Dr. Umar Johnson’s case against Christianity depends on a step he rarely says out loud: that the way a faith reached a people tells you what the faith is and whose it is. He is right about much of what surrounds that step. Black pride is legitimate, and so are the grievances about economic neglect and a whitewashed church history. The step itself fails twice. It is historically false, and even if it were true, his conclusion would not follow from it.
Answering Johnson well means keeping those two things apart. Defend the church against every part of his critique, and you lose the people who can see that parts of it are true. Grant his conclusion because his grievances are real, and you accept an inference the evidence never earned.
The case at its strongest
Pastor Jerome Gay, who has answered Johnson publicly, treats him as a serious opponent: a leading voice in Pan-African thought, a psychiatrist and former principal with an earned doctorate. Pan-Africanism, in Gay’s account, is an ideology about the political, economic and social development of people of African descent rather than a religion, and it is held by Christians, Muslims and humanists alike.
Johnson’s thought, as Gay summarizes it, rests on three anchors: the centrality of ethnicity, the empowerment of Black people in education, economics, social life and politics, and repatriation, meaning deliberate investment in the progress of the African continent, which Johnson believes America neglects even though Africans built much of its culture through forced labor.
From there the case against Christianity can be stated fairly. Black Americans largely encountered Christianity through the people who enslaved them. Those people used the faith to justify their power. The church that resulted presents a white Jesus, white heroes and a history that begins in Europe. A people seeking dignity should therefore reject a religion that came to them as part of their subjugation and still seems to erase them.
Each step contains something a thoughtful person could say with a straight face. The question is whether the steps connect.
What the critique gets right
More than many Christians are comfortable admitting, and Gay admits it.
On pride, he refuses to treat cultural affinity as a threat. When someone tells him they care about Black businesses and Black empowerment, his answer is that he does too. He leads a predominantly Black church, serves a primarily Black community, and says he sees problems in that community he cannot ignore. His principle is simple: “affirming blackness doesn’t mean anti whiteness.” He even endorses Johnson’s refrain that Black parents should give their children homework every day.
On history, Gay concedes the grievance at its root. Many white Christians, he says, have been silent or complicit in spreading the idea that the faith belongs to them, mainly by highlighting only white contributions. He points to white portraits of Jesus and of African church fathers, and to church history told as though it begins with Martin Luther and John Calvin. His diagnosis is blunt: “Christianity has ignored its African roots and its black and brown contributions.” He counts this neglect among the reasons many Black people are walking away.
On moral hypocrisy, he goes further. He names Calvin and Luther as anti-Semitic and George Whitefield as an advocate for slavery, and he argues that holding such men up as theological models while dismissing imperfect Black leaders is a double standard. Christians who insist ethics cannot be separated from theology do exactly that for their own heroes. In Gay’s words, “you’re separating your ethics from your theology.” His verdict on the slaveholding preachers is short: “That’s not a model for good theology when you own people.”
On money, Gay shares Johnson’s anger at ministers chasing private jets, money he says could fund hiring, after-school programs and STEM education for Black children. He calls health and wealth teaching a false gospel and cites Galatians 1:8: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”
Lisa Fields adds a matching observation. Johnson’s movement gives African Americans a sense of identity and heritage at a point where much of evangelicalism seems to take theirs away. She sees church history as the best answer here, which she describes as “telling the truth about what happened.”
A Christian who denies these things has not answered Johnson. That Christian has proved his point.
Where the inference breaks
The argument moves from how Christianity reached many Black Americans to what Christianity is and to whom it belongs. That move needs a hidden premise: the channel of transmission defines the ownership of the thing transmitted. Stated openly, the premise is hard to defend.
Test it against a simple case. Suppose someone learns to read from a cruel teacher who uses literacy to humiliate students. The cruelty is real, and the student has every right to name it. Reading still does not belong to the cruel teacher, and the student need not give up books to keep her dignity. The analogy has a limit: reading makes no claims about God, while Christianity does. The logical point survives the limit. Who handed you a claim does not settle whether the claim is true or whose it is.
Gay attacks the premise from the historical side. If the faith’s identity were defined by the slave trade, there would be no serious African Christianity before it. There was. In his words, “we didn’t believe because of the slave trade, there were African church fathers who believed in Christ and taught Christ well before the transatlantic slave trade.” He names Augustine of Hippo and Athanasius as African church fathers who helped shape theology, and concludes that “there’s no way historically or geographically to think that Christianity is a white man’s religion.”
The Bible’s own sequence makes the same point. In Acts 8 an Ethiopian official is baptized and goes home believing, while Paul’s call to cross into Macedonia does not come until Acts 16. An African believer carries the faith away from Jerusalem before the apostle carries it into Europe.
