The claim goes like this: enslaved Africans in America took whatever religion their owners handed them, and the Black church still carries that borrowed faith. The record left by formerly enslaved writers tells a different story. Many of them read Scripture against the people who preached it to them. They separated the faith of Jesus from the faith that blessed the auction block, and they used the Bible itself to tell the two apart.
That is the argument of Dr. Emerson Powery, a New Testament scholar who teaches at Messiah University and co-wrote The Genesis of Liberation with Rodney Sadler. The book grew out of years of reading the narratives written by people who escaped slavery. Powery calls them freedom narratives, because every one of their authors was free by the time they wrote. What he found in them is a body of biblical interpretation that is argumentative, selective, sometimes surprising and very much their own.
What Exactly Does the Claim Assume?
It helps to state the claim precisely, because it contains two different assertions. The first is historical: Christianity reached many enslaved people in America through the churches and preachers of the slaveholding class. That part is largely true, and Powery does not dispute it. The second is interpretive: because the faith arrived that way, the enslaved could only receive it as their owners intended. That second step is where the claim breaks.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, put the problem to Powery directly. In her words, “People think slaves were kind of just taking Scripture and weren’t critically thinking through that.” Powery’s answer is that this picture is not only wrong about enslaved people. It is wrong about the history of Black biblical interpretation as a whole. He describes a common assumption, even among scholars, that “critical investigation of the Bible didn’t happen among Black people until post civil rights.” His book was written to show otherwise.
The distinction matters. A religion can arrive through corrupt hands and still be read faithfully by the people it reaches. Whether that happened is a question about evidence, and the evidence is in what enslaved people said and did.
What Did They Do With the Sermons They Were Given?
Start with access. Powery cites the historian John Hope Franklin’s estimate that only about five to six percent of the enslaved population could read. Most people encountered the Bible by hearing it: in the services they were made to attend, and in songs sung in the brush arbors, the hidden outdoor gatherings away from the master’s eye. Scripture functioned with authority in their lives, Powery says, even when no one was debating the doctrine of authority.
Hearing was not the same as accepting. Powery points to Harriet Jacobs, who described the guest preachers brought in to address the enslaved. Everyone knew in advance what sermon they would preach. People would listen, and then they would get up and walk out. In Powery’s reading, that small act shows a working judgment about the difference between gospel and something dressed up to look like it.
Jacobs also tells a sharper story. One traveling white minister began preaching that enslaved people must be treated decently and given enough food. Then he started to call slavery itself into question. The enslaved listeners began to appreciate his message, and he was never invited back. The episode exposes the logic of the whole system. If the faith on offer belonged entirely to the masters, a minister reading from the same Bible should never have become a threat. He did, and they knew it.
Powery traces the line enslaved readers drew to Frederick Douglass, who named it this way, in Powery’s summary: “The Christianity of Christ, and the Christianity of the land.” Many narratives also speak of the religion of Jesus as distinct from what was preached on the plantation. These were not people confused about what they had been given. They were sorting it.
How Did They Read the Passages Used Against Them?
The verse slaveholders leaned on most was Paul’s instruction in Ephesians 6:5:
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ” (Ephesians 6:5).
Powery shows that enslaved readers did not respond to it in one uniform way.
Some, like William Anderson, left the command largely alone and drew close to Paul as a fellow sufferer, a man beaten and abused on his travels. Others pushed back on how the verse was used. Powery cites one narrator who said he had heard countless sermons on servants obeying masters and never once a sermon on the verses that follow. Ephesians 6:9 continues:
“And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9).
That objection is a reading-in-context argument. Paul’s household instructions in Ephesians 6 address both parties and place the owner under the same heavenly Master as the enslaved person, with no partiality. Faithful readers today still discuss how far that passage goes and what it does and does not say about slavery as an institution. But the enslaved interpreter’s point holds on its own terms: a preacher who quotes only verse 5 is not reading Ephesians. He is editing it.
The curse of Ham drew the same scrutiny. Powery describes Samuel Ward, a preacher whose narrative was published in London, taking apart the claim that Genesis 9 justified African slavery. Noah was drunk when he spoke, Ward argued, so why rest an entire slave system on his words? And the text does not curse Ham at all. Genesis 9:25 reads, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” Ward was doing exactly what careful exegesis requires: asking what the passage actually says before accepting what is claimed from it.
William Anderson went further, and his move is revealing. If people insisted on finding the origin of races in Scripture, he would offer a different story. In 2 Kings 5, Elisha’s servant Gehazi greedily takes payment from the healed Syrian commander Naaman, and Naaman’s leprosy is transferred to him. The KJV ends the scene: “And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow” (2 Kings 5:27). Anderson argued that this was the beginning of whiteness, a curse tied to greed. He said, in Powery’s account, that he had given the talk many times and no one had proved him wrong.
Powery adds a detail that cuts both ways. He notes that “the Hebrew text actually doesn’t have white” in that verse. The word is supplied in the English translation everyone was reading. Anderson’s reading, then, is no more exegetically sound than the curse-of-Ham reading it answers. What it shows is something else: he understood that the racial theology around him was built by pressing texts into service, and he could turn the same method back on its users. That is not the posture of a man passively absorbing a religion.
What Did They Believe About Jesus?
