'God is Not a White Man' shortlisted for the Michael Ramsey Prize

God is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations (Hodder & Stoughton, 2021) was shortlisted in November for the 2023 Michael Ramsey Prize.

Named after the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury, the prize seeks to generate awareness of the most promising contemporary theological writing for Christians today.

Author Chine McDonald (pictured) is the Director of the think tank Theos – part of the Bible Society family. Theos exists to tell a better story about the role of Christianity in public life. She considers leading this team to be a dream job, as together they speak at events and publish reports and social commentaries that shed light on the interplay between faith, politics and society. 

After exploring body image among women of faith in her first book, Am I Beautiful?, she had a revelation that catalysed what would become God is Not a White Man. ‘As I thought about my race, gender and identity, I realised that when I thought about God, I pictured a white man, and everything else stemmed from there,’ Chine says. ‘For me, what it meant to be good, holy and righteous was inextricably linked to whiteness.’ 

As Christians, the way we see God is the lens through which we see all of life. What does it mean, then, if we see God as a white man? Chine explores where this dominating image of the divine has come from and how it impacts our world, from global inequality and international development to relationships, feminism and the Church.

She began writing the book in 2020, working to disentangle God from a particular race and gender, as the church worked to ‘deconstruct its link with racism and white supremacy’. What we have now is a sometimes funny, sometimes angry, consistently thought-provoking book of theological insight and personal storytelling. Chine’s deliberate vulnerability within the book serves an important purpose. ‘I realise that for some people, talking about race and sexism is difficult, and it’s easy for us to put walls up before a conversation has even started,’ she says. ‘Personal story is a way to break through those walls and build empathy, human to human.’ 

She shares about being a black woman in different white-majority spaces, like when she was one of only 11 black students out of 3,000 in her year at Cambridge University in 2002. ‘Most of my theological formation, the writing I read about God while studying theology, came from a specific perspective – mainly 19th-century European male thinkers,’ Chine says. ‘But how they see the world isn’t how I see it. We each bring to our conceptions of God our backgrounds, cultures and views of life.’ 

One comes to realise that inside her story is the story of an entire people. Her voice is one joining in the lament of the black community over whiteness being seen as superior, and anything other than whiteness being seen as lesser. Black women in particular have found their own stories and voices inside hers. 

Her story is also a challenge to the British Church, which she’s seen abandoned by an increasing number of black women. ‘I’d like to change the mind of a church leader who maybe doesn’t think about issues of race and gender in their own context,’ she says. ‘I would want to help them to see their own blind spots, and actively seek to make a change in how they lead their congregations and how they see God.’ God is Not a White Manpresents a way forward for all of us: it offers a view of God as completely distinct from any of the boxes that we try to place him in.

Other awakenings

How does our perception of what is good change, for example, if we move from seeing God as a strong, victorious man to someone who suffered violence and oppression? What if we see God as a child refugee, forced to flee to Egypt to escape death – or in the body of a crucified man? 

In the life of Jesus, Chine says, ‘God both sides with the oppressed and is the oppressed. His death on the cross is the ultimate violence on the human body – the ultimate shame and oppression. The beauty in this is that by going through that, God sides with the oppressed today. It challenges the idea that God is separate from suffering.’ How does our thinking about the violence we see done to black people in the world today change when we think about Jesus as the oppressed? Where might we be surprised to find Jesus in today’s conflicts? 

While powerful and overt ideas like these fill the book, Chine also subtly uses language to change the status quo. Readers will notice that they can’t find any male pronouns for God in her book. For Chine, this deliberate choice was about a ‘conscious reframing of language’, based on the idea that ‘language tells us about what we believe and how we see the world’.

But wasn’t Jesus male? And didn’t he call God ‘Father’? ‘As much as I might say God is not male, Jesus is male, and I don’t think it could have been any other way,’ Chine says. ‘In the context of the time, if Jesus had been a woman, no one would have listened to him. He had to be a man, but he challenges the stereotypes of what a man is in our society. What I find interesting is that while Jesus is a man, he comes into the world through a woman. God partners with a woman to come into the world. Jesus wasn’t a man because men are better.’

Hope for the future 

Some have claimed that Chine’s book is promoting a ‘woke’ agenda, favouring the politically correct. But Chine has embraced what the process of writing this book has taught her. ‘What I notice is that often people have a reaction to the title alone. They make assumptions that I’m trying to say that God is black or a woman,’ she says. ‘There is a vulnerability and an exposure that comes with writing a book like this, but I feel that God has enabled me to be OK with that.’

‘It has helped me to see God as greater, bigger, more interesting and exciting. God is able to speak into different cultures and backgrounds, to draw on the diversity of creation. All of the difference among us – and the beauty of that difference – tells us something about God.’ 

Despite the fact that the Church has a long journey ahead, when Chine thinks about the future, she’s hopeful. ‘When the book came out, I did a talk at a primary school, and asked the kids how they pictured God. I expected them to say, “Father Christmas” but they said things like “a ball of energy” or “a ying-yang sign”,’ she says. 

‘In some ways the decline in religious knowledge in young people is sad, but it also means they don’t carry the baggage older generations do about what God is like. My hope is that from this place we have freedom to introduce them to a more expansive and interesting picture of who God is.’

Along with her work at Theos, Chine is a regular contributor to BBC Religion & Ethics programmes, including Thought for the Day on Radio 4’s Today programme, the Daily Service, and Prayer for the Day. You can find out more about Chine’s work at Theos and beyond, and order God is Not a White Man on her website. 

Theos stimulates the debate about the place of religion in society, challenging and changing ideas through research, commentary and events. Find out more about its work, or read its latest report, Dying for Beginners: Theos’ work on Death, Dying and the Afterlife. 

Noël Amos is the Editor of Rooted, Bible Society’s devotional journal.