My Kids Want to Learn About God
But I can’t be the one to teach them
One day my kids found the 2007 movie, Evan Almighty, and decided to watch it. In it, Steve Carell plays a freshman Congressman and God’s pick to become a modern-day Noah, tasked with building an ark ahead of a flood forecast only by God himself.
God, played by Morgan Freeman.
As we watched Evan together, and God graced the screen for the first time, I asked my six- and eight-year old girls, “Do you know who that’s supposed to be?”
They both shook their heads.
“He’s God,” I said, before explaining in shaky detail what I knew about the story of Noah’s Ark. They both nodded and turned back to the television. After a few minutes, my eight-year-old said, “I always pictured God as being a white person.”
I knew what she meant. I’d felt largely the same nearly two decades ago when I first saw Freeman in the role. Having grown up white in a mostly white town, with a white family and white friends, and having gone to a handful of white churches on the rare occasion I attended in the first place, it never would have occurred to me that God might be Black. But why couldn’t He be?
“Do you think maybe you thought that because you’re white?” I asked.
