“Christianity is the white man’s religion. It came to Africa with the colonizer and to America with the slave ship. If you decolonize your mind, you will eventually have to decolonize yourself out of the faith.” In one form or another, that is how the claim reaches many Black believers: in classrooms, in online threads, and from friends who used to sit beside them in church. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, has watched friends from her campus ministry and Christian hip hop days walk away with that sentence as their reason.
The claim contains a real history and a false conclusion. Christianity was used to colonize and enslave, but it does not follow that decolonizing requires leaving it. Decolonizing and deconstructing are often treated as one project, and they are not. Decolonizing removes what was bolted onto the gospel. Deconstructing, carried all the way down, removes the gospel itself. You can doubt hard enough to question everything you were handed and still keep the faith. Whether you do depends on what you take apart.
Read side by side, the conversations in the Jude 3 Project library make that distinction usable: