The charge that Christianity is the white man’s religion is a claim about history before it is a claim about God. It says Black people received the faith as a hand-me-down from the people who enslaved them, and that holding it now means holding the master’s tool. History can answer that charge directly. Dr. Tiffany Gill, who teaches history and Africana studies, reads the record and finds something the charge cannot explain. Enslaved and persecuted Black Christians did not copy the faith they were handed. They tested it, rejected the counterfeit, and built churches that outlasted the people who tried to keep them out.
Gill puts the first piece of evidence plainly. Once Africans were brought to the Americas in chains, she says, “their adoption of the faith was not a simple mimicry of what white folks told them it was.” If the faith had simply been imposed, you would expect a copy. What appeared instead was a correction.
What exactly is the charge claiming?
The charge usually bundles two claims. The first is about origins: Christianity belongs to Europe, so it arrived among Black people as something foreign. The second is about function: the faith served to pacify enslaved people and has kept their descendants passive and poor ever since.
Gill acknowledges the answer to the first claim in passing. African engagement with Christianity, she notes, predates the transatlantic slave trade. Then she sets that ancient history aside and focuses on function, because that is where the charge does its damage. A person can accept that Africa had Christians long before Europe’s slave ships and still believe that the faith practiced in America was an instrument of control.
So the real question is narrower and harder. When Christianity reached enslaved Black people through slaveholders, what did those people actually do with it? If they absorbed the slaveholders’ version, the charge has a point. If they did something else, the charge confuses the faith with the people who abused it.
A church born under persecution
Gill’s central historical observation is that “the black church, as we know it, was born as a persecuted church.” She traces two births, one formal and one hidden, and both point the same direction.
The formal birth happened in Philadelphia. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, free Black men, worshiped at a predominantly white Methodist church where they were confined to the balcony. The breaking point, as Gill tells it, came when they were dragged off their feet while praying, beaten and thrown out of the church. They had every reason to conclude that the religion of that congregation was a lie. Instead, Gill says, “they knew that God was still worth pursuing.” They built a church where Black people could worship, learn Scripture and pray in safety.
Allen and Jones separated the God of the faith from the congregation that claimed him. People who believed Christianity was simply white property would have walked away from both. They walked away from the institution and kept the God. That choice only makes sense if they believed the faith had a truth of its own that the white congregation had betrayed.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church that grew from that founding is, in Gill’s account, the longest held property by African Americans, with Bethel AME still standing on a similar plot of land bought in the early 19th century. For Gill, this shows that from its first generation the Black church built institutions. It bought land, held it and kept it, in a country that offered Black people very little they could hold.
The second birth was hidden. Most enslaved people had no money to buy land. On larger plantations, they might attend services with the families who owned them. Gill describes what often followed: in the afternoon or evening, enslaved believers went out to arbors and held their own worship, away from the watching eyes of slaveholders. Scholars call this the invisible church.
Gill pushes back on a common picture of these gatherings as merely emotional. Expressive worship was part of the culture, she grants, but preachers were usually literate members of the community, sometimes enslaved, sometimes free, who knew the Bible and taught it. She mentions Nat Turner as a slave preacher in Virginia. Her conclusion about these gatherings is the heart of the apologetic: “these also were places where theology was formed, where the Bible was taught, and where black folks were able to see a vision of God that was different than what was being force fed to them.”
Telling the true gospel from the false
That sentence describes a contest between two versions of the faith. Slaveholders, Gill says, used and manipulated Scripture against enslaved people at a time when most of those people could not read. The manipulation should have worked. People who cannot check a text against what they are told are easy to deceive. Yet, in Gill’s words, “there was an enduring faith. There was an ability to understand the truth of who God was and who God is in spite of that.”
Gill calls this a miracle. That is a theological judgment, and readers can weigh it as one. The historical observation underneath it stands on its own: people with every disadvantage in access to the text arrived at a reading of it that exposed their oppressors.
Scripture itself prepares readers for this kind of contest. Writing to churches in Galatia, Paul confronts teachers who were adding requirements to the message he had preached: “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:6-7). Paul’s dispute concerned circumcision and the law, not slavery. But the passage establishes a category the New Testament takes for granted. A message can carry Christ’s name and still pervert his gospel. Enslaved Christians applied that category to the religion of their masters.
Illiteracy, Gill insists, was never ignorance. “Just because people did not have access to literacy or to the internet or to Google and all of that, did not mean that they were less intelligent,” she tells her students. She also asks, “why aren’t slave narratives being taught in seminaries?” She points to Frederick Douglass calling out the hypocrisy of the white American church, and to the writings of Henry McNeil Turner, as theologically rich documents that wrestle with suffering and pain. On her view, these writers belong among the teachers of Christian thought.
