Yes. A Christian can take the cry behind Black Lives Matter with full seriousness without endorsing every aim of the organizations and ideologies gathered under the hashtag. The reason is logical. Dr. Carl Ellis argues that the cry for justice belongs to biblical righteousness itself. Any organization that adopts the slogan is a separate thing, to be judged on its own record. These are two different objects, and affirming one does not commit you to the other.
That sounds simple, yet the public argument rarely allows it. One voice says that if you will not say the words, you do not care. Another says that if you say the words, you have signed the whole platform. Those voices disagree about almost everything, but they share one premise. Once that premise is pulled into the open and tested, most of the false choice falls apart.
What premise is the public argument assuming?
Call it the package-deal premise: to affirm a moral claim is to endorse whoever is most visibly making it. Both sides of the hashtag fight lean on it. One side uses it to demand allegiance. The other uses it to justify silence.
Is the premise true in other cases? Consider a plain one. A person can agree that hungry children should be fed without approving every group that raises money on that sentence. Agreement with a proposition and membership in an institution are different relations. The first concerns whether a claim is true. The second concerns whether you will place yourself under someone’s leadership and goals.
Ellis makes this distinction explicitly. He says he is fighting for the cause of Black lives without coming under the official organization’s leadership, because it carries other aims he cannot support. He also refuses to treat partial disagreement as a reason to walk away from people working on the same wrong. As he puts it, “people have common cause with other people that they disagree with on other things.” Cooperating on one issue leaves your other convictions intact.
So the first conclusion is negative but important. The fact that an organization holds aims you reject does not show that the cry it amplifies is false. The fact that a cry is true does not show that you must join the organization amplifying it. Each inference needs a separate argument. The package-deal premise hides that fact.
Is justice really part of righteousness, or an optional add-on?
A second assumption runs underneath the first. Many Christians were taught, directly or by example, that the gospel concerns personal salvation and that justice is a political extra. If that were true, the church could leave the cry behind Black Lives Matter to activists without losing anything essential.
Ellis rejects the assumption at its root. He says that “social justice is part and parcel of the gospel, actually.” His reasoning starts with the word righteousness. Too often, he argues, Christian righteousness has shrunk to piety: devotions, church attendance, private habits. “But there’s another side to righteousness, and that is justice.” He then distinguishes a personal dimension and a social dimension of righteousness. A faith that tends only the personal side is incomplete, however devout it looks.
The prophets give him strong support. Amos 5:24 reads, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” In the KJV, “judgment” here carries the sense many other translations render as justice. In Hebrew poetry, the two lines are set side by side so that each sheds light on the other. Amos was confronting a nation that kept its religious festivals while mistreating the poor, and the paired lines refuse to separate worship from fair dealing. That is the historical meaning. The application Ellis draws, that righteousness without justice contradicts itself, follows from it fairly. His appeal is to the Bible’s own account of what righteousness includes, with no political theory doing the work.
Why has the church so often missed this? Ellis’s diagnosis concerns location more than motive. Evangelical theology, he argues, grew up in the context of the dominant culture, and people on top of a system rarely think about how that system treats those beneath them. He says plainly that he shares evangelicalism’s high view of Scripture, and adds, “I say that as an evangelical.” His complaint is that the tradition left a whole range of Scripture unexplored. The cost is visible. When a tradition’s practice lags behind its stated belief, many people conclude the belief itself must be false.
Why does it matter where a Black life’s worth comes from?
Here Ellis makes the move that gives this question its sharpest edge. He does not merely say that he agrees with the statement that Black lives matter. He asks what makes it true.
His answer is the image of God. He says Black lives matter because “black people are the image of God,” and he calls that teaching “the loftiest statement about human dignity” to be found anywhere. Genesis 1:27 is the root text: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” On this reading, dignity comes from the Creator to every human being. No movement, court or culture grants it, and no one can revoke it.
That grounding lets Ellis turn the question around. He imagines asking activists why Black lives matter: “do you have a basis for that?” He asks it to expose a weakness in the foundation. A claim can be true while some of the people asserting it cannot say why. When that happens, the claim tends to be applied unevenly, because nothing beneath it holds it steady.
Ellis offers exactly that test. He argues that the official organization was inconsistent. If Black lives truly matter, he asks, “does it make that much of a difference if the killer was white or black?” He cites the killing of a child in Chicago and of a Black police officer in New York as cases he believed drew too little response. Whether his reading of those particular cases was fair is a factual matter readers can examine. The logical structure of his argument stands either way. A principle that applies only when it serves a cause is functioning as a tool.
