A Come-to-Jesus Meeting: The Raceless Gospel for Children

Editor’s Note: The following appears in the July/August issue of Nurturing Faith Journal.

“Jesus loves the little children. All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black, and white.
They’re all precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

But this is not how Jesus loves the little children. Jesus does love “all the children of the world,” but he does not love them as “red and yellow, black, and white.” Even though “they’re all precious in his sight,” just because it rhymes doesn’t mean it’s right.

This is how the songwriter, Clarence Herbert Woolston, said Jesus loves the little children. Inspired by Matthew 19:14, the famous children’s church song is Woolston’s interpretation, his understanding of Jesus’ love for infants, toddlers, youngsters, and teenagers. Woolston saw them as “red and yellow, black, and white.”

I should point out that a few colors are missing: brown and beige for those who identify as “mixed race.” But these additions wouldn’t make the song any better.

Woolston, a graduate of Crozer Theological Seminary, now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, believed we love people, beginning with children, according to race, which is the social coloring of skin that determines one’s position in American society.

Race justifies a color-coded hierarchy, a kind of social ranking, that supports “relationships of ruling.” It is the “epidermalization of inferiority,” meaning we tuck interpretations like “less than” under some people’s skin–skin that is 0.2 inches thick, proving how we lose our sense of human being and belonging by the thinnest of margins.

We have been deceived into thinking we could come close to fully describing a human soul and color-code human beings as “red and yellow, black, and white.” This is not the gospel. They are Woolston’s lyrics, his words, not to be conflated with Jesus’ words.

Woolston’s lyrics are an example of whitewashing. One dictionary definition of whitewashing is “deliberately attempting to conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about (someone or something).” Woolston’s suggestion that Jesus agrees with the conclusions of race and loves us based on its class-enforcing categories is an example of whitewashing.

The sweet singing of children doesn’t change the implication that Jesus would go along with these designations that maintain an us-versus-them, white-versus-people of color, oppressor-versus-oppressed binary.

Rather than deal with the “unpleasant and incriminating facts” about the oppression that race upholds, Woolston wrote a song that suggests Jesus believes in race, accepts its imagined differences for human beings, and loves us based on the social coloring of our skin. It is “social coloring” because humans are not physically colored beige, black, brown, red, yellow, or white.

This is “another gospel” (Galatians 1:8). Woolston is putting words in Jesus’ mouth. Mary’s baby never said this. Woolston, then, is racializing Jesus’ gospel, including race as part of Jesus’ good news, though race is not good news for everybody.

While we are physically different, Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another fish” (First Corinthians 15:39, NRSV). Yes, we look different, but we are all human beings. Even when the pigment of our skin is a different shade, we are still all “hue-man beings.” Just because an animal is a different color doesn’t mean it’s not an animal. Just because a bird is a different color doesn’t mean it’s not a bird. Just because a fish is a different color doesn’t mean it’s not a fish.

Race simply does not exist in God’s eyes as a creative tool, a means of soulish measurement, or divine insight. It is solely how human beings have been taught to see each other and feign omniscience. The meanings we associate with the color-coding of human beings are not God-given. We received those messages, stereotypes, and prejudices from human lips.

Woolston’s song implies that Jesus loves us no matter our race. But why would that be Jesus’ position? Race teaches us that God created human beings in comparison and as opposites, that some human beings are “created a little lower” than others, and that some human beings are better than others–innately, innately, naturally, and spiritually. But there is no biological or biblical basis for this belief.

There are no scriptural references to race as a system of oppression based on the social coloring of skin. This did not exist until the 17th century. The Christian scriptures were written in the first century. Consequently, when you see the word “race” in the Bible, it is the interpreter’s addition to the text.

The late New Testament scholar Cain Hope Felder teaches us in Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class and Family: “Today popular Christianity too easily assumes that modern ideas about race are traceable to the Bible. … Centuries of European and Euro-American scholarship, along with a ‘save the heathen blacks’ missionary approach to Africans, have created these impressions.”

In Matthew’s gospel, “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.’ And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.” Jesus didn’t say a single word about race. He told his disciples to let the children come to him and not to get in the way.

They are citizens of the “kin-dom” of heaven. They are not in the way. They don’t need to stop talking, fidgeting, or giggling. They don’t need to “hurry up and grow up.” They don’t need to dress a certain way or cut or comb their hair to look “more presentable.” No, Jesus said, “Come to me.”

Woolston’s song, written in the 1800s, said more about him and, perhaps, the hurdles he faced when coming closer to Jesus. If you let Jesus tell the story, you’ll see that race is not a part of children’s ministry.