Dark-Skinned Satan Has A Long History

By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

(RNS) When some people recently started questioning whether the Satan character on "The Bible" miniseries resembled President Obama, others posed a broader question: Why does Satan need to be dark-skinned at all?

Religious experts and historians say the controversy points to a centuries-old tradition where dark is bad, light is good.

"It's just part and parcel of the stereotyping and the encoding of dark and black, particularly of African descent, as negative in American popular culture," said the Rev. Paula Matabane, an African Methodist Episcopal minister and associate professor of television and film at Howard University.

Scott Poole, author of "Satan in America: The Devil We Know," says the linking of Satan and race predates American history.

European folklore described Satan as a black man, and the Puritans imported these notions, and raised them during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.

"That's an idea that the Puritans brought with them from England to New England," said Poole. "They actually had a tendency to identify all racial others with satanic powers, satanic control."

Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, the husband-and-wife executive producers of the History channel miniseries that concludes on Easter Sunday (March 31), swiftly rejected the Obama comparison, calling it "a foolish distraction" and noting their "highest respect" for the president.

"The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors," the History Channel added in a statement. "It's unfortunate that anyone made this false connection."

Entertainment writers noted that makeup artists made Moroccan actor Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni look darker than he usually is, with one comparing his usual visage to Omar Sharif or David Niven.

Stephen Thorngate, an associate editor for Christian Century, was one commentator who said the hubbub about Obama "isn't the point."

"Just don't give the ultimate good guy fair skin and the ultimate bad guy darker skin," he said. "We've been down that road too many times before."

Time columnist James Poniewozik noted that the Bible lacks descriptions of Satan -- just as it doesn't dwell on the color of Jesus' skin.

"Whether or not they intended to make Satan look like Obama, they did intend to make him a dark-shrouded bogeyman," he wrote. "And that's the real sin here."

Long before Obama became the nation's first black president, white supremacist theologians in the late 1800s claimed the devil was black.

"In that kind of high-water mark of American white supremacy, even the tempter in the Garden of Eden is referenced as an African man or woman who is soulless," said Edward Blum, co-author of "The Color of Christ."

Jumping ahead a century, there's another Hollywood example of a negative biblical character: African-American actor Carl Anderson portrayed the role of Judas in the 1973 movie "Jesus Christ Superstar."

"That caused a great deal of controversy," said Blum, whose book noted protests from black Baptists who were upset that Jesus' betrayer was depicted as a black man.

Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said Anderson's role was an "exception" for Hollywood depictions of Judas. But white actors tend to be cast as what would be considered the good guys of the Bible.

"There's been a tradition that an awful lot of the heroes of the Bible have been played by light-skinned European Americans, including oftentimes, Jesus, who looks much like he may have come from northern Europe than down Israel way," he said.

In Mel Gibson's 2004 "The Passion of the Christ," Satan was depicted as an androgynous albino figure. "I believe the Devil is real, but I don't believe he shows up too often with horns and smoke and a forked tail," Gibson told Christianity Today.

Cain Hope Felder, professor of New Testament language and literature at Howard University, said the Satan depiction in the recent miniseries was disappointing given the more multicultural depictions of biblical figures seen in recent decades.

He was the general editor of the Original African Heritage Bible, which in 1993 included images of Jesus and his disciples as people of color. That was followed in 1999 by the African American Jubilee Edition of the Holy Bible, which includes depictions of a black Jesus on the cross and in the arms of Mary.

"It's unfortunate that the producers of this show made this terrible error," Felder said. "They either should have taken Satan off the screen entirely and just had a voice or something. Or if you're going to use him, he should certainly not have been black."

Also on HuffPost:

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The fault line between Christianity and Islam in The Tenth Parallel.