Ellis also handles the familiar counter-slogan. He says he is not bothered that the phrase does not say “all lives.” The phrase speaks to a particular situation: “When you’re marginalized, then your life doesn’t matter.” Stressing the worth of people whose worth is being denied takes nothing from anyone else. On a biblical foundation, it insists on the image of God precisely where that image is ignored.
What about the movement’s other aims?
The strongest objection deserves its full weight. It runs like this. A slogan is not just a sentence. It is a brand, and brands accumulate power. When Christians use the words, they lend credibility to whoever controls the brand, including agendas they reject. Separating the cry from the organization is a fine distinction on paper, but in public life the distinction disappears.
Ellis does not dismiss this. He builds part of it into his own position. He argues that movements draw two kinds of people. One kind cares about the issue. The other sees the movement as a vehicle for a separate agenda, a Trojan horse that can be used to gain power once the old order is overturned. Christians, he says, “have to be wise enough to recognize that every movement will attract people who are sincerely concerned,” and also those using it for other ends. His refusal to come under the organization’s leadership is that wisdom in practice.
But notice what the objection actually proves. It shows that Christians need discernment about institutions. It does not show that they should go quiet about the injustice, and the second conclusion does not follow from the first. Ellis draws the distinction himself. The organization, he says, “might have some nefarious things on their agenda along with that, but there’s a lot of people of goodwill who are fighting for that.” He points to friends in St. Louis who worked directly among participants in the movement and, in his account, had a real effect on how many of them understood the issue. Walking away would have left those people of goodwill with only one set of voices.
Silence has consequences too, and Ellis names them. A church without its own theology of justice does not end up neutral. It borrows. In his words, “we let non-Christians decide what our options are,” when “only God decides what our options are.” He calls this condition theological welfare: “We find ourselves on theological welfare.” Avoiding the hashtag leaves that dependency in place. It only shifts it to a different set of borrowed instincts.
Why can’t the church hand its allegiance to any movement?
The reason runs deeper than one organization’s record. Ellis defines oppression as “simply sin plus power.” It happens when someone in a dominant position imposes sin, or its consequences, on someone beneath them. That definition makes oppression a universal human possibility, available to anyone who holds power, including Black people and including people who began as advocates for the oppressed.
He pairs the image of God with a second biblical truth: human beings are fallen and fundamentally flawed. Forget the image, he argues, and you dehumanize others or yourself. Forget the fall, and you trust people too much, hand a seemingly good leader unchecked power, and end up with tyranny.
Apply that to a movement. The image of God is why the cry for justice is right. The fall is why no movement that voices the cry can be trusted without reserve. Its leaders are sinners with power, like everyone else. A Christian who held only the first truth would sign the whole platform. One who held only the second would dismiss the cry along with the platform. Holding both produces the posture Ellis describes: full commitment to the cause, conditional cooperation with the organizations, and no unconditional loyalty to either.
What does taking the cry seriously actually require?
If the argument holds, the church’s task is leadership on its own foundation. Ellis says, “we should not wait for the world to tell us what issues we should be concerned about.” Christians should look at the world themselves, name what is wrong and, where it fits, lead their own efforts. “So, yes, we should participate, but on our own terms.”
He ties this to the Great Commission. In Matthew 28:19 the KJV reads “teach all nations,” which more literally means make disciples of all nations. Ellis argues that discipleship works on cultures as well as individuals, and he names the Civil Rights Movement as a modern example. He calls it deeply theological at its core. He does not claim it made the country Christian. He claims that a society whose laws no longer enforce racism is more in line with God’s kingdom than one whose laws do. That is a measured claim about direction.
He also describes a method. Your own situation raises questions, and you bring them to Scripture. Then “the first thing the scripture does is that it corrects my question.” He links this to Paul’s description of Scripture as “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). For this topic, that means letting the Bible reshape the question itself. The question becomes what God’s justice demands here, and on what grounds, before it becomes which side to join.
What remains unsettled?
Ellis gives a principle, not a rulebook. He does not say exactly where the line falls between joining a public cause and placing yourself under an organization. Marching beside others, using a slogan in a sermon, giving money and signing a statement communicate different things, and reasonable Christians will weigh them differently. His principle makes the judgment possible. It does not make it automatic.
His assessment of the organization’s aims was also his own, based on his investigation at the time he spoke. Organizations change. A reader applying his distinction today has to look at the groups that actually exist now rather than assume any earlier verdict settles the matter.
The foundation does not change with the organizations. The worth of Black lives rests on the image of God, which no movement granted and none can own. A church that can say why Black lives matter has no need to borrow anyone’s slogan to mean it, and no reason to fear the words when the cry behind them is true.