You can trust a faith that was used against your ancestors if you separate the faith from the people who bent it, and then judge both by the standard Jesus himself set: look at the fruit. Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, argues that the root the reader is worried about is American Christianity as it was practiced on Black people, which is a different thing from Christ. Her answer is public and specific. Live the whole gospel, own the story and repent in ways that repair.
Fields gave that answer at the 400 Conference, speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on the theme of changing the story. She framed the problem in one line: “how in the world do we get good fruit from a rotten root?” The rest of her talk tries to answer it without pretending the history is cleaner than it is.
What exactly is the claim against Christianity?
Fields makes a point about Black apologetics that sets the terms. In her experience, many Black people already believe God exists. The question they bring is where God is in their suffering, and why anyone should trust a Christianity that seems to have worked mainly for white men. That is the question Jude 3 Project takes to historically Black colleges and universities: is Christianity a white man’s religion?
So the claim has a precise shape. It says the faith is compromised at its source, because it reached Black people through the hands of their oppressors. Fields states the history behind that claim without softening it:
“We’ve seen strange fruit hanging from trees with blood on the leaves and the root because the Bible is seen as a way and the method of manipulation, not a tool of liberation in the voices of many.”
“Strange fruit” is the old name for the bodies of lynched Black people, and Fields uses it on purpose: for many Black Americans the visible fruit of the religion was terror, and the Bible itself came to look like an instrument of control.
Whose story is this, and what did the people in it do?
Before answering the claim, it helps to ask whose experience is being described. Fields offers a specific witness. She recounts a story from Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited. Thurman spent summers with his grandmother, who had him read the Bible aloud but chose the passages herself. She kept him in the Gospels and the Psalms and never let him read Paul. When he finally asked why, she told him her slave master had used Paul’s words against her, and she had vowed never to read Paul again.
The story is usually told as an indictment, and it is one. It also shows what she kept. She refused the master’s use of Scripture while still reading the Gospels and the Psalms to her grandson, drawing her own line between the religion she was handed and the Jesus she found in the text. Her life is a counterexample to the idea that leaving is the only honest response to a weaponized faith.
Black Christians have never spoken with one voice about this history. Some walked away. Many, like Thurman’s grandmother, held on while rejecting the theology of their oppressors. The “white man’s religion” claim also skips older history: Acts 8 records an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah and being baptized on the road from Jerusalem, long before any plantation existed.
Is the root really rotten?
Listen closely to Fields’s wording. Later in the talk she speaks of getting good fruit from “what seems like a rotten root.” The rot she has in view is the American Christianity “that has been perpetuated in our country,” which she sets against the gospel’s own message. She concedes that the version of Christianity many Black Americans met was a counterfeit, and she leaves Christ out of that concession.
Her text is Jesus’ warning about false prophets. In the King James Version, Matthew 7:15-16 reads: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Jesus told his followers that people would come in his name whose lives would expose them.
That has a sharp implication. The test the skeptic uses against Christianity is a test Christianity supplied. When a slaveholder quoted Scripture while selling children, the faith he claimed had already given his victims the standard by which to name him a wolf.
The limit of this point should be stated plainly. Bad fruit can discredit a messenger. Good fruit cannot, by itself, prove the message true. Whether Jesus rose from the dead is a historical question that needs its own evidence, and Fields is not making that case in this talk. She is addressing why the message has been so hard to hear, and what the church must do so that its witness stops contradicting its words.
What does it mean to live the whole gospel?
Fields’s first move borrows an image from Ergun Caner’s writing on apologetics, which describes two wings of apologetics, information and incarnation. Information is what the church proclaims. Incarnation is that message lived out. Fields presses the point with questions. What good is it to preach that Jesus rose on the third day if you do not submit your life to him? What good is defending the Bible’s authority if you do not live under it? What good is teaching that every person bears God’s image if you do not care when Black and brown people are shot in the street?
She pictures the two wings on a plane and explains the repeated crashes of Christian witness this way: “because we only have one wing on our plane.” One part of the church keeps the information and neglects the life, while another keeps the activism and lets go of the message.
She ties this to Ezekiel’s call. In Ezekiel 2-3 the prophet is handed a scroll written with lamentations, mourning and woe, and told to eat it. Ezekiel 3:3 says of the scroll, “it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness,” and a few verses later he goes out in bitterness of spirit. Fields reads the scene as a call to take the whole word: “Not just what benefits you, not just what you like, but the stuff that’s hard to digest.” She names what that includes: “The stuff that puts your power in check, the things that challenges your history and your own personal narrative, the things that challenge your savior complex”.
That last phrase targets a specific habit. Fields describes Christians who spend time with Black people only to serve them, never as equals. Eating the whole scroll means letting Scripture correct that posture too.
