Introduction: Reclaiming the Anti-Imperial Jesus
Walk into most American churches and you'll see him: the blue-eyed, flowing-haired, porcelain-skinned Jesus who looks more like a European aristocrat than a brown-skinned, colonized revolutionary from first-century Palestine. This image is not only historically inaccurate—it's theologically violent, obscuring the radical reality that the historical Jesus had more in common with Indigenous people resisting empire than with the European empires that conquered in his name.
The transformation of Jesus from colonized to colonizer represents one of history's most successful acts of theological imperialism. Western Christianity replaced a Middle Eastern resistance fighter with a European mascot for empire, turning the cross from a symbol of imperial violence into a literal banner for conquest.
But non-Western peoples often recognize something that European Christianity has forgotten: the real Jesus, the one who challenged empire and died as a result, the one who taught that the last shall be first and the mighty shall be brought low. This recognition isn't accidental—it flows from shared experience of colonization, resistance, and the struggle to maintain identity and sovereignty under empire.
The Historical Jesus: A Colonized Person Under Empire
To understand how far Western Christianity has strayed from its origins, we must first recover the historical reality of Jesus's context. First-century Palestine was a colonized territory under brutal Roman occupation. Jesus wasn't born into a Christian empire—he was born into a colonized community struggling under foreign domination.
The parallels to Indigenous experience are striking. Jesus's people faced cultural assimilation pressures, economic exploitation, religious suppression, and violent military occupation. Roman colonizers demanded taxes, labor, and loyalty while dismissing Jewish law and tradition as primitive superstition. Sound familiar?
Jesus grew up speaking Aramaic, not Latin. He lived in a society where the occupying power's language, laws, and culture were imposed on subjugated peoples. He witnessed his people's sacred sites being desecrated, their leaders being co-opted or executed, their children growing up disconnected from traditional ways.
When Jesus began his life’s purpose, he wasn't preaching to fellow Europeans about civilizing “savages” in missions—he was organizing among colonized people about liberation. His message that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" wasn't abstract theology but revolutionary politics, announcing that God's reign was coming to challenge Caesar's empire.
Jesus the Indigenous Revolutionary
Reading the gospels through Indigenous eyes reveals a Jesus that Christian empire has worked hard to obscure. This Jesus sounds remarkably like Indigenous resistance leaders throughout history:
Teacher of Traditional Wisdom: Jesus constantly drew on traditional knowledge, teaching through stories, parables, and connections to the natural world. Like Indigenous wisdom keepers, he used creation as his classroom—pointing to birds, flowers, seeds, and trees as teachers about divine reality.
Critic of Assimilation: Jesus consistently challenged those who collaborated with empire or abandoned traditional ways for imperial privilege. His harshest words were reserved for religious leaders who served imperial interests rather than their own people.
Defender of the Marginalized: Jesus centered those pushed to society's edges—the poor, the sick, the outcast, the foreign. His ministry consistently challenged systems that created and maintained these marginalizations.
Practitioner of Restorative Justice: Rather than focusing on punishment, Jesus emphasized healing, restoration, and the possibility of transformation. This aligns closely with Indigenous justice systems that prioritize community healing over retribution.
Land-Based Spirituality: Jesus's spirituality was deeply connected to land—he prayed on mountains, taught by rivers, found God in wilderness places. His parables constantly referenced agricultural cycles, seasonal changes, and the wisdom embedded in creation.
How Empire Hijacked the Gospel
The transformation of Jesus from colonized revolutionary to imperial mascot didn't happen overnight. It required centuries of theological violence that systematically erased the historical Jesus while constructing a European replacement.
When Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the fourth century, the religion of the colonized became the religion of the colonizer. Almost immediately, the anti-imperial message began being sanitized. The cross, once a symbol of imperial violence against the colonized, became a symbol of imperial power. At that point many if not most theologians became servants of empire, shaping their doctrine to control beliefs.
As we've seen, 15th-century papal bulls the Doctrine of Discovery explicitly authorized Christian empires to conquer non-Christian peoples and lands. Jesus the colonized became Jesus the colonizer, with European Christians claiming divine authorization for the same kind of imperial violence that had killed him.
European missions carried this imperial Jesus around the world, presenting Christianity not as the religion of the colonized but as the civilizing force of empire. Indigenous peoples were told they needed to abandon their "primitive" ways to follow a European Jesus who would make them "civilized."
Over time, Western Christianity developed sophisticated theological justifications for white supremacy, claiming that European culture represented God's highest revelation. The brown-skinned, colonized Jesus disappeared under layers of European interpretation and imagery.
Indigenous Recognition of the "Real" Jesus
Despite—or perhaps because of—this theological violence, Indigenous peoples often recognize the historical Jesus more clearly than his supposed followers. This recognition grows from shared experience of colonization and resistance. As Choctaw Episcopal Bishop Steven Charleston explains, Jesus can be seen "from an Indigenous perspective as a Native messiah, one who fulfills Indigenous spiritual expressions and who exemplified Indigenous values and morals in his teachings and way of life".
