A black, female God is not the traditional portrayal that Christians are used to. But that’s the portrayal the upcoming movie “The Shack” is using.
Based off the Christian novel by William P. Young, “The Shack” is a movie about Mackenzie Allen Phillips (Sam Worthington), a young father who loses his daughter on a camping trip. After spiraling into a deep depression, Mack receives a letter telling him to return to the cabin where his daughter was killed. There, he is greeted by Papa, as played by Octavia Spencer, Jesus (Aviv Alush) and Sarayu (Sumire Matsubara), also known as the Holy Spirit. With the help of the Trinity, Mack is brought on a powerful journey, centered around grief and forgiveness. The book was an extremely popular one, but now that the casting of Octavia Spencer has been revealed, controversy has emerged.
Many are claiming that the image of God portrayed in the movie is false or misleading. Others are furious over the portrayal of the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman. However, Young says that the casting was purposeful, and based off of his own experience. In the novel, Young aimed to show the personification of God through the eyes of one man. “The wider thing he was saying was that this was not God in the shack, this was God revealing himself through someone,” Jacobsen said. “And it can be a black woman, an Asian woman, a Jewish man”.
So, why is this diversity causing such controversy? Simply put, many Christians are uncomfortable with a God that doesn’t look like the image popularized during the Renaissance period, by artists such as Michelangelo. They don’t like the idea of God being portrayed as black, or as a woman, because to them, it goes against whatever ideals they created on their own. The point they’re missing, however, is that God appears in different ways, which is exactly what Young is trying to illustrate.
In the Bible, God appears as numerous different things, everything from a rock to a man to a voice in dreams. But if confining God to a single race or sex isn’t a practice that is shown in the Bible, why is it so popular today? By creating a white God, white Christians were able to assert their power in the church. An image of a white-only God is responsible for the founding of religious white supremacist groups, such as the KKK. By casting a black woman as God, this image is actively combated. Though a white God is not inherently attached to violence or racism, it is important to recognize that other interpretations of God are vital to combating some of the prejudice that exists in Christianity.
Though I can by no means speak for an entire religion, it is my belief that your idea of God should be a personal one. No one can force you to view God in a certain way. For Young, God is a nurturing, black woman. By popularizing this image through “The Shack”, Young is taking active steps to combat the idea that God must be a white man, simply because that’s what other white men have been telling us.