Some will hear all this as politics in church clothes. Fields answers from inside her Pentecostal upbringing, refusing to trade holiness for justice or justice for holiness: “I’m passionate about justice, but I’m also passionate about personal piety and holiness because just as God is a just God, he’s a holy God.” Her argument is that God’s attributes cannot be pulled apart, and that justice cut off from holiness loses its ground: “if we just preach justice without talking about God’s holiness and without lifting up his word, we’ll have no foundation in which to execute that justice.” Her summary is compact: “We must have orthodoxy and orthopraxy.”
Why should anyone own a sin they did not commit?
The second move draws the hardest objection, and it deserves its strongest form. Scripture seems to reject inherited guilt outright. Ezekiel 18:20 says: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” On that reading, asking a Christian today to repent of slavery looks like asking a son to bear his father’s iniquity. Fields hears this objection often. People ask her how she can hold them responsible for their ancestors’ sin.
Her reply turns the question back on the preacher. “We hold humanity responsible for the sin of Adam.” Romans 5:12 says that “by one man sin entered into the world,” and Christians readily teach that every person is tied to a sin committed long before their birth. Yet when the subject turns to this country, she says, many connect themselves to Adam’s sin “but we disconnect ourselves from the original sin of America”. The result: “We indeed become hypocrites in the minds of Americans.” A church that tells the world it is guilty through Adam while claiming no part in its own national history is asking people to accept a standard it will not apply to itself.
Her second answer is Ezra. In Ezra 9 the scribe confesses his people’s sins in the first person plural: “for our iniquities are increased over our head” (Ezra 9:6). Fields notes that Ezra was not personally guilty of everything he confessed, but “he sees us as interconnected.” She contrasts that with Western individualism, pointing to the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with “Our Father” and asks for our daily bread.
Read together, Ezekiel and Ezra may describe two different things. Ezekiel 18 addresses whether God punishes a son for his father’s crimes, and says he does not. Ezra 9 describes a leader confessing as part of a people whose history he shares. That is one interpretive way to hold both texts, and it fits Fields’s call better than talk of personal guilt does. Ezra’s prayer is also a description of how one leader confessed, not a command binding every believer, so Fields is offering it as a model of solidarity. Her plea asks Christians to stand inside their people’s story and turn from its sin together, while leaving each descendant’s personal guilt where Ezekiel puts it.
She then moves from logic to sight. She retells a story from a book on reading Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes, about Mother Teresa bringing rice to a starving woman in Calcutta. The woman split the rice in half and left with it, and when she returned she explained that her neighbors were hungry too. Fields stresses that the woman was not a Christian, yet even in her own suffering she saw someone else. Matthew 9:36 says that when Jesus saw the multitudes, “he was moved with compassion on them.” Compassion begins with seeing, and Fields names what blocks it: “Sometimes we have no compassion because we don’t see anybody other than who’s in the mirror.”
What does repentance that repairs look like?
Fields’s third move starts with a simple definition: repentance means to turn. Confession comes more easily once a person connects to the story, because only then can they see what there is to repent of. For Fields, turning reaches past words to repairing what was broken. She names reparations as one example and then moves to questions individuals and churches can act on: “What are some ways that I can use my privilege to benefit another?”
Her sharpest example concerns church planting. She describes churches that plant new congregations in Black neighborhoods as if there were no gospel there, when several Black churches have been doing the work for years. She asks white churches to support “not the safe churches that I plant, but the African American churches that have existed in the community for years that need something.” She imagines the million dollars spent on a new plant going instead to an existing church that some might fear is not safe or theologically sound enough. Her verdict on the usual pattern: “Because we seek to colonize more than we seek to help.”
Her reason is practical. A hundred thousand dollars given to an established Black church, she argues, would go further than a new plant ever could, “because they already have the trust in the community.” Reconciliation, she warns, falls on deaf ears when it looks like moving guilt-stricken newcomers into a neighborhood while ignoring the people already serving it.
Reparations as public policy is a question on which Christians disagree, and Fields raises it as her own view. Her central proposal stands without settling that debate. It asks churches to stop competing with faithful Black congregations and start resourcing them.
What the fruit test gives a Black reader
The reader asking whether this faith can be trusted is not being handed the job of fixing the church that did the harm. Fields aims her three moves at the people and institutions who inherited the benefits of the distortion. What she offers the reader is a way to tell the counterfeit from the original.
Jesus’ fruit test cuts in a specific direction. It condemns the slaveholder’s religion by Jesus’ own words, so a Black Christian can name that religion a wolf in sheep’s clothing without granting it the right to speak for Christ. Thurman’s grandmother made that judgment generations ago when she put down the master’s reading and kept the Jesus of the Gospels. Indicting the counterfeit, on Jesus’ terms, is itself an act of trusting him.