Christ reorders your ethnicity instead of erasing it. Your heritage stays a real gift from God, and it loses the power to decide your worth. That answer meets two opposite pressures at once: the church voice that treats Blackness as a detail to leave at the door, and the ethnic-roots movements that say you must leave Jesus to get your history back. Both assume you have to choose. The gospel does not ask you to.
B.J. Thompson, who disciples college students at Morehouse with the Navigators, put the whole tension into three sentences while talking with Lisa Fields:
You are not a white man. I’m not a black man. Even though God gave us ethnic origins, positionally, we are brothers.
Read quickly, that sounds like erasure. Look at the middle clause. God gave the origins, so they are a gift and carry no stain. The word that carries the argument is “positionally.” Thompson is describing where a believer stands before God and in the family of God, while leaving where that believer came from fully intact. He follows it at once with the point he cares about: “I don’t have a lesser value than you.” The passage is about value. Ethnicity remains, and its ranking power is gone.
What exactly is the pull toward ethnic-roots movements?
Vague talk about “the culture” helps no one here, so it is worth naming the claim as Thompson heard it. In his early twenties he sat in a barbershop watching a video that, in his words, dismantled Christianity and called it a white man’s religion. The argument troubled him less than what he saw in the people around him: a hunger to know their ethnic origins, and no one in the church feeding it.
Years later he saw that hunger again, in a swell of movements he lists by name: the Nation of Islam, Hebrew Israelites, Egyptology, Five Percenters. These groups teach different things, and he does not treat them as one doctrine. He sees a common need underneath:
it is a group of people who are grasping for a desire to be affirmed historically with real roots in spirituality.
That diagnosis treats the seekers with respect. The desire for roots is legitimate. A person wants a history with weight and a spirituality connected to it. The real question is who meets that desire, and at what cost.
Thompson’s analogy is blunt. If a whole society denies you food and shelter, and then someone shows up offering both, you will take it, even if the person offering it is dangerous. He calls his own example extreme, and it is. The logic still holds at a smaller scale. People rarely leave the faith because a stranger out-argued them. They leave because someone else offered to affirm what the church had ignored.
Where does the hunger come from?
Thompson traces it to two absences, one in the classroom and one in the pulpit.
The first is thin history. He argues that many Americans received “an anemic version of history” in school, built around wars and test dates, with small slices on emancipation and civil rights. Most of us, he says, “learn history for the sake of a test” and “not for the sake of understanding who we are and where we come from.” A people who were never told their own story will eventually go looking for it, and they will trust whoever seems to have it.
He makes the loss concrete with something from the conversation itself. He asks Lisa Fields where her last name came from, and she answers that it came from the slave master. His conclusion is sobering: “we’ve been so deprived of our ethnic origins that we can only refer historically to slavery.” For many African Americans, the family name marks the point where the earlier record was cut off. That gap is documentary, written into the family line, and a person who notices it will want to fill it.
The second absence is the church’s silence. Thompson points to two figures from the 1960s as he understands their stories. He recounts that Muhammad Ali, raised by Christian parents, could not accept a Christianity that would not honor him as a human being, and that the church’s passiveness turned him away. He describes James Baldwin seeking refuge in the church and finding that the Christianity he met could not answer why Black people were not treated equally or why fellow believers did not stand with them. These are Thompson’s readings of their lives, offered as illustrations. His larger claim is that when people see a truth plainly and the church says nothing about it, the damage resembles a bad breakup. It scars the ability to trust that thing again.
Lisa Fields adds a further thread. Drawing on a book about James Cone, she notes that in the 1960s people attending Black churches often did not hear their struggle outside the walls addressed from the pulpit, so Black liberation theology felt to many like a breath of fresh air. She says she appreciates much of Cone’s work and disagrees with a lot of it as well. Her point concerns what happens when sound teaching and sound practice come apart: “there’s these extremes that we are pushed to.”
Isn’t Christianity itself the problem?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves more than a quick reply. Christian institutions in America supported segregation, and Christian language was used to defend it. Thompson says as much: at the time, he argues, Christianity in its power structures stood with people affirming racial segregation. He names the church’s central failure as “A lack of humility” and goes further: “we’ve lacked humility and we’ve lacked repentance in being able to say that was evil.” His example is the long delay before Southern Baptist leaders formally said they had been wrong about Martin Luther King Jr., which he places in the 1990s. That date is his recollection.
