When someone you love joins the Nation of Islam, a Hebrew Israelite camp, a Kemetic community or a strongly Pan-African circle, the first urge is usually to correct them. That urge is how most of these conversations end badly. A better answer is to listen until you understand what they believe and why, to ask questions that let them explain themselves, and to start from the grief you already share over how Scripture was used against Black people. Truth still gets spoken. It just gets spoken to someone who has been heard.
This guide works through that posture. It draws on Through Eyes of Color, a Jude 3 Project curriculum, and its lesson on engaging what it calls Black cults. It does not compare doctrines in detail. It focuses on how the conversation itself goes. You can work through it alone over a few sittings, or with a small group in one longer session. The practice near the end is meant to be done between readings, with a real person.
What you are actually walking into
Start with a distinction that changes everything after it: the surface of a belief is not always its root. The curriculum is frank about how some Hebrew Israelites come across in public, shouting from street corners. Then it looks underneath. It says that “underneath all of that vibrato is a deep sense of pain, confusion, and abandonment they long to explain.”
That sentence is worth slowing down for. If your loved one’s new beliefs are partly an attempt to explain real suffering, then attacking the beliefs head-on can feel to them like dismissing the suffering. The lesson recounts a campus encounter where a Hebrew Israelite man, after arguing his position, broke down in tears and asked why Black people were suffering so much. The curriculum hears in his cry an echo of Psalm 22, where the psalmist asks, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” (Psalm 22:1).
Notice what that comparison does. It puts the question inside the Bible, not outside it. A person who asks why God has allowed Black suffering is asking a question Scripture itself allows people to ask. You do not have to treat the question as hostile. You can treat it as one you share.
A second distinction: these movements are not all the same thing, and your loved one may not hold the textbook version of any of them. The curriculum notes that the Nation of Islam departs from orthodox Islam, while Hebrew Israelite teaching departs from orthodox Judaism and reshapes the Christian story rather than rejecting it outright. It treats Pan-Africanism differently again, saying a person can be both a Christian and someone who holds Pan-African ideals, and that the danger comes when those ideals are placed apart from or above a biblical worldview. It also warns that many people blend pieces from several sources into a personal mix. Its advice is to “be careful not to judge a person like this too quickly without getting a fuller picture of what they believe and why they believe it.”
So you may need to set aside the label you would put on their group, at least in conversation. Whatever word you use privately, the person in front of you will hear a word like “cult” as a verdict, not a question. The conversation goes better when you learn their beliefs from them rather than from a chart.
Three passages that shape the posture
Read these slowly. For each one, ask what it actually says before asking what it means for you.
James 1:19-20
“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).
James gives three instructions, and the third is the one people skip. Being slow to speak is hard. Being slow to anger is harder when someone you love says something that sounds like an attack on Jesus. Verse 20 gives the reason: human anger does not produce what God is after. The curriculum applies this directly. It admits the impulse to shut people up or beat them over the head with a Bible, and answers, “But brothers and sisters, this is not the way.”
Its reason is practical as well as moral: “As we slow down and listen, we get a sense of their worldview.” Then comes the part that answers the worry that listening means giving in: “Once we have a better sense of their worldview, then we can speak directly to the concerns and beliefs they hold dear.” Listening is not a substitute for speaking. It is what makes your speaking land on the right thing.
1 Peter 3:15
“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and 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 word “answer” here has the sense of a reasoned defense, the kind you give when asked to account for yourself. Peter’s readers were facing suspicion and mistreatment, so he is not describing friendly debate club. Two things travel together in the verse: a real reason, and a manner marked by meekness and fear, which some translations render as gentleness and respect. Many Christians keep one half and drop the other. Some have the gentleness and no reasons. Others have reasons delivered like a weapon. The verse asks for both.
2 Corinthians 5:20
“Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20).
Paul’s picture is of an envoy pleading, not a prosecutor winning. The curriculum draws from this that an ambassador must know the King well enough to represent him accurately. That cuts two ways in a family conversation. You owe your loved one an honest account of what you believe. You also owe them the tone of someone pleading for reconciliation, because that is the message.
Questions that open instead of trap
The curriculum treats asking good questions as part of being quick to listen. Questions let you learn the person’s view, and they also keep a conversation from drifting into a dozen side arguments. Its sample questions, lightly adapted for a family setting, look like this:
- How did you come to accept what this group teaches?
- What do you find appealing about it?
- How have you come to know that what you believe is true?
Each one does different work. The first asks for a story, and people are usually more open telling a story than defending a position. The second invites them to name what they have gained, which often points straight to the need underneath: dignity, belonging, an explanation for pain. The third is the most searching, and it is fair to ask only after the first two, because it asks them to examine their own grounds. Be ready to have it asked back to you.
