I fed Revelation 4 into an AI video generator.

I fed Revelation 4 into an AI video generator. It was late, and I couldn’t sleep. I saw an ad and welp, here we are. I thought of a neutral text I could use to test my theories around diseased imagination and dysregulation. So I popped the most neutral parts of a passage I read and sang and memorized a million times:

A throne.
A presence like jasper and carnelian.
Lightning and thunder.
A sea of glass, like crystal.
Elders casting crowns.
Creatures covered in eyes.

And what did the AI give me? A white man.

On a throne.

And to me, that felt like hell.

Why? Because AI Reflects What It Has Been Given

AI doesn’t imagine. It doesn’t reach for metaphor. It doesn’t know how to hold mystery.

AI is trained on history’s inherited defaults—a world where whiteness and power are interchangeable, where supremacy has already declared who sits on the throne. AI was only ever going to give me back what empire has spent centuries imposing on us.

But AI also lacks the one thing that empire has never been able to control—feeling.

Feeling is the Point

When I saw the white man AI gave me, my body recoiled.
When I replaced that image with a Black woman on the throne, something in me exhaled.

I felt held.
I felt seen.
I felt cared for.
I felt like it was all going to be okay.

And that is the point.

Because imagination is not just about what we see—it’s about what we feel.
And what we feel shapes how we live, how we move, how we have our being.

If our imaginations have been fed a white-male-God,
Is it any wonder that Christianity is so disembodied?

A white, male God is an abstraction. A concept. A ruling authority detached from the lived experience of real bodies. It makes sense that Christianity—built in that image—has been obsessed with policing bodies instead of honoring them. With controlling desire instead of embracing it. With suppressing feeling instead of trusting it.

But the God of Revelation 4 is not a white man.
Not a colonizer.
Not an emperor on a gilded throne.

The God of Revelation 4 is color and fire and energy and sound.

And I know a people like that.

I know a people who move like rhythm itself.
Who shine like the brilliance of the sun.
Who thunder when they speak and shake the ground when they dance.
Who carry fire in their bones and eternity in their eyes.
Who have survived empire, exile, and erasure.
Who know how to make something out of nothing, how to name what the world refuses to see, how to create the very thing they were told could never exist.

And any future that does not include us, that does not center us, is doomed.

Because we have been both mirror and mystery to the fallacy of white supremacy.

We are the thing it could never fully erase, never fully own, never fully predict.

And if this country cannot imagine a future with us free and divine, then it has no future at all.