Two Christians can hold the same Bible, use the same word for God, and still be trusting opposite things. The slavery era in the United States shows it plainly. Enslavers and the people they held in bondage read one Scripture, and the God the enslavers described approved of the bondage. Bishop Leah Daughtry, presiding prelate of the House of the Lord Churches, argues that the shared word did not mean a shared God. Her test is whether the God being invoked sees every human being as bearing his image.
That answer has limits. It gives no license to call every Christian you disagree with an idolater. It means shared vocabulary proves less than we assume, and it raises a harder question: how do you tell the difference without turning discernment into a weapon?
Same name, different God
Speaking at a Jude 3 Project gathering on faith and public life, Daughtry pressed the point further than most people would. “I think what we have to accept is that while we may call the higher being God, our gods are different. Our gods are not always the same.” Her claim concerns worship itself. With the same word, the same book and the same building, the God some Christians serve can still differ from the God she serves.
Her language is careful. She speaks of the God of their understanding and the God of her own understanding. She is not proposing that two divine beings exist. A person can address the one true God by name while trusting, obeying and defending a picture of him that contradicts what he has revealed. In practice, that person serves something else.
What the slavery era shows
Daughtry grounds the claim in American history. “The slave master called on a God, and the God of their understanding made slavery legal because people of color, black people were not human.” Then she adds the detail that makes the case so uncomfortable: “They didn’t consider black people to be made in the image of God. They were Christians. They went to church every Sunday.”
She describes a visit to Ghana, where a church stood near the place where captured Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic. “It was the most disconcerting thing ever to walk from this church and walk not a hundred yards to where they were holding Africans to be sent across the water every Sunday they were in church.”
Her account does not depend on the worship being faked. No one can read the hearts of individual enslavers, and the argument does not require it. What the record she describes shows is a working church a short walk from a holding cell, attended week after week by people whose theology made room for both. Their God raised no objection. Daughtry’s conclusion is direct: “I’m not worshiping the same God that slave master worship. We got two different understandings of who God is.”
Pastor Michael McBride, pastor of the Wade Church in Berkeley, California, supplies the other half of the history. Black church leaders in that era fought other Christians over slavery itself. “The bishops were literally abolitionist bishops going into conflict with their white counterparts who were claiming to be Christian, but were okay with slavery.” He describes a similar pattern in the civil rights era, when Baptist preachers pushed back against fellow Christians who defended the racial order.
Both sides of those conflicts called themselves Christian and claimed the same Bible. McBride’s question cuts to the center: “whose Christian faith or whose version of Christian faith are we talking about.” The label settled nothing. What remained was a contest over whether a given reading of God was faithful to the God of the text.
Isn’t this just a disagreement about interpretation?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. There is only one God. If someone understands him badly, that is a theological error, not a second deity. Calling it “a different god” can sound like an escalation that ends conversation.
Scripture addresses this directly at Sinai. When the people saw the golden calf, the text records their words: “These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). They credited the calf with the exodus, the very act by which Israel’s God had made himself known. Aaron then built an altar, “and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5). The covenant name stayed. The story of the rescue stayed. The text still treats the scene as idolatry, because the people had attached the true God’s name and history to something they had shaped with their own hands.
Jesus raised the same problem in his own terms. “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21). “Lord, Lord” is correct vocabulary, and Jesus does not deny that the speakers used it. He denies that using it proves they know him. Daughtry echoes this passage when she asks about people who say “Lord, Lord” while showing no concern for whether their neighbors are fed or safe.
God is one, and Scripture still declines to treat every sincere use of his name as worship of him. Some descriptions of God are more than misreadings. They replace what he has revealed with something that serves the worshiper.
Where the line falls
Without a boundary, this argument becomes dangerous. Almost every tradition has at some point accused another of not being truly Christian.
McBride is candid about this in his own background. He describes himself as a fourth-generation holiness apostolic Pentecostal and admits, with some humor, how his tradition once saw others: “In my Apostolic Pentecostal tradition growing up, many of you in this room would not be saved.” That counterexample keeps the argument honest. The instinct that can expose an enslaver’s god can just as easily be aimed at a Baptist down the street over matters that were never central to the faith. Disputes over baptism, church government or the end times have divided believers for centuries without giving anyone grounds to say the other side worships another God.
Daughtry’s case falls on the other side of that line for a specific reason. The enslavers’ God permitted them to deny that certain human beings were made in his image. That strikes at what Scripture says about God and people from its first chapter: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
The text does not divide humanity into image bearers and property. A God who does is not the God of Genesis, whatever name is attached.
Why worship and the treatment of people belong together
The Bible ties these together repeatedly, which is why Daughtry’s test grows out of theology rather than being imposed on it. James writes about the tongue: “Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:9-10). His argument rests on the image of God. You cannot bless the original while cursing the likeness.
John is sharper still: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20). John calls the claim false.
Daughtry’s present-day test comes from the same root. “Where do I find the people who believe that each and every one of us is made in the image of God and therefore our needs are holy and must be addressed as holy?” She means bodily needs: food, shelter, clean water, safety. Her charge against a fellow believer who dismisses those needs is personal and theological at once: “You’ve devalued me. And in that way you sin.”
Her standard asks whether a person’s God treats the human being in front of them as carrying his image. Christians can and do disagree about which policies best meet human needs. What Scripture does not allow is a God who regards those needs, or those people, as beneath concern.
Turning the test on yourself
The panel itself offers a useful check on misusing this. Its members did not share one politics. Daughtry has served as chief of staff of a national party. Treneé McGee, a Connecticut state representative, describes herself as a Democrat who holds a consistent life ethic and opposes abortion. Justin Giboney, president of the AND Campaign, criticizes both parties.
Giboney agreed that not everyone who wears the label is following Christ, then drew a boundary: “But what I want to keep us from doing is assuming that that line is drawn across a partisan line.” His alternative is slower: “Let’s use the discernment to say, let me look at each case and evaluate that in an impartial way.” He also named the trap. When people frame a conflict as good against evil, he warned, “One is we miss the evil within us and on our side.” McGee put it in one line: “neither party has a monopoly on Christ.”
The enslavers are the extreme case of the failure Giboney describes. They could see sin in others while their own God excused their most visible sin. A reader who applies Daughtry’s test only to opponents has missed its first target.
Daughtry also shows what the test requires in conversation. Talking about disagreement inside congregations, she urges starting from love and from the shared conviction that every person bears God’s image. “But you know what, I’m not always called to understand. I’m first called to love.” If the image of God is the measure, it governs how you speak to the person you are measuring. Discernment that treats someone as less than an image bearer has already failed the standard it claims to enforce.
The enslavers sang, prayed and preached. What they lacked was a God who could tell them they were wrong. That is the question this history leaves for every believer: does the God you worship ever contradict you, or does he always seem to agree?