For decades, many Christians in southern Sudan read their struggle as the book of Exodus. They were Israel, their rulers were Egypt, and independence in 2011 felt like crossing the Jordan. That story shows why race and religion blur so easily. They are different things: race sorts people by ancestry and appearance, while religion makes claims about God. Historian Christopher Tounsel, who studies race and politics in South Sudan, says it directly: “I’m in no way arguing that race and religion are the same.” His point is that faith keeps getting used to say who a people are, who their enemy is, and whose side God is on.
That use of faith can give an oppressed community courage to survive. It can also turn a racial group into a holy nation and its rivals into enemies of God. Tounsel’s study of South Sudan makes the line between those two outcomes easier to see.
How does a faith come to define a race?
Tounsel’s book, Chosen People, examines a country long described in religious and racial terms at once. He explains that Sudan has been defined for about a century as an Arab and Muslim north and a Black Christian south. After South Sudan seceded in 2011, he notes, most of its people would identify racially as Black, and by his estimate between 60 and 70 percent identify as Christian.
His book aims to blur the line people usually draw between race and religion. In his words, “religious thought has often been used to define racial identities and differences.” His example is concrete. When South Sudanese Christians identified Black South Sudanese with the children of Israel, Black people in that setting became, by implication, God’s chosen people. When Sudanese Arabs were likened to biblical Egypt or Babylon, Tounsel says, “You are now infusing this Arab racial counter identity with a counter spiritual identity.”
Watch what happens in that move. A difference of ancestry, language and political power picks up a spiritual enemy. The other group is no longer only different or only oppressive. They stand where Pharaoh stood. From then on, race explains religion and religion explains race.
Was Sudan’s conflict about race or about religion?
Slavery runs through the answer. Tounsel describes slavery in the region as an ancient practice and says the Sudanese government used it as a weapon during the second civil war, which he dates from 1983 to 2005. The master class, he says, was often defined by Arab ancestry, while the enslaved were darker skinned and came from the social and political margins.
His research found that religion was not the only dividing line. Skin color was often “the kind of defining feature that marked who was enslaving and who enslaved.” He points to Darfur in western Sudan, where very dark skinned Muslims were oppressed by lighter skinned Muslims. Shared faith did not stop racial domination.
He raises a related case that reaches Black Americans directly. In the late 1990s, he says, the Nation of Islam had a close relationship with the Sudanese government, which he holds responsible for the suffering of Black people in Sudan. That pressed a hard question of solidarity: “What does it mean, or what might it mean for an African American Muslim to support an African Muslim government that is persecuting black people”. Put more bluntly: “Is it race over religion?”
Lisa Fields connected this to a claim heard in some circles, that Islam is the original religion of Black people, though Christianity is older than Islam. That claim, like the claim that Christianity belongs to white people, assigns a faith to a race. Sudan shows how poorly such assignments fit the record. Muslims enslaved Muslims along color lines, and the Black Christian south traced its faith to an African church. No religion moves cleanly along racial lines, and assuming one does can leave a person defending the wrong people.
The strongest objection to Tounsel comes from this same evidence. Lisa Fields raised a claim quoted in his book, that race rather than religion is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, with religion adding fuel to the fire. Darfur seems to support it. If Muslims enslaved Muslims by color, perhaps religion was only a banner over a racial war.
Tounsel does not call that claim wrong. He says “it’s not an either or” and calls it “a both and.” He also grants that his own position “can be debated.” His evidence supports both halves. Race often decided who was enslaved, while religious language gave the conflict its meaning and moral stakes for those living it. Treat religion as decoration and you misread how many South Sudanese understood their own struggle. Treat race as a footnote and you lose the Muslims of Darfur. His case also has a limit worth naming. It comes mainly from one region, and his comparisons to the United States, from Exodus themes in Black Christianity to the rise of white Christian nationalism, are parallels, not identical cases.
Where has the bond given people strength?