The deepest evidence of independent reading is not in the arguments about proof-texts. It is in where enslaved believers located Jesus. Powery points to studies of the spirituals showing how often they dwell on Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion, with comparatively few references to resurrection. The reason, he suggests, is that the singers were still in the middle of their own suffering. They sang a Jesus attached to their experience.
One narrative Powery describes puts it in a single image: “Jesus at the slave auction, Jesus is the one who is being taken up on the podium, and he too is enslaved. He too is being sold off to the highest bidder.” Powery draws out the theological claim inside that picture: “The greatest sufferer, Jesus is on our side. He is not on your side in order to maintain our suffering.”
Underneath it sat a simple conviction. Powery describes it as “God is a God who loves us, created this body so must love me,” which led enslaved readers to conclude that “what the white masters are saying can’t be right. Something’s off about that.” The reasoning starts with creation and the body and moves outward to judge the preaching. Powery’s summary of their faith is compact: “You can’t have gospel message unless it’s embodied.” A Christianity that left bodies in chains was, to them, a counterfeit.
Powery’s research also corrects a popular assumption. Many people imagine that the Exodus was the central story of enslaved Christians. In the freedom narratives, Powery found “there is very little within the slave narrative tradition prior to the Civil War that draws on the exodus motif.” People talked about Moses, but the Exodus as a framing story for a whole people became much more prominent after emancipation, along with resurrection themes. Before freedom came, the cross carried more of the weight. That is a sober finding, and it makes the tradition more interesting, not less.
Why Did Literacy Matter So Much?
Some states banned teaching enslaved people to read. Powery notes that when Douglass overheard his master object to teaching a slave to read, he understood that reading was a form of access worth pursuing. Douglass later wrote of finding damp, scattered pages of Scripture and drying them out to keep. Henry Bibb, who escaped to Canada and was caught repeatedly while going back for his family, was found on one occasion carrying a tiny pocket Bible.
Powery also highlights an older thread, the trope of the talking book, first identified by the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. In Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, the young Equiano watches his master’s lips move over a book, assumes the book is speaking, and later opens it and puts his ear to it. It says nothing to him. Years later, Sojourner Truth, asked to swear on a book in a courthouse, says the first thing she did was put her ear down to it. Powery reads this as a long tradition about “the power of the book to speak. But somehow it’s not always speaking to us.” The aim was never to escape the book. It was to get the book to speak to their condition.
Are These Sources the Whole Story?
No, and Powery is candid about the limits. The narratives come from a small group: people who escaped and who had some access to literacy. He considers them representative, because they report on many others, but they are not a survey of every enslaved person.
The sources were also shaped by their market. Powery explains that after abolitionist Theodore Weld called for more firsthand accounts in the late 1830s, the narratives found a northern white Christian readership, and their themes became narrower and more Christian. Authors needed income and wanted their stories read. Earlier narratives were freer, and a few tell a story largely without God.
And not everyone held on. Some narrators describe family members, often older ones, who walked away from Christianity because of how it was lived in America. One narrator Powery cites said he had heard too many sermons on obeying masters and would keep to the God of his African ancestors instead. Powery does not hide from this. He says, “It’s easier for me to understand the people who walked away than it is those who held up.” He even notes a story Randolph recorded of a tradition among some enslaved people that Jesus, because he suffered, was not quite the same as God. Enslaved Christianity was not a single, tidy orthodoxy.
None of this rescues the passive-recipient claim. It strengthens the opposite. Some people accepted, some argued, some rejected, some improvised. That variety is what thinking people do with a text. It is exactly what the claim says did not happen.
What Changes When You See the Distinction?
The white-man’s-religion charge treats a belief system and the people who abused it as one thing. Enslaved readers refused that equation, and they did it from inside the faith. The Jude 3 Project holds that calling Christianity a white man’s religion is historically inaccurate, since the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe. The freedom narratives add a second line of evidence from American soil: even where Christianity came through slaveholders, the enslaved tested it, read past the edited sermons and found a Christ who stood on the auction block with them.
Powery wrote the book to show that “folks have always been active agents in their own freedom. Not just passive recipients, not just waiting for someone to come free them.” He adds: “They’ve been active agents of attempting to humanize others even while people were dehumanizing them.” The inheritance, then, is not a faith copied from the oppressor. It is a faith that knew how to read its own book better than the people who claimed to own it.
Quick Answers
Did enslaved people simply believe what their masters preached? No. Freedom narratives show many of them judging sermons, walking out on proslavery preaching and reading passages in fuller context than the preachers did.
What did they do with Ephesians 6:5? Responses varied. Some identified with Paul as a fellow sufferer. Others pointed out that preachers skipped Ephesians 6:9, which places masters under the same Master in heaven.
Was the Exodus their main story? Less than many assume. Powery found little use of the Exodus motif in narratives written before the Civil War. It grew more prominent after emancipation.
Did every enslaved person embrace Christianity? No. Some rejected it because of how it was lived in America, and some returned to the God of their African ancestors. The record includes acceptance, argument and rejection.
Can the narratives be trusted as evidence? They are valuable but limited. They come from literate people who escaped, and later ones were shaped by a northern Christian audience. Read with those limits in mind, they still show widespread critical engagement with Scripture.