Doesn’t the economic record cut the other way?
The function claim has a sharper modern form. Lisa Fields raised it with Gill: some people who follow the thinking of Umar Johnson argue that the Black church has done nothing economically for Black communities. On this view, the church took money and gave back comfort, which is another way of saying it kept people docile.
Gill’s answer is blunt. “The survival of black people in this country is itself a miracle of God, and that black people in this country would not have survived without the church, period, point blank.” Then she gives the reasons.
- Churches hosted penny saver clubs, which Gill describes as precursors to the insurance that companies refused to sell African Americans, including burial insurance.
- With no state safety net for Black families in hard times, churches raised money to keep households afloat through the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- During the Great Migration, churches helped people arriving in the North find jobs and housing.
- During the civil rights movement, churches fed marchers and raised money to get people out of jail.
Marches did not happen because people spontaneously ran into the street. They were planned, and planning takes money and organization. Many of the women who built that organization, Gill argues, learned their skills and drew their networks from church. In her words, “they use the organizational structures of the black church to organize movements.” She names Ida B. Wells, who used journalism to expose lynching, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten for trying to vote in Mississippi and saw the economic injustice around her as an affront to the kingdom of God. Their faith was the root of their advocacy.
The church also supplied dignity where the wider society withheld it. Gill explains why Black women dressed in their best on Sundays: many were domestic workers during the week, called by their first names and denied respect. At church they were deacons and first ladies, honored by name and title. “I think context is everything,” she says. A faith that only taught submission would not have become the one place where degraded people were publicly honored.
None of this proves that no one ever used Christianity for control. Slaveholders plainly did, and Gill says so. What the record shows is that the faith could not be reduced to control. In the hands of the people it was supposed to pacify, it produced insurance clubs, land ownership, migration networks, public honor and the logistics of a mass movement.
Isn’t this just a romantic story?
It would be, if the argument depended on every Black church being heroic. Lisa Fields named that danger directly, warning that “there is a romanticized view” of Black churches and the civil rights movement. Gill agrees and supplies the counterevidence herself.
Only a small percentage of people took an active part in the civil rights movement, she notes, and an even smaller share of churches. Some religious leaders came out against Martin Luther King Jr. Some preached to their congregations to stay out of the work. Some saw arrests as disruptive to the church’s mission. Others in the movement embraced self-defense rather than strict nonviolence. Gill also corrects the idea that nonviolence was the timid option, insisting that “nonviolence was not passive.” Sitting in a segregated space while knowing you would be arrested and beaten struck some pastors as too radical.
Gill does not read this disagreement as a blow to the tradition. She observes that “many of these same black pastors still believed that black people should have full citizenship,” and that they differed over how to get there. No one, she says, should expect every Black church to agree on what the issues are or how to tackle them. The Black church was never one voice, and an argument that treats it as one would collapse on contact with the record.
She is equally direct about abuse. “Have there been abuses within the church? Absolutely.” Some churches contribute to the decline of their communities. Some try to fleece people. Gill applies to them the same test enslaved believers applied to their masters, saying it would do us well to see the difference “in the same way that enslaved people were able to see the difference between the true gospel of Christ and the false gospel of slave holders.” People can do things in the name of Christ without belonging to him.
What this history can and cannot prove
A skeptic deserves a fair account of the argument’s limits. Black history does not prove that Jesus rose from the dead. That question turns on other evidence. Survival under persecution also has possible explanations other than God. Communities endure for many reasons, and other faiths have their own stories of courage. Gill’s word “miracle” is a confession of faith, not a conclusion that history forces on every reader.
What the record establishes is narrower, and it is decisive against the charge as usually stated. The charge treats Black Christianity as a product manufactured by enslavers. The evidence shows Black Christians testing the enslavers’ religion against Scripture and finding it false. It shows them leaving the institution that rejected them while keeping the God they believed it had betrayed. It shows a church that built land ownership, mutual aid and movement infrastructure under conditions designed to prevent all three. The charge cannot account for its own counterevidence.
That leaves the hardest question every skeptic raises: what about the evil done in the faith’s name? It is fair to name it. The question is whether the abuse follows from the faith or contradicts it, and the people with the most at stake already answered. They heard slaveholders quote the Bible, and they concluded that a slaveholder quoting the Bible did not make the Bible his.