Race and religion are not the same thing, but in many hearts they have grown together so closely that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. This guide gives you a way to find that seam in yourself. The method is simple. Picture God being for you, then look closely at who is standing next to you in that picture and who is standing across from you. Everything below helps you read that picture honestly, test it against Scripture, and redraw it with Christ at the center.
You can work through it alone in one sitting or across a week. A group can cover it in one long meeting or two shorter ones. You will need paper, a Bible, and a willingness to look at something you may never have put into words. Anything you write is yours. No step requires you to show it to anyone.
Draw the picture before you study it
Start before you read any Scripture or any argument. Your first instinct is the evidence you are here to examine.
On a card or the top of a page, finish this sentence as quickly and honestly as you can: When I imagine God fighting for us, “us” means… Do not edit it. Then, on the same card, write who stands on the other side. Use names of groups, not individuals. If your answer is “sin and death” and nothing else, notice whether that is what you actually feel, or what you know you are supposed to say.
Now add one more line. Where did you learn this picture? It might be a hymn, a preacher, a family story, a news cycle, or a movement you admired. Most people never chose the moment their faith and their racial story were stitched together. They absorbed it. Set the card aside. You will come back to it at the end.
A commander who would not take sides
Read Joshua 5:13-15 slowly, twice. Israel has just crossed the Jordan. The wilderness is behind them, and the walls of Jericho are in front of them. Joshua sees an armed man and asks the question every people at war asks: “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?” (Joshua 5:13). The answer comes back: “Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come” (Joshua 5:14).
Before you interpret, observe. Write down what Joshua asks, what the man refuses, and what Joshua does next. Then notice the setting. This is a liberated people, newly in the land of promise, about to fight. If any people in Scripture could expect God to sign up with their side, it was this one.
This passage is narrative, so it describes an encounter rather than handing down a rule. Christian interpreters differ on who the commander is. Some read him as an angel. Others read him as an appearance of the Son before the incarnation, which is a reasonable reading but an interpretation, not a certainty. You do not have to settle that question to see the point. The commander does not deny that the LORD will give Israel Jericho. He refuses the framing. The real question is not whether God has joined Joshua’s side. It is whether Joshua stands under the LORD’s command. Joshua’s response is to fall on his face and ask what his Lord wants.
Pause here with one prompt. Look at your card. Does your picture have room for that “Nay”?
How a people’s story becomes God’s story
Dr. Christopher Tounsel, a historian at Penn State who studies race and politics in South Sudan, helps explain why the question on your card is so hard to answer cleanly. Sudan has long been described as an Arab and Muslim north and a Black Christian south. In his research, Tounsel found that faith did more than sit next to race. As he puts it, “religious thought has often been used to define racial identities and differences.”
Some of that was life-giving. For many South Sudanese believers, independence was told as the crossing of the Jordan, the same crossing you just read about. Tounsel describes a setting where the oppressor had a race, a location and names, and where “to claim Christian identity was to claim basically being a soldier in a fight against oppression.” He sees something similar in Black Christianity in America, which he says has never been simply a matter of “that blacks just so happen to be Christian.” Exodus, slavery and promised land run through the faith itself.
Scripture gives that reading real ground. “And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). A suffering people who conclude that God cares about their chains have read this verse correctly.
The danger comes in a quieter step. Tounsel describes South Sudanese Christians identifying Black South Sudanese with the children of Israel and casting Sudanese Arabs as biblical Egypt or Babylon. When that happens, he says, “You are now infusing this Arab racial counter identity with a counter spiritual identity.” A human rival becomes a spiritual enemy because of who they are, not what they have done. Tounsel then turns the question on himself as a Black American Christian. If he fused his racial identity with his spiritual identity, would identifying with David mean casting people of other races as Goliath? Would being bound for the promised land mean treating others as Pharaoh’s people?
Lisa Fields saw the same structure in Hebrew Israelite teaching in America, which takes on the identity of the Hebrew people, casts non-Black people as Gentiles, and expects them to be overthrown in the end. And Tounsel’s research cuts the other way too. In Darfur, he found, darker skinned Muslims were oppressed by lighter skinned Muslims. Shared faith did not erase the color line. When he considers African American Muslims supporting a Sudanese government that persecuted Black people, his question is blunt: “Is it race over religion?”
Here is what this means for your card. The “us” in your picture can be drawn along a racial line even when you think it is drawn along a faith line, and the reverse. The exercise is not to decide that one of those loyalties is fake. It is to find out which one is actually doing the drawing.
Three tests for your picture
Bring your card back out. Run it through each test below. Write a sentence or two after each, even if the sentence is “I’m not sure yet.”
The Amos test: does God belong to your rivals too?
Read Amos 9:7: “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?” Amos is speaking to a nation confident that its history guaranteed God’s favor. God answers that he has directed other peoples’ histories too, including Israel’s enemies. The Exodus was real and it was his. It was not a private claim on him.
Ask: if God said this sentence to my people, naming the group on the other side of my card, how would I feel? What does that feeling tell me?
