If someone you love has joined the Hebrew Israelites or the conscious community, start where they are right, and then be exact about where they are wrong. Dr. Walter McCray, who says he has spent 50 years in gospel ministry and more than four decades on this material, works in that order. He affirms the Black presence in Scripture and the depth of African history. Then he takes exception at specific points: the claim that Black people are cursed, the claim that every Black American is biblical Israel, and any attempt to make the Christian faith serve another religion.
That order changes what the argument is about. Your loved one probably believes the church hid their history from them. If you open by defending the church, you confirm the suspicion. If you open by showing them the history is already in the Bible, the disagreement moves to the conclusions they drew from it. That is a better place to disagree.
The question underneath the doctrine
It is tempting to treat these movements as a set of doctrines to refute. Lisa Fields offers a different starting point. She argues that the core issue is “wanting to have a faith that you can see yourself in,” and that white supremacy and racism in America left many African Americans feeling they could not see themselves in Christianity.
She also describes a Hebrew Israelite who came to a question-and-answer session on a Jude 3 Project HBCU tour. Once he calmed down, she recalls, he was close to tears and asked why Black people suffer the way they do. Her reading of that moment is that “he was trying to make sense of the problem of evil.” For him, the idea that Black people are cursed explained the suffering.
That observation reframes the task. The curse teaching does not attract people because it is pleasant. It attracts them because it answers a real question that many churches have answered badly or not at all. If you only knock the answer down, the question is still standing. Whatever you say has to address the suffering as well as the error.
What McCray affirms
McCray describes his response to these groups as “a black biblical response.” In his words, “the Bible says a lot about blackness, about black people and black persons and black nations.” His aim is to show that Black people are part of the Scriptures “from Genesis through revelation.”
His central text is Genesis 10, the table of nations, which traces the descendants of Noah’s three sons. He reads the line of Ham as close to an African family tree. The text names Ham’s sons directly: “And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan” (Genesis 10:6). Mizraim is the Hebrew name for Egypt. McCray identifies Cush with the Nile Valley south of Egypt and suggests Put was probably in the region of Somalia.
Then he adds a qualification that cuts in more than one direction. “These are three broad branches of humanity, and they are not three racial groups.” Racial categories, he argues, are a modern ideology the biblical writers did not know. That keeps him from doing what the movements do, which is to read modern racial categories back into ancient genealogies and build a theology on them.
McCray goes further than many Christian teachers would. He affirms the study of African languages, ancient Kush, the pyramids and the sciences of the Nile Valley. He notes that Moses was born and educated in Egypt. He says plainly, “we do not put the scriptures in opposition to that.” Some of his larger claims, such as Abraham being a Cushite, are his own arguments and should be held that way. His central affirmation does not depend on them. Genesis 10 names African peoples outright, and a Christian can say so in the first five minutes of a conversation without giving up anything the gospel needs.
The movements’ case, stated fairly
In this material, the movements’ arguments come secondhand, through McCray’s summary and Fields’s account of one encounter. So it is worth stating the strongest version before answering it.
The Hebrew Israelite argument usually runs like this. Deuteronomy 28 lists curses that will fall on Israel if it breaks covenant with God: defeat, exile, oppression by foreigners, and finally a return to bondage in ships (Deuteronomy 28:68). Read with the history of the transatlantic slave trade in view, the passage seems to describe what happened to Africans taken to the Americas with uncanny precision. If the curses fit, the argument goes, then the people who suffered them must be the people the curses were spoken to. That makes Black Americans the biblical Israelites, and it makes their suffering a sign of covenant judgment that can be lifted only by returning to Israel’s law.
Taken on its own terms, the argument is not foolish. It treats the Bible as true. It takes Black suffering seriously. It offers a history, an identity and a path out. That is why it reached the young man Fields describes. Anyone who answers it should first admit that it is responding to something real.
Where the two sides divide on the curse
McCray answers on two fronts. He addresses the older curse teaching from Genesis 9, and the modern Hebrew Israelite form that rests, he says, on “the latter chapters of Deuteronomy.”
On Genesis 9, he reads the text closely. The words of the curse come from Noah, after Noah wakes from drinking. God does not speak anywhere in that part of the narrative, and nothing in the passage shows God endorsing what Noah said. The curse also falls on Canaan, not on Ham: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9:25). And the chapter opens with God speaking very differently: “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 9:1).
From that, McCray concludes: “when God bless you, nobody can curse you effectively. And especially a drunken Noah.” Citing the biblical scholar Charles B. Copher, he says the idea of a divine curse on African people comes from Jewish writings from the second through the fourth centuries AD and was revived by white people during the slave trade. His summary is blunt: “Ideology is not theology, it is not biblical.”
Christian interpreters differ on Noah’s words. Some read them as a prophecy later fulfilled in Israel’s conflict with the Canaanites. Others treat them as a father’s angry speech that the narrative records without approving. Neither reading supports the curse teaching, because the text names Canaan and never extends the curse to Africa.
On Deuteronomy, McCray answers theologically: “when Jesus died on the cross, he be, he became a curse for all humanity.” Paul makes a related argument when he takes up Deuteronomy’s curse language in Galatians 3: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Paul is writing about the law’s curse on everyone who fails to keep it, Jew and Gentile alike. So even if someone grants the Hebrew Israelite reading of Deuteronomy 28, the New Testament does not leave any people serving that sentence. Christ takes it.
