Your Own Personal Jesus

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars, and I’m in the studio with Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Hey, Roman. So, I want you to do something for me, okay? And I’m coming in kind of hot, all right? 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, I want you to picture in your head an image of Jesus Christ–specifically the Jesus that you saw in your imagination when you were growing up.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. When I was growing up–okay. This does feel like a trap, but I will play along. So, mostly I’m picturing kind of, you know, flowy brown hair, a peaceful face–lean and bearded–white with blue eyes… I recognize what territory we’re getting into here with blue eyes.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Okay, good. 

ROMAN MARS: But, like, a nice surfer. A mild, peaceful, nice surfer. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Yeah, same! Listen, this is not a trap, man. And the way that you described him–that’s exactly how I grew up thinking about Jesus, too. And a lot of our listeners may have also grown up seeing this same mental image of Jesus. And so what I’m here to tell you today is that that mental image that’s in so many of our heads–that idea of what Jesus looks like–it actually comes, in large part, from one single painting that was made in 1940 in Chicago. And it was called the Head of Christ. And it’s the single most popular, most ubiquitous image of Jesus in the world. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. Okay. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, here, let me show it to you. 

ROMAN MARS: Yep. That’s the dude. He’s kind of three quarters of a profile, blue eyes, white, thin, lean, trim beard… He’s got this sort of soft glow around him as he looks softly into the distance. But yeah, that’s the Jesus. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: That’s the guy, right? And this Head of Christ painting is, by some accounts, the single best known piece of American artwork of the whole 20th century. It’s been reproduced a billion times, spread all over the planet. And it has shaped so many of the popular depictions of Jesus that we know. 

ROMAN MARS: And just up front here, like, we don’t know much about what Jesus actually looked like, right?

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: We don’t! And the Bible doesn’t tell us a whole lot. But that fact hasn’t stopped anybody. Artists have been creating images of Jesus for many, many centuries, all over the world. 

ROMAN MARS: So, Joy and I went and saw The Last Supper in Milan, in person, last year. And I didn’t really think about it much at the time, but I just kind of pulled it up as we were talking, to see how different it was from this Head of Christ image that you just showed me. And it’s really different. So, there’s lots of different images of Jesus out there. And some of them are very famous, like the Last Supper. And so how did this one painting–Head of Christ–come to dominate all of our images of Jesus in our heads? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Okay, so that story starts with a Chicago artist named Warner Sallman. Back in the 1920s, Sallman was a commercial illustrator who did ads for pianos and toothbrushes and trucks and suits and stuff like that. He was also a Christian, and he volunteered to be the art director for this new magazine for young people that his church had just started. And in early 1924, he was on deadline to draw something for the cover art.

ROMAN MARS: And is he trying to draw Jesus–put Jesus on the issue of this magazine, kind of like Oprah on every cover of Oprah magazine–or what? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: I mean, you know, he’s the art director for this kids, Christian magazine. I guess he could make whatever he wanted. But then Sallman suddenly got artist’s block. Is there such a thing as artist’s block?

JACK LUNDBOM: He said he had been working on it for a while, and nothing worked out. He was unsatisfied with everything he tried. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This is Jack Lundbom. He’s Warner Sallman’s biographer, and the two were good friends. 

JACK LUNDBOM: And, yeah, it came close to the deadline. He went to sleep. And during the night, he had a dream or a vision, in which he saw this picture in his mind’s eye. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, he got out of bed. And he penciled out kind of a first draft. And the next day, he turned that into a larger charcoal sketch. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so what did this charcoal drawing look like? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, this was a very simple sketch black charcoal sketch of Jesus’ head. This is still 15 years before Sallman would make his world famous Head of Christ painting. And this drawing is much more basic than that. But the template is definitely there, and you can see the similarities. It’s Jesus’ head with long, wavy hair, the trimmed beard, and those soft, peaceful eyes gazing off into the distance.

