In regards to the "hippie look", /u/thepibbs wrote in response to 'When did artists first start portraying Jesus with shoulder-length hair and a beard?'

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/u/sunagainstgold has written about the role of iconography in Jesus' being seen as white.

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EDIT: You mentioned the 'universal Buddha look': /u/artfulorpheus previously explained 'Why is buddha fat?', which turns out to be a trick question.

My earlier answer on white Jesus in the Middle Ages has been linked elsewhere in this thread. But while Latin medieval people already had the 'white guy, brownish hair, beard' iconography going, I'm going to assume your Uncle Rick doesn't look quite like the Christus Pantokrator of Monreale Cathedral in Palermo (Byzantine style, but Latin artists and church).

For the image of Christ behind Space Jesus, we have two 20th century Americans and a whole media empire to credit: Warner Sallman and Richard Hook.

Sallman was a Protestant (Lutheran, IIRC) commercial artist raised in the era (one of the eras) of "muscular Christianity," who spent a lot of his free time in the 1910s-20s making sketches of Jesus. In the mid-20s, he was inspired by a reproduction of a late 19th century Lhermitte painting.

Apparently Sallman saw in the depiction of Jesus, specifically, a more human Christ that people could relate to on a personal/person-to-person level. He produced a "headshot" version titled the Head of Christ.

The image was hugely attractive to a whole lot of people--but it was also enormously publicized, which is why so many people had the opportunity to find it attractive. In particular, several major US publishing houses got behind spreading that particular portrayal to US churches. Sallman produced a whole series of variations that were the 1930s-40s version of the Head of Christ photoshopped into various scenarios. And most in/famously, the Salvation Army distributed the image to soldiers during World War II.

Then the 1960s happened.

The backlash against the Head of Christ was twofold. First, this was definitely an era of Masculinity in Crisis (masculinity is always in crisis). And a lot of people started to grumble that Sallman's Jesus was Girly Jesus. David Morgan, the scholar who very literally Wrote The Book on the modern iconography of Christ (actually, several books), collected a whole series of [very sexist and heterosexist but nevertheless] hilarious insults whipped at the poor image:

• "A pretty picture of a woman with a curling beard, who has just come from the beauty parlor with a Halo shampoo"
• "A bearded woman with as much dignity as a movie-house billboard"

...Please note that at the time Sallman painted the Head of Christ, it was advertised as "the most attractive masculine representation of the Savior."

Again: masculinity is always in crisis.

The second factor of the backlash against Head of Christ, and probably a good chunk of the real reason behind the first, was generational. The 60s/early 70s are the counterculture decade, after all.

So along comes Richard Hook, who's grown up in an era where Head of Christ is all white American Christians' mental image of Jesus, including his. He paints Hippie Jesus (sometimes known as Surf Jesus)--a variant on Sallman's Christ. As Eileen Luhr puts it in Witnessing Suburbia:

In the painting, which differs from other postwar depictions of Jesus in its depiction of a "masculine" Christ, an Anglo-Saxon Jesus looks straight ahead and appears about to speak. He has long, unkempt hair, a beard, and even his clothes, which resemble a hooded sweatshirt made out of rough hewn fabric rather than robes made out of finely spun cloth, create an aura of masculinity. Hook presciently painted a hippie Jesus who fit perfectly within the counterculture.

Luhr goes on to discuss the importance of Hippie Jesus at the time, why this particular model of masculinity instead of, say, Bodybuilder Jesus, Arm Wrestling Jesus, or Fight The Commies Jesus:

The idea of a counterculture Jesus, a rebellious Jesus, a Jesus fighting the system, fit very well with the "we're a persecuted minority" mindset of some conversative Christian movements that were gearing up steam in the 60s-70s.

Today, of course, there are an ever-fractalling multitude of images of Jesus--some iconographical and safe (Space Jesus), others iconoclastic and shattering. But Hook's portrayal and its ancestor in Sallman's Head of Christ have hung in there and continued to influence later portrayals.

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