Tounsel argues that for many South Sudanese, the story of independence is also a spiritual chronicle. Political liberation was told in the language of the Exodus. He places this beside James Cone and Black theology in the United States, recalling the framing of Jesus Christ as the liberator par excellence. In South Sudan, he says, “Christ was not being spoken of in these kind of lofty, metaphysical terms, but that the oppressor was very real”. The oppressor had a race, a location and names. As a result, “Christ was made basically, I argue, a political figure,” and “to claim Christian identity was to claim basically being a soldier in a fight against oppression.”
He sees the same pattern in Black Christianity in America, where exodus, slavery and promised land have been tied to the faith itself and not merely carried alongside it.
There is biblical ground under that reading. “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 people in chains who conclude from this verse that God cares about chains have read it correctly. Reading Scripture from the underside of history often recovers what comfortable readers skip.
When does it turn dangerous?
Trouble starts once the identification is fixed to race and never released. Tounsel tests the idea on himself as a Black American Christian. If he joins his racial identity to his spiritual identity, does identifying with David turn every non-Black person into Goliath? If he is one of the children of Israel headed for the promised land, are people of other races cast as Pharaoh’s household?
Lisa Fields pointed to Hebrew Israelite movements in America, which take on the identity of the Hebrew people, cast non-Black people as Gentiles, and expect them to be overthrown in the end. She saw a close parallel with the African and Arab framing in Sudan. Tounsel said he could not speak to how those groups handle ethnicity. The shared structure is still visible: a racial line becomes a line between the chosen and the condemned.
Tounsel names a second, quieter danger. He recounts the critique of Black theology made by the figure he calls the father of African theology, who argued it was too focused on liberation. The risk, as Tounsel describes it, is reading liberation into every scripture. Then he asks: “what does Christianity become for a person once they’re in the proverbial promised land”.
Lisa Fields stated the consequence: “if you read liberation into every passage, you have nothing left for you after that.” A faith organized only around escape goes silent for the person who has escaped, who moves from poverty to wealth or from the margins to the center. She added that God’s word speaks to the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and Israel’s history shows the two can trade places. Once liberated, she observed, “when they weren’t following God’s law, they acted as oppressors.”
Tounsel calls this “the what now question” and says it “is so important when we’re talking about liberation and liberation theology.” His biblical answer is the book of Judges, which he called pretty dark. Its closing line is grim: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Judges is narrative. It records what happened without endorsing it, which is why it works as a warning. Tounsel asks “what can we learn from the biblical example in terms of a script of what to do and what not to do”. Judges supplies the second half of that script. A freed people whose deepest loyalty is their own deliverance can rebuild the injustice they fled.
What does Scripture do with chosenness?
The Bible speaks openly of a chosen people and still refuses to let chosenness become racial self-worship. The prophet Amos addresses Israel in a season of national confidence: “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 9:7). The word rendered “Ethiopians” translates Cush, the region south of Egypt that includes parts of present-day Sudan. Amos is warning that the Exodus gives Israel no immunity from judgment. God claims the histories of every nation, Israel’s enemies included. Long before anyone called Christianity a white religion, the prophets were naming African peoples as objects of God’s care.
The law also turns the memory of slavery outward. “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). Here the Exodus works as a moral obligation. Having been foreigners in Egypt, Israel is barred from treating foreigners as Egypt treated them. That command answers the danger Lisa Fields described before Israel ever entered the land.
Ethnicity itself is not the problem. Tounsel describes two streams of thought in South Sudan, a country where he says more than 60 languages have been recorded. One leans on Paul: “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” (Galatians 3:28). Those who hold it want to downplay tribe and fold it into a shared Christian identity. The other holds that God created ethnicities as well, so a Dinka believer, in Tounsel’s words, would reason that “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’s argument in Galatians makes room for both. He is answering whether Gentiles must become Jews to belong to God’s people, and he says no: standing before God no longer runs through ancestry. He still writes as a Jew to Gentiles, so the differences remain. What Christ removes is ethnicity as the ground of belonging.
Held that way, the Exodus can stay what it was for South Sudan and for Black Christians in America, a true word that God sees the afflicted. It loses its power to harm once no race can claim to own it. A people who find their story in God’s story keep a faith that still speaks after the chains come off, to the freed and to whoever they might be tempted to oppress next.