ROMAN MARS: And in his biography or in the story of his life, is there ever an explanation as to why he drew Jesus this way? Why did the drawing come out like this? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Well, there are a few answers. One answer, of course, is that this is the image that he saw in his vision. But there are a couple of other reasons too. You know, people had depicted Jesus for a long time before Warner Sallman sat down. And Sallman admitted he’d seen some of those and he got inspiration from those. But probably the biggest thing that inspired Sallman was that in the mid 1920s, around the time that he made this drawing, there was this growing general concern that American Christian men were getting soft. Part of that anxiety was stoked by changes in work. People were becoming more sedentary, there were more office jobs, and folks were worried that men were getting more sluggish and putting on weight. This was especially problematic for Christians who felt that a man of God was supposed to be exemplary and disciplined and strong, not some schlubby pencil pusher. On top of that, white Protestants like Sallman were really freaked out about cities. 

DAVID MORGAN: Oh, there was a real concern that city life sapped moral goodness and energy. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This is David Morgan. He’s an art historian who teaches religious studies at Duke, and he’s written a lot about Sallman’s artwork. 

DAVID MORGAN: Sallman was very much a part of this discourse about particularly the effect on men–that they lost their masculinity. They became effeminate. They became preoccupied with the pleasures of a city life that would distract from moral mission and fail to recognize what was supposed to make them different from the world. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: And so, one reaction to this was this movement that was called Muscular Christianity. The movement started in England and was picked up by Protestants in the U.S. who felt that they had to redefine what it meant to be a real Christian man. And so, people like Sallman, who were connected to that movement, felt one of the best ways to inspire men–and especially young men and boys–to be more fit and strong and manly and courageous was to give them images of Jesus Christ that had those same qualities.

EDWARD BLUM: There’s this strong desire for a new image of Jesus. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This is Edward Blum. He’s a historian who co-authored the book The Color of Christ: The Son of God & The Saga of Race in America. 

EDWARD BLUM: There’s a desire for a Jesus who would represent manliness and masculinity in a time when white men often feel like they’re kind of losing their masculine identity.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: And so the 1924 drawing that Warner Sallman made for the kids magazine–that was his attempt at this. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. But here’s the thing… 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: What’s up? 

ROMAN MARS: This image… It’s not what I would… Masculinity is not the first word that would come to me. You know what I’m saying? This is not stereotypically– This is a person who has a very, very gentle face. I mean, maybe the action of this moment is masculine, but this image doesn’t scream that without that context. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Hey, listen, I agree. But masculine was exactly what Warner Sallman was going for here. 

DAVID MORGAN: When Sallman produced his image, he was interviewed. And he made this point that my image of Jesus–that drawing–a, in his phrase, “manly image of Christ that our young people need.”

ROMAN MARS: And so how was this prototype Head of Christ image received? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Well, Sallman’s church members liked it a lot. But the image mostly just circulated inside that small, tight-knit, religious community. 

JACK LUNDBOM: Keep in mind, this is only in the Midwest. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This is Sallman’s friend and biographer, Jack Lumbom, again.

JACK LUNDBOM: Really, his exposure was largely in covenant churches in the Chicago and Midwest. Very few people outside of the Midwest would have known the Sallman name or the picture. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: But this was all about to change. And what took this image to the next level was when it went from a small black and white, charcoal sketch to this full size oil painting done in color. 

In the late 1930s, Sallman met a couple of marketing reps who sold Christian goods. And was this guy named Fred Bates. Fred Bates worked for a big company that was later named Warner Press. Warner Press made and sold all sorts of Christian themed merch. You’ve seen this stuff, like thermometers, table sets, including plates and pans, lamps, pencils, mirrors–all with biblical mottos and scripture on them. Warner Press started selling prints of Sallman’s simple black and white charcoal drawing. And then Fred Bates started whispering in Sallman’s ear that they would love to see a version of this black and white drawing of Jesus done in color. Bates and his colleagues at Warner Press believed that a color version would have way more appeal to the masses.

ROMAN MARS: And why did Fred Bates think that a color version of Jesus would do so much better commercially than the black and white version they were already selling?

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Because it would feel less like, you know, sketched art, which is kind of what the drawing really looked like, and more like a real portrait. 

DAVID MORGAN: The representatives of Warner Press said, “You know, we think doing a color version of this would have added appeal and could be used in a variety of different ways. You could create little prayer cards. You could create color reproductions to frame and hang in the home.” What they were talking about were commercial possibilities. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Mostly, Sallman just kind of ignored Bates’ request. But then, in 1940, Sallman, on the low, actually did do a version that was a full color oil painting. And he named that painting “Head of Christ.”