 

Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel is a tour of what the late historian Samuel Huntington called "Islam's bloody borders," although Griswold has little use for either Huntington or his theories. She shies away from attributing violence or virtue to any particular religion and limits her focus to the African and Asian places where the world's largest and fastest-growing religion, Christianity, competes for souls with its second-largest and second-fastest-growing, Islam.

The 10^th parallel, 700 miles north of the equator, has always been a religious frontier. It is where Arab armies and traders were halted by the sudd, the tsetse-infested band of swampland that feeds the Upper Nile. British imperial authorities in the Sudan encouraged Christian missionaries to go south of that line and forbade them in the Muslim lands to the north, for fear they would provoke insurrections. The 10^th parallel is also where, a century ago, the German evangelist Hermann Carl Wilhelm Kumm built a string of fortified missions stretching across the continent.

Lately, technology and climate have made this an unstable boundary. Camels could not penetrate the sudd with Mohammed's revelation, but the Internet and al-Jazeera can. As Africa warms and the Sahara spreads, the largely Muslim residents on the southern shore of the desert are being pushed into contact—and sometimes violence—with their Christian neighbors. Christian evangelists, meanwhile, describe the line as the southern edge of their prime mission territory. The non-American world between the 10th and 40th parallels—roughly the northern half of Africa plus the parts of Asia from Afghanistan southward—contains 2.7 billion people, a third of whom are Muslims and only 3 percent of whom are born-again Christians. Where Christians see themselves as spreading the Word, Muslims see Christians as muscling in on their turf.

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Typical of the flashpoints that result is the Nigerian town of Yelwa. In 2002, insults at a polling station led to a rock fight between Christians and Muslims. In 2004, young men hollering for jihad herded Christians into a church and burned it down, along with a nursery school, killing dozens. Two months later, Christians from the area massed around Yelwa. They killed 660 Muslims and burned a dozen mosques.

Griswold has done an astonishing volume of reporting—in Yelwa itself and in similarly remote and dangerous parts of Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Her interview subjects include some of the cruelest people on earth, along with their most indomitable victims. Griswold is a poet as well as a reporter, and she uses a literary, even lapidary, language to treat matters that most writers address analytically. Of a terrible flood near the Nigerian provincial capital of Jos, in which mothers were able to save some of their children by placing them in high trees, she writes: "I have pictured those babies again and again; they come up behind my eyes without bidding, in silhouette, like a woodcut, with an eggplant sky behind them, and greasy water licking at the tree trunks."

Griswold's treatment of inter-religious conflict is more intimate and nuanced than those we see on television and in tabloids, which tend to slot interview subjects into a familiar narrative of villains, victims, and the clash of civilizations. Her book, by contrast, is baggy, anecdotal, humane, and occasionally even funny. In the Nigerian city of Kaduna, an abattoir of inter-religious violence, the Muslim neighborhoods are called Baghdad and Afghanistan and the Christian ones are called Haifa, Jerusalem, and Television. After the tidal wave in the heavily Muslim Indonesian region of Aceh, the local morals police, the Vice and Virtue Squad, busted young couples making out at sunset on the beach, warning them: "You'll cause another tsunami!"

Interviews are the heart of Griswold's project. Speaking to the North Carolina-based Rev. Franklin Graham about his missionary work in despotic Sudan, Griswold wonders "how it could be worth evangelizing a woman who could be killed by her family for converting to Christianity." He replies with a passage from the Gospel of John (10:28): "And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand." Griswold comes from a Christian family herself, but of a different kind. Her father is the very liberal Anglican bishop Frank Griswold. She describes her upbringing as one of "Passover Seders, Jesus Christ Superstar, and doing the Crop Hunger Walk." She is patient, though, in dispelling misconceptions about the eschatological Protestantism that flourishes on Christianity's frontlines with Islam. One such misconception is that evangelists seeking to bring about the "end time" by spreading the Good News expect to convert the world. For the most part, they do not. The Second Coming will happen when everyone has heard the message of Jesus, they believe, not when everyone has accepted it.

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