The two positions cannot both be true. One says Black suffering is evidence of a curse still in force. McCray says the curse in Genesis was spoken by a man, aimed at someone else and overruled by God’s blessing, and that whatever curse the law carries was borne by Christ.
One family’s lineage, or a whole people’s?
The disagreement over identity is narrower than either side often admits.
McCray does not deny that some enslaved Africans were Hebrew Israelites. He says some of the people brought from Africa were Hebrew Israelites, some were Christian and some were Muslim, but perhaps most followed indigenous African religions. A person, he says, may trace their own ancestry back to biblical Israel. What they cannot do is make that claim for all African Americans. In his words, “We come from a composite religious tradition.”
This is where the strongest objection lands. Someone in the movement might say: if the biblical world is this full of African peoples, as McCray himself argues, then the claim that Black Americans are Israel follows naturally. It does not. Being African in the biblical world and being descended from Jacob are two different claims. Genesis 10 places Cush, Egypt and Put in the line of Ham, and the nations around Israel were often African. Their presence in the text shows that Africans belong in the story. It says nothing about which modern families descend from the twelve tribes.
The Deuteronomy argument has the same gap. A prophecy of exile and bondage could fit many peoples who suffered those things. The fit shows that the suffering was real and terrible. It cannot by itself establish ancestry. The evidence that would actually bear on the question is historical: where enslaved people were taken from, what religious communities existed in those regions, and what a particular family’s records show. That is why McCray’s distinction works. It leaves room for one family’s claim and asks for evidence before accepting a claim about millions of people.
Lisa Fields presses the practical side. The Christian who answers by flatly denying any Jewish presence among enslaved Africans, she warns, weakens their own case: “if we say, well, nobody came over that was Jewish, then that kind of undercuts our defense in engaging the group.” Overclaiming in reply to an overclaim loses the conversation.
Shared setting is not borrowed content
Fields names another common charge: that Christianity copied ancient Egyptian religion. McCray does not deny contact between Israel and Egypt. He points to Moses’s Egyptian education and to the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. His argument is that the biblical writers were inside that ancient African world, and that what they recorded came from revelation by the most high God. He also marks a limit: “we would take exception with those who would try to pervert a biblical understanding of the Christian faith” by making it subordinate to ancient religions.
The question to put to a loved one is simple. Does a shared cultural setting prove that the message was borrowed? Or can God speak to people within their own culture? McCray holds the second. The copying argument needs the first.
What makes McCray’s affirmation different
McCray notes that “not everyone who deals with black people in the Bible deals with Jesus” as Savior and Lord. Then he states his own aim: “My studies are Christ centered.” He lifts up Jesus, who he notes had African and Cushite lines in his genealogy, as the Son of God and Savior of the world.
That is the real dividing line. McCray and the movements agree that the Bible’s world was full of African peoples. They disagree about what follows. For the movements, it supports a claim about racial identity and inherited destiny. For McCray, it shows that the God of the Bible was never foreign to Africa, so the gospel about Jesus is not foreign either. When he says “we do not believe that the Bible is the white man’s book,” he is denying that the people who misused the Bible ever owned it.
He adds a historical claim from Acts. The Ethiopian official converted in Acts 8 carried the gospel into Africa, and the gospel reached Europe when Paul answered the Macedonian call in Acts 16. “Black folk, African folk became Christian before Europeans did,” McCray concludes. For a loved one who believes Christianity was imposed on Africans by Europeans, the order of events in Acts is worth reading together.
Taking this into the next conversation
The model McCray and Fields offer suggests a few concrete moves.
- Ask about the suffering before the doctrine. Fields’s young man was not first asking about genealogy. He was asking why Black people suffer. Ask your loved one what the teaching explains for them, and listen to the answer before offering your own.
- Offer a real concession. Say plainly that Africans are named throughout Scripture, that Moses was educated in Egypt, and that some enslaved Africans may well have been Hebrew Israelites. These are things McCray himself affirms, so you are not conceding them as tactics.
- Narrow the disagreement to a question you can examine together. Open Genesis 9 and look at who speaks the curse and whom it names. Or ask what evidence would show that every African American, and not one particular family, descends from Jacob.
- Avoid answering an overclaim with an overclaim. Do not deny all African history, all Jewish presence in Africa, or all contact between Israel and Egypt. Fields is right that this undercuts your own case.
McCray’s own work began, he says, in the early 1970s at a mostly white Christian college where he saw white Christian racism on campus. He led a chapel group hoping that showing white students and professors how God spoke of Black people in Scripture might reduce it. The same material now answers Black movements that call Christianity a white religion. Both errors rest on one assumption, that Black people stand outside the Bible’s blessing. The curse myth used by slaveholders and the curse teaching your loved one may now repeat share that premise.
Pointing that out is often the most useful thing you can say. You are telling the person you love that the teaching they adopted to escape white supremacy borrowed its central idea from white supremacy. You can say it gently, after you have agreed with everything true in what they have learned. You can then open Genesis 9:1 together and read what God actually said over Noah’s sons.