ROMAN MARS: Ah. So, this is the painting that you showed me earlier: Jesus with three quarters of a profile, gentle blue eyes, trim beard, white guy, that soft glow in the background, looking off into the distance–all that. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Exactly. And when Sallman first painted it, he just kind of hung it above the family piano and went on with his life. 

And then, one night, Fred Bates stopped by Sallman’s house. And he saw the Head of Christ painting. And he was like, “Yes, this is it!” He was totally enchanted. I mean, to him, this looked like the real guy. This is what he’d been asking for. And he loved this painting. 

DAVID MORGAN: And when Bates saw that, they said, “We think this sort of thing can sell.” So, they felt like, “We can take this from being a magazine illustration into a special object in domestic life.” And I think their intuition was quite correct. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, Warner Press did a print run of Head of Christ in various sizes. And they tested it, and they tweaked the image. And then in early 1941, the first print run of 100,000 copies went out into the world. They were distributed through those Christian bookstores, through door-to-door sales people, catalogs, and of course through churches. And that print run sold out, Roman, in two months. 

ROMAN MARS: Jesus! Well that’s a lot. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: By the end of the year, more than a million copies of the Head of Christ image had been distributed. And then, over the next several years, four million more versions of the Head of Christ image went out in all different sizes on all kinds of stuff like bookmarks, baptism announcements, obituaries–you name it. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I can imagine it doing well, you know? It’s a pretty painting of a man. But surely this isn’t the only contemporary color painting of Jesus that looks kind of realistic. Like, why was this one–why was Head of Christ in particular–the one that was so wildly popular? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Okay, so here’s what art historian David Morgan says. He says that the difference was that this image–it looked like more than just a painting. It looked to a lot of people as if someone had taken a camera and snapped a real photo of a living Jesus Christ.

DAVID MORGAN: When I was talking to people and would sometimes ask them, “What is it you really like about this picture?” some would say, “Well, because it’s what Jesus really looked like,” and some would say, “Frankly, it’s a photograph of Jesus.” I was struck by how they would regard authenticity in photographic terms.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: And so what David noticed was just how much this painting uses elements of what was then modern studio photography–portraiture. This was super popular at the time that Sallman made Head of Christ, especially for things like high school and college yearbook pictures. 

DAVID MORGAN: You would walk in–sit down–and there was a… There was a shtick–a visual shtick. “This is how you pose. This is what the photographer’s looking for because that’s how everybody thinks you need to be remembered.” 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, now that you’ve mentioned it, I totally didn’t put it together, but it really does look like Jesus Christ’s senior yearbook photo. [CHUCKLES] 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Yes, exactly! And so, like, you’re right. When you look at the position of Christ’s head, David says it has that three quarters pose. 

DAVID MORGAN: Typically looking away–looking off into the future, into the past, wherever–it gave you much of the face. And by the early 20th century, the three quarter pose was considered the dignified look of eternity. “This is how I will be remembered forever.”

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: And then there were the ways that Sallman mimicked studio lighting to get that Sears portrait studio gauziness that you see in Head of Christ. He uses yellows, whites, and tans to create the sense that Jesus is both emanating light and he’s also lit up like he’s in a studio.

DAVID MORGAN: He decided–I think creatively–that “this is how I’m going to show Jesus. This will give him a presence and a kind of relevance.” And people said– One woman told me, “This is what he really looked like.” What she meant was it matched the image in her mind of what Jesus looked like. And when that happens, that clicks–that’s why people form such a lively emotional connection to the picture. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s so remarkable that he’s using a sort of visual vernacular of this moment to create a portrait of Jesus that looks like a photograph. And then it matched the image that Christians had in their minds of what Jesus actually looked like. And so you give them this portrait that looks like a family member whose picture you just, like, hang up in your living room. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: A photo, basically. 

ROMAN MARS: And so this, like, portrait studio vibe… Is this the thing that really makes it go global? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Well, that’s why people were so drawn to it–that studio portrait vibe. But what really made it go global was an incredible mass distribution effort during World War II. And that effort was called Christ in Every Purse. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. It has a name. Christ in Every Purse. So what was that? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: It’s pretty much what it sounds like. It was a huge project that was started by Christians in Indiana to get Head of Christ images that were about the size of baseball cards handed out to soldiers who wanted them.

