Are Biblical Epics Epically Racist?

Famous black stars appear in publicity photos .. But not in major religious movies.

Whitewashing the Bible is nothing new. It has been a mainstay of Western culture for centuries — from pallid Byzantine icons to Leonardo da Vinci’s lily-white “Madonna of the Rocks” to Charlton Heston’s roles in “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur.”

These depictions always provoke debate. What did Jesus really look like? What color was Mary’s hair? God doesn’t actually look like Gandalf, does he? Historians, anthropologists and geneticists have all weighed in — and the consensus seems to be that Moses probably looked nothing like Charlton Heston and Jesus little like his Byzantine portraits.

In an interview with The Washington Post, the theologian and historian Reza Aslan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” explained to Max Fisher that Jesus was a Galilean, and “as a Galilean, he would have been what is referred to as a Palestinian Jew. He would look the way that the average Palestinian would look today. So that would mean dark features, hairy, probably a longer nose, black hair.”

But this is not the Jesus audiences see projected on movie-theater screens. In “The Passion of the Christ,” he was played by Jim Caviezel, an American actor of Irish, Swiss and Slovakian descent. The History Channel’s “The Bible” cast Diogo Morgado, who is Portuguese, in the role of Christ; Darwin Shaw, a British actor, as Saint Peter; and a slew of other white actors as Moses, Abraham, Adam and Eve.

Likewise, recent pictures based on Old Testament books, like Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” and Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” to be released later this year, tell their stories in monochrome. Many observers wonder why, in 2014, these blunders are still so common. As Roxane Gay notes for Vulture, even well-intentioned filmmakers can be inadvertently obtuse when attempting to capture culturally sensitive stories on film.

“Exodus” features Christian Bale as Moses, Aaron Paul as Joshua, Joel Edgerton as Pharaoh Rhamses II, John Turturro as Pharaoh Seti I and Sigourney Weaver as the Egyptian queen Tuya — all white actors cast in nonwhite roles. Worse still, while the film features many actors of color, they’ve been largely relegated to roles as slaves, thieves and servants.

Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah,” which received largely positive reviews from critics, is a retelling of the Genesis flood narrative — and also features a virtually all-white cast: Russell Crowe as Noah, Jennifer Connelly as his wife and Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah.

“Where are all the black people in the new ‘Noah’ movie?” asks Micah David Naziri in a blog post for Political Blindspot. “Let’s be more to the point, no one is particularly ‘Middle Eastern’ looking for that matter.” This, he writes, says a lot about the industry’s already tenuous grip on the importance of diversity. “Is Hollywood afraid of casting African or Middle Eastern people as the predominant leads in big-budget films?” he asks. “Is this a product of their own overt or covert racism? Or is this based on the marketing belief that Caucasians will not turn out to see a movie with such demographics?”

The film’s blinding whiteness apparently did not go unnoticed by its makers. In an interview with Christine A. Scheller of The High Calling, a popular Christian blog, a co-writer on the film, Ari Handel, said: “From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals does not matter. They’re supposed to be stand-ins for all people. Either you end up with a Benetton ad or the crew of the Starship Enterprise. You either try to put everything in there, which just called attention to it, or you just say, ‘Let’s make that not a factor, because we’re trying to deal with everyman.’”

For Ryan Herring, writing for Sojourners, a faith and social justice blog, the solution begins with recognizing and stamping out prejudice where it breeds — in these instances, Hollywood, churches and the spaces where the two intersect. “When retelling a Biblical story, the effects of whitewashing are amplified,” he writes. “In the case of the movies ‘Noah’ and ‘Exodus,’ whitewashing continues a well-established practice of white sacralization through religious indoctrination.”

Mr. Herring explains that when religious narratives are entrusted to the creative powers in Hollywood, those powers have an obligation to produce inclusive images. Because when those images fail to represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the audience, “the message that is then conveyed is that people of color exist outside of God’s spiritual imagination, that God is not available to them, that they are not seen as loved or cherished by God.”

By Jake Flanagin