Citation: S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies, V5 N1 (2026)

Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s When God Became White is something of a primer on the supremacy of whiteness in the (mostly) North American understanding of Christianity. The book’s professed purpose is didactic; it seeks to educate the reader on this destructive aspect of Christianity in order to advocate for a more just and edifying religious identity that might draw communities of faith together in a more equitable relational arrangement (14). Granted the volume’s subject matter, a Christian readership is in view. When God Became White is the author’s latest work on the subject of equity in intercultural relations. Earlier works in this vein include The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other: A Model of Global and Intercultural Pneumatology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Embracing the Other: The Transformative Spirit of Love (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), and Wind Invisible: Theology and the Experience of Asian American Women (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2021).

After a description of the project in the introduction, Chapter 1, through the lens of the author’s experience, takes the reader through an encounter with whiteness as a biopolitical construct, before embarking on a description of the historical permutations of the concept from the seventeenth century to the present performance of race in North America. Chapter 2 dwells on the impediment white supremacy poses to work towards a just and fair society. The infusion of white supremacy in the historical/theological development of Christianity in the West and the fruits of that unhappy pairing borne by missionary endeavor across the world is the subject matter of Chapters 3 and 4. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the effects of White Christianity and White Jesus on Christian life and practice in the present. A turn towards the intersection of race and gender in the worship and promotion of a white and male God is the occupation of Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 9 sees a turn in the book’s rhetorical direction toward reform in the conception of God as spirit, a departure from the embodied imaginings of divinity germane to a patriarchal White Christianity. The final chapter advocates for the application of this overhaul of the religious imagination in rethinking liturgy, discipleship, and the pursuit of justice.

This book offers a brief and broad overview of an important matter in theological discourse. Being such, its coverage of the subject is a survey of salient points without a sustained engagement with minutiae in the pursuit of its central objective, that of alerting Christians to a cancerous development in the life of the church. Readers would have to peruse the notes of the volume to gain leads to the rich scholarship that informs the book’s arguments. The strength of the work lies in its truculent criticism of an unholy pairing of racism and religious fervor, enriched by personal anecdotal witness to the stultifying and deleterious consequences of White Christianity. In this Kim achieves well her objective. She opens with aplomb. “Everything,” Kim claims, “is connected to race” (p. 5). In rich personal recollection she elaborates upon this brazen claim. Shorn of the trappings of middle-class comfort and convenience in the meagre furnishings of the London, Ontario apartment of her family’s first home in a still strange Canada, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ has pride of place on the otherwise bare living room wall (p. 7). Kim, carried along by her mother’s genuflection to the image of Sallman’s Euro-Jesus, by the conjunction of the national anthem and the Lord’s Prayer in school, by the incessant encouragement to assimilation into white-stream, mainstream Canadian culture through Church-sponsored events and activities, came to con-fuse Christian piety, English-language competence, and the Canadian social ethos (pp. 5-6). She was hooked from young. Equally arresting is Kim’s recounting of her mother’s return to Canada from a trip to Korea, where her mother had been schooled on the hazards of possessing figurines and carvings that might harbor evil spirits—the fruit of religious instruction by white missionaries (pp. 61-62). The resultant purging of the apartment of articles treasured by the young Kim sparked an acute awareness years after the fact of the intemperate reliance upon the speculations of western missionaries in the Korean conception of orthodoxy (pp. 62-63). Kim’s anecdotal illustrations serve well the purpose of the volume in connecting with readers for driving home her warning on the denigrating effects of White Christianity.

Of service to the interests of this journal is the book’s attention to the intersection of race and gender in the propagation of white supremacy. A white and male God—sustained by the church’s doctrine, liturgy, and reading practices—promotes patriarchy, discrimination, and the exclusion of women in leadership in church and society (p. 132). In the punctuation of prayers with Ha Na Nhim A-bu-gi (Heavenly Father), for example, the mutually enforcing notions of masculinity and whiteness in the contrived conception of a hierarchy to the divine economy keeps Korean women at a distance from God and, most harmful to Korean and Korean-American congregations, imposes a feeling of inferiority to those outside the guarded white and male circle of prestige (p. 117). Kim offers redress in countering this dominant tendency in theological interpretation by noting the various feminine representations of divinity: God as El Shaddai (a god of breasts by one reading of the term; pp. 137-38); the divine Shekinah (the divine Presence of early Jewish biblical interpretation; pp. 138-42); and Sophia (Wisdom) of the Book of Proverbs (pp. 142-46). This pressure for a counter-ballast to the European-man God is twinned with efforts to present a non-European image of divinity—James Cone’s connection of the crucifixion of the Christ to the lynching of African Americans, for example (p. 152).

This multispectral pluri-vision to an embodied immanence, however, stands in some tension with Kim’s advocacy elsewhere in the book for a more abstract notion of divinity. In Kim’s judgment, it would be more just and profitable to conceive of God as genderless, classless, raceless, somewhat akin to the Chi of Daoist thinking. Chi, in dwelling between sky and earth, unites mind and body, ethos and worldview, an Asian counterpart to ‘spirit’ which frees the Christian imagination from race and gender as conceptual categories in envisioning divinity (p. 159). Yet, even here on this point, Kim is insistent that the energizing Chi is embodied in people, rendering them visible in their diversity (p. 159). This last boon to the God-as-Chi construct seems especially important in that a blindness to the imputed biopolitical and (selectively) observed phenotypical distinctions of race facilitates white privilege (p. 39). A divine immanence manifest in the multifarious expressions of humanity seems an important aspect of theologizing worthy of retention. Perhaps, on this point, Kim’s advocacy for the Korean concept of ou-ri (meaning ‘us’) comes closer to the mark. Ou-ri, as a theological orientation on Christian corporate identity, in Kim’s words, “takes us away from individualism and orients us toward a communal understanding of the kin-dom of God that includes all people… accept[ing] and honor[ing] everyone in our community, no matter how different they are from us” (pp. 157-58). Bundled with Jeong—the Korean term for a love that binds and endures through a stark realization of an interconnectedness between persons through difference—ou-ri seals the relationship between the members of the Christian body with the ineluctable stuff of the death-defying bond to the divine in the description of Romans 8:38 (p. 158).

On the whole, the book does well in flagging the pitfalls of White Christianity—an imputed racialized and gendered hierarchy to the church that fosters racism, sexism, and a crippling self-loathing for non-whites. On the positive side of things, the work articulates well reforms in thought and practice for lifting the church out of the bog of a misogynistic Eurocentrism that hurts broad swathes of its membership and mars its message to the world. As an introduction to a pressing matter for our troubled times, aimed at a popular readership, Kim’s project, if only for this reviewer, opens the door also to reflection on the difficult issue of a shared (Christian) identity that must yet remain astutely cognizant of difference across registers to be truly just in imagining a harmonious Christian community. I commend Dr. Kim for leading us in reflection and reform on this necessary, if complex and hazardous, path.