DAVID MORGAN: Every GI was offered this picture. “Take this picture with you. It’s made for your pocket.” And many of them did. And it went through the war with them so that, when these folks came back, many of them still had the picture of Jesus and had developed narratives about how important it was and what it meant to them.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: David says that when he was doing research about Head of Christ, he got letters from hundreds of veterans and their families. And those letters talked about how, for the GIs in World War II, that small image became a talisman and a protector, an inspiration, a source of good luck, and also a reminder of fellow soldiers who they’d lost on the battlefield.

ROMAN MARS: That’s amazing. I mean, it seems like it would become infused with a bunch of power because of that. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Definitely. And then in the decade after the war, tens of thousands of prints were going out every month. And they were going to Alcoholics Anonymous, they were going to the Salvation Army, and they were going out to all sorts of huge international Christian groups and leagues. They were all a part of this, and they were giving Head of Christ cards away. And in the U.S., the spread of Sallman’s image also synced up with this much larger effort to inject Christianity into public spaces. 

DAVID MORGAN: After the war, in the sort of Cold War setting, there were movements to put that image of Jesus in settings like courtrooms and libraries and public buildings and to blur any distinction of sacred and secular.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: That movement actually succeeded. In the mid 1950s, around the same time that the phrase, “Under God,” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, Head of Christ was being hung in public schools and hospitals and all sorts of public buildings all over the country. 

Historian Edward Blum says the biggest impact of this super saturation of the globe with this image was that Sallman’s Head of Christ then eclipsed most other images of Jesus in the popular imagination.

EDWARD BLUM: Before 1940, you just see lots of more localized images of Jesus. There’s a lot more flexibility in how people present Jesus–how they alter images of him. And really after the Warner Sallman revolution and the image, it became the ur-symbol. It became the symbol by which all other symbols that were then judged. If it was close enough to Sallman’s Head of Christ, that could be what Jesus looked like. But if it was too far, then it was just symbolic or metaphorical. Sallman’s Head of Christ became the Head of Christ–not a Head of Christ–for how people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, then judged what Jesus actually would have looked like.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This one image was so wildly successful that Sallman’s publishers at Warner Press went to him and they said, “We want more of this. Give us more Head of Christ, please.” And so, Sallman, who passed away in 1968, made many more religious paintings featuring Jesus in all these different scenes. And so, even as the scenes changed, the Jesuses still looked like the guy from the Head of Christ painting. And so, I think you can trace a throughline from Sallman’s Head of Christ and all of those Head of Christ-inspired pieces that he did much later to a lot of our popular culture depictions of Jesus today. And that image of Jesus, which is so fully soaked into our popular consciousness– Of course, he’s a white man. He’s got these blue gray eyes–this straight Roman nose. And so, when Head of Christ became the dominant portrayal of Jesus, that portrayal really helped crystallize this single popular image of this guy who is white. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, whiteness is a very thorny and big concept, which many, many books have been written about. And it’s got too much to go into here. But, like, in terms of the historical Jesus, what do we know or what do we think we know about what he might have looked like?

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: As you were just suggesting, there is a lot to say about this. And we won’t do it here. But what we do know, of course, is that Jesus was a Jewish man who was born in what is now the West Bank in Palestine. And although the Bible doesn’t tell us much about what he looked like, lots of people think that he would have been, at the very least, a lot more brown than the Jesus that’s portrayed in Sallman’s Head of Christ and in the subsequent renderings inspired by Head of Christ. Warner Sallman was a white Christian artist who painted a world famous image of a white Jesus. And what made the image so meaningful to so many Americans was its whiteness.

DAVID MORGAN: It gave Americans, particularly white Americans, a Jesus that was theirs–their take. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: This is art historian David Morgan again. 

DAVID MORGAN: It gave that image a special, comforting, reliable portrait of not only who Jesus was but who they are as Jesus people. And race is very much a part of this. You know, they wanted to see a white Jesus.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: But as much as white Americans fell in love with this image, they were not the only ones who used it a lot in their homes and churches. But we can talk about that after the break. 

ROMAN MARS: We’ll do that after the break.

[ AD BREAK]

Okay. So, before the break, we were talking specifically about what this white Jesus meant to white Americans, especially white Christians. And so I’m curious about what this image meant to non-white Christians.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Yeah, so Head of Christ was not just popular among white Christians. You could find Sallman’s image in the homes and the churches of brown and Black Christians too. I mean, I know in my family, both my grandma and my great grandma–who were very religious Black women–they definitely had things around their houses with the Head of Christ image on it. And so in Black churches, you might have seen someone’s Head of Christ in the vestibules or on people’s Bibles, maybe in the sanctuary, and very, very likely on those handheld, paper church fans that people would use to cool themselves during service.

