Christianity is the white man’s religion. It came over on the slave ships with the chains, it was preached to keep Black people obedient, and anyone who still holds it has taken up the master’s faith. That is the claim as it usually travels. Parts of it rest on things that really happened.
Christianity is good for Black people, and the case does not depend on denying that history. The faith was established in Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade. The men who used it to defend slavery could not use it whole. They had to edit it, pull verses out of their setting, and invent categories the text does not contain. When abusers have to cut a book apart to make it serve them, the book is not the source of the abuse. It is the thing they were counterfeiting.
The claim borrows a real wound and a short timeline
The charge has force because its starting point is true. People who called themselves Christians bought and sold human beings, whipped them, broke up their families, and went to worship on Sunday. Justin Giboney, president of the AND Campaign and an attorney and political strategist, does not dodge this: “It is true that some people try to use a partial or incomplete Christianity as a means of keeping people docile, as a means to serving their personal ends.” Lisa Fields, founder and host of Jude 3 Project, says the same about those who tried to spread the faith through war: “And we are not running away from that reality.”
What the claim adds to that history is a timeline. If the story of Black people and the Bible begins on a plantation in the Americas, then Christianity can only look like something done to captives. Giboney points to what keeps that picture in place. Even after people hear the evidence that the faith was in Africa first, he says, they reach for the distorted version because that is the version they were taught to treat as standard. He calls that habit “almost a type of white supremacy.” His point carries a sharp irony. A critique meant to resist white supremacy ends up letting white slaveholders define what Christianity is.
So the cultural claim actually contains two claims. One is about origins: the faith belongs to Europe and arrived by force. The other is about essence: the faith is, at its core, a tool of control. They need separate answers.
The African record is older than the ships
Damon Richardson begins with stone. He points to a stela from the Aksumite kingdom, in the region of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea, which he dates to around 330 AD. Written in Ge’ez and Sabaean, languages native to Aksum, it records King Ezana’s conquests and, by Richardson’s account, his own conversion to Christianity. From this he draws a pointed conclusion: “we’re also proving that the very first Christian nation that ever existed was an African nation led by an African king who was as black as every last one of us in here.”
Readers can weigh the “first nation” title for themselves. The larger point does not hang on it. Richardson notes that by the time of Ezana the faith had already been in Africa for roughly three centuries. He names Tertullian, Athanasius, Bishop Alexander and Bishop Peter, leaders tied to Carthage or Alexandria who guided churches in the second and third centuries. He also argues that North Africa held so many Christians that much of the early persecution was centered there. Christianity in Africa, on this account, was not a missionary outpost. It was one of the faith’s home regions.
Scripture puts Africans in the story from the start. Luke describes the man Philip meets on the desert road as “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). He was reading Isaiah, was baptized, and went home. Richardson’s emphasis is that this official carried the faith back to Africa himself. A few chapters later, Luke lists the prophets and teachers of the church at Antioch, including “Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene” (Acts 13:1). Cyrene sat on the North African coast. Africans were among the church’s earliest leaders, in the text itself.
Richardson extends the argument to West Africa. He cites a fourteenth-century account, connected to correspondence about Mansa Musa, describing Christians living near the coast, which he places about two hundred years before European colonization of the region. His conclusion: “Christianity is in the continent of Africa on the West Coast by choice.” That rests on his reading of a single medieval report, so it carries less weight than the Aksumite inscription or the North African churches. It points the same direction, though. The origins claim does not survive contact with the African record.
The edited Bible and the people who refused it
The essence claim is harder, and here the most revealing evidence comes from the slaveholders themselves. Lisa Fields points to the slave Bible, which she describes as an edited volume handed to enslaved people. Her reading of why it existed: “Because they knew reading the Bible from cover to cover that it was a liberative book.” She describes that book as one “That not only liberated us from the sin of slavery, but the slavery of sin.”
Follow the logic. Nobody edits a document that already says what they want it to say. If the whole Bible endorsed the slave system, slaveholders would have pressed the whole Bible into enslaved hands. The fact that they trimmed it is a confession about what the untrimmed book contained. The edit is evidence against the editors.
Fields reads the Constitution’s three-fifths language in the same light. In her view the men behind that compromise knew where an honest reading led: “Because they know if they were honest with scripture, that they couldn’t treat their slaves the way they treated them.” A person, she reasons, would expose them as living in sin, so they wrote Black people down as something less. “So to soothe their own consciences, they created a false narrative.”