I have heard others say, “Jesus is just like our medicine people who are healers.” Many Indigenous communities recognize Jesus's teaching methods as similar to their own wisdom traditions—the use of stories, connection to natural world, emphasis on community responsibility, and integration of spiritual and political concerns.
Indigenous and other people of color often understand imperial violence in ways that colonizing peoples often do not. They recognize the patterns of cultural suppression, economic exploitation, and physical violence that shaped Jesus's context because they've experienced similar patterns. These movements see in Jesus's ministry familiar strategies of resistance—building alternative communities, challenging collaborators, maintaining cultural identity under pressure, and finding hope in the midst of apparent defeat.
Indigenous peoples and other people of color understand what it means to die for refusing to assimilate, for defending traditional ways, for challenging imperial power. The crucifixion makes sense to communities that have witnessed their own leaders killed for similar resistance.
Jesus Through Indigenous Eyes: Specific Examples
Different Indigenous communities interpret Jesus through their own cultural lenses, often arriving at understandings that challenge institutional Christianity. Having pastored a culturally Native American congregation and spending years discussing these topics around Indian country I have noticed some of the differences in how Jesus appears to Native people. This includes Native Americans who want nothing to do with Christianity, but can still have a deep understanding of Jesus.
Some Native peoples understand Jesus as embodying the principle of harmony—walking in balance with all creation. This Jesus isn't separate from the natural world but part of the sacred web of relationships. Sometimes they see Jesus as fulfilling the role of a sacred being sent like in their own mythologies—one who brings healing and maintains connection between earth and sky, human and divine. Some interpreters recognize Jesus as exemplifying the principle of cooperative work for the community benefit rather than individual advancement. Others see in Jesus the qualities of a good leader according to the their moral principles—humility, service to the people, and concern for seven generations into the future.
These interpretations consistently emphasize aspects of Jesus that European Christianity has marginalized: his connection to creation, his challenge to empire, his emphasis on community over individual salvation, and his embodiment of traditional wisdom.
The Threat of Decolonized Christianity
When Indigenous peoples interpret Jesus through their own cultural lenses, they often arrive at conclusions that threaten institutional Christianity. Perhaps the most threatening aspect of Indigenous interpretations of Jesus is how they reveal the distance between historical Jesus and imperial Christianity. If Jesus was indeed a colonized person teaching resistance to empire, then much of what passes for Christianity today, especially as currently expressed in MAGA world, represents exactly what he opposed.
This recognition forces uncomfortable questions: How can churches built on stolen Indigenous land claim to follow a decolonized Jesus? How can denominations that blessed slavery and genocide claim to follow one who sided with the oppressed? How can Christianity aligned with empire claim to follow one who was executed by empire? Christianity has, at best, failed miserably in delivering good news to Indigenous people precisely because it became aligned with the imperial forces that Jesus opposed.
The Choice Before Western Christianity
Non-Indigenous Christians have much to learn from Indigenous interpretations of Jesus, but this learning requires genuine humility and willingness to be changed. Western Christianity today faces a choice between the imperial Jesus created by empire and the Indigenous Jesus revealed through colonized experience. This choice isn't just about correcting historical inaccuracy—it's about choosing between empire and liberation, between domination and relationship, between the cross as weapon and the cross as symbol of resistance.
The imperial Jesus serves empire by making Christianity safe for colonizers, by blessing systems of control and domination, and by promising heavenly reward for earthly injustice. This Jesus asks nothing of empire except individual piety, moral purity, and charitable giving.
The Indigenous Jesus threatens empire by demanding justice, by centering the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the disinherited, the forgotten, and by calling followers to resistance rather than compliance. This Jesus cannot be used to bless conquest, slavery, or environmental destruction.
Conclusion: Returning to the Indigenous Boy from Nazareth
The historical Jesus was not European. He was not White. He was not imperial. He was a brown-skinned, decolonized person under colonial domination who taught resistance to empire and died for it. This recognition offers both challenge and gift to Western Christianity. The challenge: acknowledging how far imperial Christianity has strayed from its origins. The gift: the possibility of returning to a Jesus who offers genuine liberation rather than comfortable religion.
The choice is before us: continue following the imperial Jesus created by empire or learn from Indigenous peoples who recognize the colonized Christ who stands with the oppressed. The first path leads to continued complicity with systems of domination. The second offers the possibility of authentic discipleship in a world crying out for justice.
Indigenous peoples didn't need European missions to recognize the sacred but rather they offer to teach Western Christians about a Jesus they've forgotten—the Indigenous revolutionary who challenged empire and calls his followers to do the same. The question is whether Western Christianity can find the courage and humility to learn from the very people it tried to colonize.
I am a mixed Indigenous writer of books, screenplays, articles. I explore spirituality, theology, Indigeneity, justice, race, farming. Recovering PhD, Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Speaking and living into healing our world.
These words "Christianity has, at best, failed miserably..." echo back to one of the several videos of Richard Twiss I've found and have on file. One in particular, noted that the success rate of the evangelization of Native Americans was 3%. I've also accepted Richard's description of himself as a recovering republican and a recovering evangelical as my own. I often describe my faith journey as "going upstream". My journey is aged, but not over. I see your post today as being at the headwaters. Thank you for your wisdom today!
Appreciate this - learning from you!