The stranger test: does your memory make you tender or entitled?
Read Exodus 23:9: “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The law takes Israel’s memory of slavery and points it outward. Having suffered was meant to make them protective of outsiders, not certain of their own righteousness.
Ask: when I remember what my people have suffered, does it make me more careful with people outside my group, or more sure that God owes us?
The day-after test: what is God for once the fight is won?
Tounsel raises a critique of Black theology from the African theologian John Mbiti, who argued it was too focused on liberation. The risk, Tounsel explains, is reading liberation into every scripture, and then asking “what does Christianity become for a person once they’re in the proverbial promised land”. Lisa Fields drew out the consequence: “if you read liberation into every passage, you have nothing left for you after that.” She went further. In the Old Testament, she observed, liberated Israel did not stay innocent: “when they weren’t following God’s law, they acted as oppressors.”
Read Judges 2:10: “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.” Judges is narrative. It describes a collapse rather than approving it, which is what makes it a warning. Tounsel calls “the what now question” essential for anyone thinking about liberation.
Ask: imagine the victory your card is hoping for has already come. Is there still a God in the picture? What is he doing there?
Heritage is not the enemy
None of these tests asks you to stop loving your people. Tounsel describes two streams of thought among South Sudanese Christians, in a country with many ethnic groups and languages. One leans on Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” That stream wants to fold tribal identity into a shared Christian one. The other holds that God made ethnicities too, so a Dinka believer, in Tounsel’s example, might say, “I should lean into and actually celebrate my Dinka ness”. He compares this to the twelve tribes of Israel, one people under one God with real differences among them.
Paul wrote Galatians to answer whether Gentiles had to become Jews to belong to God’s people. His answer is that belonging no longer runs through ancestry. He does not stop being a Jew. Christ removes ethnicity as the ground of standing before God, not as part of who a person is.
Jude 3 teaches that before we are Black, before we are any adjective, we are Christian. Jude 3 also teaches that African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith, and that conflating the kingdom of God with any nation distorts the gospel. Those convictions belong together. Your heritage can stay in the picture. It just cannot be the line that decides who God is for.
Redraw the line
Read Romans 8:31-39. Paul writes, “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). Look back through the chapter and ask who “us” means. Paul defines it by what God has done: those he called, justified and gave his Son for. The line runs through Christ. In Romans, Paul has already argued that Jew and Gentile alike fall short, which leaves no group standing above another at the cross.
Take a fresh card. Write a new sentence beginning God is for us, and “us” means… using only what Romans 8 gives you. Then lay the two cards side by side. Do not throw the first one away. Mark what on it was true and worth keeping, such as God seeing real affliction. Circle anything that now looks like your group’s story sitting in God’s chair.
A practice for this week: Joshua’s question, turned around
Once a day, notice a moment when you felt sure God was on your side in a conflict, whether in a news story, an argument, a church matter or a family tension. When you catch it, ask yourself the question Joshua was really being asked: Am I standing under the LORD’s command here, or asking him to stand under mine? Write one line of answer. Some days the honest answer will be that you are standing with God against real injustice. Scripture does not ask you to call evil good. Other days you may find the sense of righteousness came mostly from who was on which side. At the end of the week, read your lines together and look for a pattern.
Guiding a group through this
This material can land very differently in a room where people carry different racial experiences. Let the Exodus 3:7 section breathe before you move to the tests. Someone who has been told their pain is too political for church needs to hear that God sees affliction before they hear any warning about misusing that truth.
Never ask people to read their first card aloud. Invite them to describe what they noticed rather than what they wrote. Keep the conversation from becoming a contest over which group’s fusion of race and faith is worse. The tests apply to everyone at the table, including the facilitator. Steer away from party politics. The question here is allegiance to Christ, not loyalty to a candidate or platform. If someone shares a fresh wound from racism or church hurt, slow down, follow up with them afterward, and help them connect with a pastor or a trusted counselor if they want that support.
Questions to talk through
- In Joshua 5, the commander does not deny that Israel will take Jericho, yet he refuses to say he is “for” them. What is the difference between God giving victory and God taking a side?
- Tounsel describes faith in South Sudan as a source of courage against a very real oppressor. Where have you seen faith give a community strength to survive, and what kept it from turning the oppressor into a spiritual enemy, if anything did?
- The Darfur example shows racial lines persisting inside a shared faith. Where might a color line, or a class or regional line, quietly run through your own church or circle?
- Which of the three tests was hardest for your first card to pass? Why do you think that one?
- Lisa Fields pointed out that liberated Israel became an oppressor when it stopped following God’s law. What would it look like for a community to guard against that before it ever gains power?
- How would you explain to a friend the difference between celebrating your heritage and making it the foundation of your standing with God?
Before you put the cards away, read the second one once more. The question worth carrying out of this study is not whether God cares about your people. He does. It is whether you would still recognize him if he showed up at the edge of your battle, sword drawn, and answered your question with “Nay.”