The usual Christian reply is to separate the gospel from the people who betrayed it. Many who have left find that reply unpersuasive. For them, the institutional record is the test: a faith is what its churches did, and a gospel that could sit comfortably beside segregation for generations has shown its character. That challenge has force, and this conversation does not settle the history behind it. Thompson offers a diagnosis of why people leave and a call to repentance. He does not lay out a historical case about how the Bible was read by those who defended racial hierarchy.
What can be said modestly is this. Scripture itself does not supply the hierarchy. Acts 17:26 says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” And Acts 8 records an Ethiopian official reading Isaiah and being baptized in the first generation of the church. At minimum, the faith reached African hands before any European empire carried it anywhere. A movement claiming Christianity was invented to control Black people has to account for that text.
Thompson’s own answer to the objection is less an argument than a demand. The church loses people precisely when it uses the purity of the gospel as a reason not to confess the sins of its members. The distinction between the faith and its failed carriers only earns a hearing from someone who sees the church actually naming those failures.
Doesn’t Galatians 3:28 erase ethnicity?
The erasure side has a favorite verse. Galatians 3:28 reads: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Read it in its argument. Paul is answering who counts as an heir of God’s promise to Abraham, and the next verse says so: “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). The issue is standing and inheritance. Nobody gets into the family by being Jewish, free, or male, and nobody is kept out for being Greek, enslaved, or female.
The verse itself shows the categories survive. Paul lists male and female in the same breath, and he plainly did not think men and women stopped existing at baptism. He also kept describing himself ethnically after his conversion, calling himself “of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Philippians 3:5). What ends is their power to sort people into higher and lower before God.
That is exactly what Thompson means by “positionally.” Position is Galatians 3:28. Origin is Philippians 3:5. A believer has both.
The end of the Bible confirms it. Revelation 7:9 describes “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” standing before the throne. In the final scene of redemption, nations and languages are still recognizable. God gathers them without melting them into sameness.
The assumption both errors share
The two opposite mistakes rest on the same premise: ethnicity must carry your worth.
The ethnic-roots movements accept that premise and try to reverse the verdict. If racism said your heritage made you less, they say your heritage makes you more, or makes you the true chosen people. Thompson’s account of racism shows why that cannot heal anything. “Racism is more than opinion,” he says. In his account it is the power to enforce a bias on someone’s life through personal or systemic force. The wound came from attaching value and power to ethnicity. Attaching a different value to it keeps the wound open and flips the scoreboard.
The erasure side accepts the premise too, then decides the safest move is to stop talking about ethnicity at all. That silence is exactly what Thompson says drove people out of the church. A faith that tells a young Black believer to forget the history behind their last name has handed that believer every reason to look elsewhere for it.
The gospel rejects the premise. Thompson’s “I don’t have a lesser value than you” rests on a worth God already settled, one no ancestry can raise or lower. Once ethnicity no longer has to prove your value, it can be what God gave it to be: a history to learn and a people to love, held without fear and without idolatry. This is why Jude 3 holds that African and African-descended believers don’t have to choose between their heritage and their faith. The choice only exists if one of them has to be the foundation for the other.
Learning the history for yourself
Asked how any of this gets fixed, Thompson answers first with “Jesus Christ on the throne.” His most direct counsel for a reader caught between roots and faith comes after: “study history for yourself. Don’t put the onus of knowing all of these things on one individual.”
That counsel cuts against both errors. It answers the church that wanted you incurious, and it answers the movement that wants to be your only teacher. A believer who has read the history directly, including the church’s sins and the faith’s early presence in Africa, is hard to persuade that Jesus was never theirs.
Thompson grounds the effort in what the church is meant to display: “We know that the manifold wisdom of God is displayed through the church.” He is drawing on Ephesians 3:10, where Paul says that “now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.” In context, that wisdom is the joining of Jew and Gentile into one body, the work Ephesians 2:14 describes when it says Christ “hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” A church that erases ethnicity has nothing left to join, so it cannot show that wisdom. A church divided by ethnicity cannot show it either, because the wall still stands. The witness appears only when distinct peoples remain distinct and stand together anyway.
That is what reordering looks like in public. Your heritage is part of what you bring to a table where no one’s seat depends on it.