and hymnody are part and parcel of a complex of signs and symbols which took the Christian neophyte away from his indigenous roots and gave him a special identity, a new reference group - a foreign, Western ethos - whose main attractiveness lay in being distinct and different from his native background. Countless examples of calendar art and church statuary reinforce these impressions.įew of us would ever publicly question such depictions, so thoroughly have we taken them for granted. Thus does imagination shape our piety and devotion. Angels are usually nubile young women in flowing white, with eagle’s wings (never mind that all the biblical names for the angels are masculine), and devils are always ugly black men with horns, bat’s wings, cloven hooves and a dragon’s tail. God the Father is an old white man with a flowing white beard, and the Holy Spirit is a white bird! Mother Mary, also in white and blue, is sexless and insipid. Jesus is presented as a white man, with long blond hair and a beard, and draped in a white and red flowing garment. It is, may we say, a white man’s fantasy. The traditional religious imagery, which many of us Asian Christians have grown up with, has been Western. It affects all religious symbols - the ways Hindus depict their gods and goddesses, their devas and asuras why Muslim iconography is adamantly against any human image and the lurid sexual imagery found in many tribal sanctuaries. Rather, its ramifications reach far beyond. This is not just a Christian issue, though this article will restrict itself to just the Christian culture. Thus the question: are our imaginations so colonized that whatever is white is pure and beautiful, and black becomes ugly and demonic? In other words, do we ever critique the sacred figures and persons we revere and pray to? How do we imagine our gods and saints? What lies at the root of such fantasies? “Mr Wesley,” they protested, “we can’t use this picture! You’ve painted Jesus Christ as a colored man!” Some board members did so and then huddled together agitated before confronting the artist. When the mural was completed, he invited his sponsors to view the painting before it was installed in the church.
Wesley chose as his theme Christ raising the paralytic by the pool ( John c. An American evangelical group once commissioned well-known Indian Christian artist Frank Wesley to paint a mural for a new church being built in Tokyo.
And this means religious change too - for nothing so shapes our beliefs and mindsets as the religious values which influence our lives.Īnd many of these values are imbibed unknowingly from the pictures and movies we see.Ī little story will illustrate what I mean. You are now signed up to Daily newsletterīut these demands are not just for sociopolitical change but for a change of attitude as well.