ROMAN MARS: So, why do you think Black Christians also use this image? I mean, if white Christians saw themselves in this rendering of white Jesus, what did non-white Christians get out of this image? 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: So, I talked with a former pastor named Willie James Jennings about this. He teaches theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School. And he says that one reason you find white Jesus in Black, Christian spaces has to do with capitalism. Historically, it’s been white companies, not Black ones, that control the production of religious goods. And those companies aren’t necessarily thinking about diversity. They’re thinking about which Jesus image is going to make their Bibles and their church fans sell.

WILLIE JENNINGS: And so, to place a white Jesus on a fan that you’re trying to sell made perfect sense. And for Black folks, without control over that economy, we were often at the receiving end of that work. So, what this meant was that you had church communities that were flooded with fans because we got a good deal on a package of 50.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Jennings also says that Black and brown Christians who were part of a society that pushed white Jesus for centuries sometimes understandably came to envision Christ that way themselves. 

WILLIE JENNINGS: There is a way of understanding our devotion to God that accepts the white Jesus image as normal. When they were asked to close their eyes and pray, it would not be unusual for people–not only people of African descent, but people all over the world… When they close their eyes and think about the Jesus who they’re praying to, he looks like that man that is on that fan.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: But then, in the 1960s, a lot of Black churchgoers started to rethink their use of images like Head of Christ. This was the era of “Black is Beautiful” racial pride. There was this huge shift in racial consciousness that permeated all sectors of Black American life, including how Black folks worshipped. And so churches started to get rid of depictions of white Jesus. And they started replacing those with images that look more like them and that portrayed a religious life in which they could see themselves. 

WILLIE JENNINGS: Black churches start to get a better sense of the importance of challenging the images that were being put in front of us that underwrote white dominance. And so that’s when you start to have people change out those fans, start to have churches change out their stained glass windows, and start to have churches create murals and paintings and pictures that depicted Black life and the beauty of Black life as fundamental to shaping our devotion. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so I definitely get the idea here. But could you give me an example of what this looked like?

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Sure. So, I mean, there are countless examples of this. But one of my favorites actually isn’t about Head of Christ specifically, but it is about putting more Black Jesus imagery in a Black church, specifically the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, the KKK bombed that church, killing four Black girls. And in that bombing, some of the church’s stained glass was damaged, including windows depicting white Christs. Two years after that bombing, the church installed what’s known as the Wales Window, which sits above the main entrance to the church. And the Wales Window is this huge, gorgeous, stained glass depiction of a Black Jesus dressed in all white. And he’s set against this backdrop that just shimmers with all these different shades of blue and purple. And there’s this bright rainbow that fans out between his arms as he stretches his hands towards the sky. Roman, it is a beautiful piece of art. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: And there have been several popular renderings of Black Jesus, at least among Black folks, but still nothing with the kind of singular global impact of Head of Christ. So, at the end of the day, despite all of these alternatives, the Head of Christ image persists. And it’s still super powerful and pernicious. And it still feels to a lot of people like the right version of Jesus. It’s really hard to undo that. You know, when you see a Black Jesus or a Korean Jesus or an indigenous Jesus, it’s usually called Black Jesus or Korean Jesus or, you know, Indian or native Jesus. Whereas Sallman’s Jesus is just Christ. It’s just Jesus. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. I mean, what’s amazing to me is how much the objects that shape and represent our values all come from real specific decisions. Like, it was a series of actions by a group of humans in the upper Midwest who decided to depict Jesus in this particular way. And had that not happened–had this specific story not happened–this specific chain of events… And then this thing was mass produced and then it was rallied around. Like, it just didn’t have to be this way. 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, this is fascinating stuff. And I love that so much comes down to this single image. What an amazing story. Well, thank you so much, Christopher. I appreciate it.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: You are welcome.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson, and edited by Emmett FitzGerald. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real, with additional music by George Langford and Jamilah Sandoto Sinai. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. 

Special thanks to David Morgan for all of his help researching this story.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.

You can find us on Bluesky and our own Discord server. There’s a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.