Gay also makes claims about biblical figures: that Nimrod and Jethro were people of color, that four women in Jesus’ earthly genealogy were women of color, and that the Gospel of Mark came from an African author. These are his readings, and they carry less weight. Settling them would require evidence about ancient ethnic categories and authorship that the texts do not give in modern racial terms. The argument stands without them on the firmer ground of the church fathers and Acts 8.
Johnson’s conclusion needs both the history and the hidden premise to hold. The history fails as a general claim about the faith, and the cruel-teacher test shows the premise would fail even without it.
This is the force of Gay’s rule for critics: “if you’re gonna critique our faith, you gotta critique it accurately.” He lists the errors. Christianity has African roots. Black people believed before being brought here. They contributed to theology, philosophy and apologetics. And most Black ministers are not prosperity preachers: “When you make proponents of the prosperity gospel, the norm, as opposed to the anomaly, you make the black church look bad.” The ones on television hold the microphone, he notes, which makes them look typical.
Does permanence make ethnicity the deepest identity?
A second hidden premise sits underneath the first. Johnson argues, in Gay’s account, that ethnicity should decide a person’s identity because it cannot be left behind. You can leave a faith, a marriage, a job, even your children, but “one thing you cannot walk away from is being black.”
The observation is true. The inference is not. Permanence does not establish primacy. No one can walk away from the year they were born or the city where they first breathed, and neither fact is the foundation of who they are. Something can be unchangeable and still fail to answer why a person exists or what a human life is for.
Gay accepts the permanence and rejects the primacy. He asks no one to care less about being Black. He argues that “our identity can’t be within our ethnicity alone.” His reason concerns purpose: if there is a Creator, human beings exist for that Creator’s glory, and not only for their own economic, social, political or even spiritual empowerment. He points to 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul writes, “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us” (2 Corinthians 5:20). In context Paul is describing the ministry of reconciliation. An ambassador takes his commission from the one who sends him and keeps the homeland he comes from.
Gay’s position is an ordering. Ethnicity keeps its full place, and the deepest answer to who a person is lies one level further down. He frames the church’s task as affirming the image of God in a people who have been historically and systemically oppressed, then bringing the gospel to that context without apology.
What about the Christianity enslaved people actually received?
Here is the strongest objection. Augustine is fine as history, a critic might say, but he is not what enslaved Africans in America were handed. They received a slaveholder’s religion, and that is what Johnson rejects. Pointing to ancient bishops changes the subject.
The objection deserves a direct reply, and Gay’s own reasoning supplies one. He condemns the Christianity preached by people who owned human beings more sharply than most of Johnson’s critics would. The real question is what makes a version of the faith distorted. If the slaveholder’s religion simply were Christianity, there would be no Christian ground to call it hypocrisy. Gay’s charge is that those preachers violated the faith they claimed. Paul, he argues, consistently joins right belief with right practice, and Gay insists that “only Jesus was the perfect one,” which leaves no human hero entitled to define the faith.
That is the logic of Galatians 1:8. A preacher can preach another gospel, because the standard sits outside the preacher. Once that is granted, the enslaver’s version of the faith becomes evidence against the enslaver. The critic’s anger at the slaveholder’s religion turns out to appeal to the very standard Christianity sets for itself.
This reply has a limit. It shows the inference fails; it does not show Christianity is true. That claim rests on other grounds, above all the historical case for the resurrection. What it settles is narrower: the slave trade cannot be the reason to reject Christ, because it neither created the faith nor defined it.
What remains open
Two questions survive the argument, and both are practical.
The first is whether the church will tell its own history honestly. Gay is not satisfied with apologies that leave the old picture standing. Many have apologized for racist heroes, he says, yet presenting those men as the model for good theology keeps the false narrative alive. It must be addressed in love, in his view, but addressed. Until it is, Johnson’s grievance keeps its force even though his inference does not, and every white Jesus on a seminary cover makes the false premise look true.
The second is how people form convictions at all. Lisa Fields finds that many people, asked for their sources, point to a video. Gay recalls people abandoning the faith after an eight-minute clip of Zeitgeist, which claimed Jesus was a copy of Horus and the Bible a book of astrology. His comparison: “people may watch a 15 minute video versus reading a 250 page book.” That cuts against everyone. The person who absorbed Johnson’s case from a clip has not tested it, and the Christian who answers with a slogan has tested nothing. An argument whose hidden premise only shows up when it is slowed down and stated plainly cannot be answered in fifteen minutes, by either side.