Category: News

The Church of St Mary the Virgin is replacing stained glass windows of philanthropist Edward Colston with windows depicting Jesus Christ as a black, illegal migrant on a rubber boat, as well as re-imaginings of the Son of God as a 1960s race activist.

St Mary Redcliffe, as the Anglican church in England is known, moved to get rid of the Colston windows after a far-left mob tore down his statue amid the Black Lives Matter unrest of 2020, while police did nothing.

The new windows will depict Jesus as “multiple ethnicities” to “counter the Anglocentric narrative of ‘white Jesus’,” according to artist Ealish Swift.

In his day and for many years afterwards, Colston was hailed as an Andrew Carnegie-like philanthropist. He funded almshouses, hospitals, and schools, and represented Bristol in Britain’s Parliament in the early 1700s.

The many historic memorials to him became a lightning rod for the far left during the Black Lives Matter disorder of 2020.

The wealthy merchant had for a time been involved with the Royal African Company, which traded African goods and slaves – purchased from African slavers – resulting in him being reductively recast as a mere “slave trader”.

Swift claims the “first panel depicts a Bristol ship traversing the raging seas of the Middle Passage during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and references the story of Jesus calming the storm,” while “the second panel celebrates the Bristol Bus Boycott, which paved the way for the Race Relations Act of 1965, with Jesus as a fellow protester and radical.” Thirdly, another “panel portrays the current refugee crisis, and Jesus as a child refugee fleeing to Egypt,” with the “final panel [showing] a diverse group of ‘neighbours’ facing the future in a display of hope and togetherness.”