Apologetics does not belong to white evangelicalism. The face many people picture when they hear the word “apologist” comes from who has filled the classrooms, conference stages and bookshelves, and Dr. Kimberly Credit argues that this picture has been mistaken for the practice itself. Scripture gives every believer the task of offering a reason for Christian hope. The Bible’s own writers show what that looks like: they shaped their defense of the faith for the specific people in front of them.
That answer settles who owns apologetics. It leaves a harder question open. If the image is cultural, where did it come from, and why do so many Black believers still feel like guests when they pick the practice up?
The question hidden inside the question
A common request goes like this: how do we take Christian apologetics and make it work in the African American church? It sounds humble and practical. Credit hears an assumption underneath it.
“When I or a person think of Christian apologetics, what we see is the white male evangelical face,” Credit says. So the person asking how to bring apologetics into a Black context is doing more than asking for tips. In her words, “what we are really suggesting is that they have a lock on what Christian apologetics is.”
The request treats apologetics as an import. Something developed elsewhere has to be adapted and carried across a border before Black Christians can use it. Credit rejects the border. If defending the faith is a biblical command, a Black congregation does not need permission or a converted version. It needs to recognize work that already belongs to it.
Where the picture came from
The image gets built and passed on in at least three places.
The first is training. Credit says that many apologetics courses and programs teach the discipline “through the lens of white evangelicals, particularly males.” She raised this directly with Norman Geisler, whose book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (written with Frank Turek) gave her early ministry a name and who later became her mentor. One of her first questions to him was “why did he feel there was a lacking of the presence of African American Christian apologists.”
Lisa Fields described what this looks like from the inside. A man had written to her after finishing a master’s degree in apologetics at a strong program. He said it had not equipped him to reach his own community. The training was rigorous. It was also built around someone else’s questions.
The second place is the stage. Fields remembered looking through the speaker list for a major apologetics conference while she was in seminary and seeing that a Black woman was speaking. “And that just blew my mind,” she said. The speaker was Credit, who later lectured at the National Conference on Christian Apologetics as, by her account, the first African American woman to do so. She also describes herself as the first woman to address the general audience, since the few women before her had spoken on topics aimed at women or children. When people see the same kind of person on every stage, they draw a conclusion about who the work is for.
The third place is the most uncomfortable. Black apologists sometimes reproduce the image themselves. Credit recalls meeting the first Black male apologist she had encountered, a pastor, and eagerly asking how he had introduced apologetics to his congregation. As he explained his approach, “it was as if he was a white evangelical male.” Many of the African American pioneers in the field, she observes, “take on the very same practice of apologetics without thinking of their context.”
That detail changes the diagnosis. The picture does not survive only because white institutions keep others out. It survives because the people who get in are trained to imitate one model and then repeat it. A Black face presenting a borrowed method still teaches the audience that apologetics sounds a certain way and answers a certain set of questions.
Separating the image from the command
Credit grounds her argument in the Great Commission. Matthew 28:19 in the KJV sends the disciples to “teach all nations,” which many modern translations render as “make disciples of all nations,” the wording Credit works from. Her emphasis falls on “all nations.” Her reasoning: “in order to make disciples of all nations, it means that you are going to encounter people that are different than you.” A mission aimed at every people cannot run on one people’s habits.
By “nation,” she explains, she means context, culture and people. That stretches the passage past its first meaning. The commission concerns the peoples of the world, and Credit carries its logic down to the smaller communities within them. The extension is reasonable, but it is her application rather than the direct statement of Matthew 28.
The verse apologists most often stand on points the same way. Peter tells believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). The Greek word translated “answer” is apologia, a reasoned defense or reply, and it is where the word “apologetics” comes from. Peter is writing to ordinary Christians scattered across several regions, not to a guild of specialists. Credit draws the same conclusion: “You don’t have to be a biblical scholar.” What believers need is the ability to explain why they trust Christ.
She finds the same pattern in how the Gospels were written: “those gospels were written with a persuasiveness to persuade those in the particular contexts to which they wanted to reach. And we have to be the same way.” Fields adds the traditional examples of Matthew shaped for Jewish readers and Luke for Gentiles. Paul states the principle outright: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22). According to Credit, the apostles’ letters follow suit. “They always offered an explanation to whatever was going on in their immediate context.” In Corinth that meant sexual immorality and pagan idols. None of them defended the faith in the abstract, and none of that requires a particular face, accent or reading list.
Is this just racial grievance dressed up as theology?
The serious objection has two parts. One is familiar: truth is truth no matter who speaks it, so emphasizing race distracts from the arguments. The other is sharper. The “white evangelical” label may oversimplify a field that already includes Black and other non-white apologists, and the evidence offered here is personal.