The curriculum also suggests a fourth move for when you notice a contradiction: point back to something they said earlier and ask how they hold the two statements together. Used well, this is respectful. It treats them as someone who thinks. Used too early or too often with someone you love, it can feel like a cross-examination. A useful rule is to ask it only when you are genuinely curious about the answer.
Common ground that is real, not a tactic
Here the curriculum makes its most important move for family conversations. It observes that what burdens these movements is often close to what burdens Christians, and then says plainly: “We share their disgust for the ways Christianity and the Bible was used to justify the enslavement of black people.” It continues: “We, too, believe in justice and equality for all.” And: “We affirm that black is beautiful, because it was created in the image of God.”
These are not concessions made to soften someone up. They are things Christians should believe anyway. The curriculum elsewhere notes that the Nation of Islam’s own literature affirms justice and equality for all people, and that many reject Christianity because of passages that were twisted to keep enslaved people in line. If your loved one is angry about that history, you can be angry with them, honestly.
The curriculum describes what comes next: “It is in these places of common ground that we can affirm their concerns, then share how we make sense of it and respond to it through the lens of a Christian worldview.” The order matters. Affirm first. Then explain how you, as a Christian, make sense of the same pain.
There is a fair objection here. Doesn’t building on shared grief risk blurring real differences? The curriculum does not pretend the differences are small. It names teachings it finds deeply wrong, such as the claim that one race is the devil, or that salvation depends on ethnicity and shared suffering. Common ground is where the conversation starts, not where it hides. You can say, without contradiction, that you share someone’s grief and that you disagree with their explanation for it. In fact, the shared grief is what makes your disagreement credible.
Being ready when it is your turn
Listening first does not mean you never answer. The curriculum’s later principles are to know what you believe, know why you believe it, and contend for the faith. It warns against answering every challenge with “the Bible tells me so,” comparing that to a parent saying “because I said so.” Its verdict: “It’s not a satisfying answer.” People usually build their beliefs over years, and they deserve better than a slogan.
Among the questions it says Christians should be prepared to answer are why you believe Jesus rose from the dead, why you believe salvation is for everyone who believes in him, and why you think Christianity and the Bible affirm blackness. That last one matters in these conversations more than many Christians expect. If you cannot explain it, your loved one may reasonably conclude there is no answer.
The curriculum also shows what careful reading looks like. Some Hebrew Israelites read the curses of Deuteronomy 28 as describing the Atlantic slave trade. The lesson points readers to how the Old Testament itself records those curses falling on Israel in the Babylonian exile, and to the book of Lamentations, where the writer grieves that what God warned had come to pass. It then observes that the writer of Lamentations shares the Hebrew Israelites’ confusion over his people’s suffering, but not their ethnicity, and does not need to in order to be assured of God’s love. That kind of answer takes study. It is also far more persuasive than volume.
A practice: the understanding conversation
This takes about a week and has three steps.
- Before. Write down, in three or four sentences, what you think your loved one now believes and why. Keep the paper.
- During. Have one conversation where your only goal is to understand. Use one or two of the questions above. When they finish a point, try restating it in your own words and ask whether you got it right. Keep going until they say yes. Do not argue, even when you want to. If they ask what you think, answer briefly and honestly, then return to listening.
- After. Compare what you heard with what you wrote beforehand. Where were you wrong? What need or hurt did they name that you had not noticed? Then pick one of the “why do you believe” questions from the previous section and write a plain answer, the way you would say it to them, without religious shorthand.
If this conversation is not safe or possible right now, the first and third steps are still worth doing on your own.
For groups, the curriculum suggests practicing answers with one another and giving feedback on what each person did well and where they could improve. That works here too. One person plays a sincere believer in a movement, using only what the group has actually learned about it, and another practices listening and restating. Two cautions for whoever leads: do not let the role-play turn into mockery of the movement, since the point is to practice respect; and remind the group that stories about family members stay in the room.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- Think of a recent conversation where you argued instead of listening. What were you protecting in that moment?
- What has your loved one gained from this movement? Try to name it in words they would accept.
- James lists three instructions. Which of the three is hardest for you, and in what kind of moment?
- Where do you genuinely share their grief or anger? Is there anywhere you have been unwilling to say so out loud?
- Peter asks for both a reason and gentleness. Which half do you tend to drop, and what does that look like?
- Which of the curriculum’s “why do you believe” questions could you not yet answer well? What would it take to be ready?
- What would count as a good outcome of your next conversation, if it is not that they change their mind?
Before the next conversation
The curriculum closes its section on these movements by inviting readers to pray in two directions: to lament before God over past and present injustice in America, and to ask God to draw back those who have come to distrust him because of it. Both prayers belong together. The first keeps you honest about what your loved one is reacting to. The second keeps you honest about what you hope for.
Neither prayer requires you to win the next exchange. The relationship you keep is often the only place your loved one still hears a Christian who listens, grieves with them and can give a reason for hope. That is worth protecting, even on the days when nothing you say seems to land.