The second part deserves a straight answer. What Credit and Fields describe rests on their own experience: courses they took or heard about, conferences they attended, people they met. It is testimony from two people who have worked inside the field for years, not a survey of it. Credit herself acknowledges that Black pioneers exist. Her complaint is that many of them practice a borrowed model. So the claim is narrower than a sweeping verdict on a whole movement. It concerns which model gets taught as the standard and how often others copy it.
On the first part, Credit’s argument changes nothing about the content of the faith. She does not say Black Christians need different doctrine. She is talking about the hearer. Her complaint about much current apologetics is that it is self-focused: practitioners “bring their context onto others when it comes to Christian apologetics instead of entering into the context of the people to reach them where they are.” The issue is whether the defender pays attention to the person being addressed.
Her own story does not set white scholarship against Black believers either. She grew up in a home where the family Bible was dusted and never opened. After a childhood prayer she believed went unanswered, she rejected God and called herself an atheist. She pressed Christian relatives about why they believed and got answers that amounted to a feeling. “I wanted answers, and so I would badger them. But at the same time, I was looking for answers.” After her conversion, the memory of those unanswered questions became a sense of responsibility to defend the faith. A white evangelical scholar’s book named that calling, and that scholar became her mentor. She does not ask anyone to throw out that tradition. She objects to letting one context’s practice define the whole discipline.
The principle also runs in every direction. Credit describes lecturing at the national conference on an apologetic response to racism, to a mostly white evangelical audience that included a number of police officers. She did not walk in with her own context. She thought about the room she was entering and spoke to how those listeners could help bridge the gap where they were. Contextualizing is not a special exception for Black audiences. It is the normal work wherever it happens.
One risk remains: tailoring a message can slide into telling people only what they want to hear. Credit’s own example shows where she draws the line. Asked how she would preach to women working in prostitution in Las Vegas, she said she would not beat them up about where they are. She would point to Rahab, who turned to God from that life, and to the truth that no one has to stay stuck. The approach is gentle. The call to change stays.
“The Black context” is not one context
If the problem were only that apologetics has one white face, the fix might look like swapping it for one Black face. Both Credit and Fields reject that fix.
“I wish people would stop, and I don’t wanna say it like this, lumping us all together,” Credit says. Her congregation proves the point. She describes it as African American, Nigerian, Trinidadian and Jamaican, in a mostly white area, with members used to suburban life. She came from a very urban background and joked with them that “y’all called a pastor from the hood.” Some of her language went over their heads, and she had to adjust. Sharing a race did not mean sharing a context.
Fields describes the same pattern from the other side. Raised in a middle-class suburban home, she is often treated in evangelical spaces as the natural expert on reaching the inner city, which she hears as code for poor Black communities. She does not see herself as the best person for that, “but because you see the color of my skin, that’s the only way you’re able to identify me.” Her point cuts both ways: “There are different classes of black people,” just as there are among white people.
This is the deepest part of the critique. The white-evangelical picture of the apologist and the generic picture of “the Black audience” make the same mistake. Each replaces real people with a type. The biblical model calls for knowing the particular people you are trying to reach.
What the command asks once the image is set aside
Credit reads three verbs out of the commission as working instructions. To go is to take the first step: “We can’t wait for them to come to us.” That means learning a people’s language and culture, because you cannot begin a relationship with someone you do not know. To make is to disciple on purpose rather than by accident. To teach is to explain, and here she turns her critique on Black churches too. In many of them, she says, “we use so many Christianese sayings and so much jargon that makes no sense.” Her example is blunt: “telling someone, he’s a wonder in my soul, is not going to help disciple” anyone asking why you trust Jesus. That is the kind of answer that left her unsatisfied as an atheist. Insider language feels deep to those who share it. To an outsider it closes the door.
Fields applies the same test to borrowed authority. She warns that apologetics can become “kind of a ivory tower discipline,” where speakers quote famous apologists and expect the name alone to persuade. If listeners have never heard of the person, she notes, “So if they have no idea who he is, me quoting him really has no effect.” A film or artist the audience already knows may connect where a famous name does not.
When Black congregations hear apologetics presented as theirs, Credit reports, they take it up. She once offered free three-day courses to churches, and every church, school and convention where she introduced the need, including the National Baptist Convention, “they have continued with the work.” That is her testimony rather than a measured study, but it fits her conclusion: “once it’s introduced, they see the need and they continue with it.”
Her appeal to pastors and Christian educators is to “please get past the face that is currently out there representing Christian apologetics” and recover the practice’s biblical roots. What those roots produce is not a new face to replace the old one. It is believers who know why they hold their hope and can explain it, in plain words, to the specific person who is asking.