The texts they needed to avoid are not hard to find. The law of Moses says, “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 21:16). Paul lists “menstealers” among those whose conduct contradicts sound doctrine (1 Timothy 1:10). The Atlantic trade was built on exactly that act. Underneath both sits the opening claim about humanity: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
Giboney insists that this verse was not a pleasant platitude in its world. “They weren’t saying that in Rome and Greece before Christianity comes along,” he says, and “to say that every human being was made in the image of God is revolutionary.” On his account that conviction is the ground Christian abolitionists stood on, Frederick Douglass among them. Richardson goes further and argues that “the biblical world view is the only world view existing that recognizes the Imago Dei in humanity.” That is his comparative claim about world history, stated strongly. The narrower point is the one this argument needs. The doctrine of the image of God gave the enslaved and their allies a standard the slaveholders could not meet, and the slaveholders knew it.
The claim that Christianity was simply forced down Black throats speaks for the enslaved without listening to them. Richardson argues that their own narratives tell a different story. “Their narratives are we were beaten, killed if they found us praying, if they found us worshiping.” He describes worship in brush arbors in the woods, with singers gathering near a river or setting out a bucket of water to muffle the sound so the master would not hear.
His own congregation is part of that record. Richardson attends Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Lilburn, Georgia, which he describes as 192 years old. “Our church was established by believing Christians who were enslaved.” When the slave owner found out about their worship in the woods, he offered to build them a building on one condition: they had to accept his preacher. “And they rejected the slave preacher because they didn’t want to hear the word being preached that was truncated, such as from the slave bible.” Richardson calls the church a legacy of “believers who accepted Christianity on biblical terms rather than on terms of subjugation.”
That refusal matters for the whole argument. Enslaved believers were offered the master’s Christianity, with a building attached, and they turned it down in favor of the one they had found in Scripture. They were making exactly the distinction the modern critic says cannot be made.
Richardson also points to Frederick Douglass, who in the appendix to his narrative set the Christianity of the slaveholding land against the Christianity of the Bible and refused to treat them as the same faith. He adds Marcus Garvey, who on Richardson’s account would not hold Jesus responsible for those who used his name to justify robbery and kidnapping. Douglass and Garvey are rarely grouped together, and Black people have never answered the faith question with one voice. On this point, though, they converged. Richardson’s summary: “And so our ancestors were able to intelligently discern the misrepresentations of Christianity from biblical Christianity.” Giboney adds a question that ought to unsettle anyone who thinks the enslaved were simply duped: “How did people who couldn’t read have a better theology than the people who had all kind of seminaries and all that?”
The theological distinction falls between the faith and its forgers
Lisa Fields puts the central distinction in the language of money: “every authentic thing has a counterfeit.” A fake hundred-dollar bill and a real one look alike on the surface, yet a trained eye can tell them apart, and “the presence of a counterfeit doesn’t dismiss the truth of the authentic bill.” Counterfeits do not appear around worthless things. People forge what carries value.
Richardson makes the same move in moral terms: “anybody can take something and misuse it, but you don’t charge the thing with misuse, you charge the person with it.” Giboney offers an image any student can follow: “not dealing with Christianity because one group got it wrong is like not dealing with algebra anymore because your roommate failed the test.” And on the slave traders and the defenders of Jim Crow, he is blunt: “their problem wasn’t that they were following the bible too closely, it’s that they weren’t following it close enough.”
A skeptic may reply that this is a convenient escape. Christians, the objection goes, simply disown every bad Christian after the fact. The answer is that the test here is not who wears the label. It is what the text says, and the text said it before the slaveholders arrived. Exodus 21:16 was not written in response to the Atlantic trade. Giboney also notes that Scripture expected impostors. Jesus warned, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15). A faith that predicts its own counterfeits is not refuted when they show up.
Fields adds a point that brings the argument close to home. Jesus himself was a victim of this kind of abuse. “The reason Jesus is on the cross is because religious people were operating in religious malpractice.” She draws the implication that he can identify with minorities who face people using religious texts to push them to the margins. The figure at the center of the faith was condemned by religious authority and executed by the state. The faith carries its own critique of religion used as a weapon.
The strongest objection does not come from slaveholders. It comes from the page. Paul writes, “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh” (Ephesians 6:5). Doesn’t that settle it?
It settles less than it seems to. Richardson cautions that “the practice of slavery in the ancient world, even going back before the first century is not monolithic,” and that some arrangements functioned as a way out of debt rather than as the race-based, hereditary chattel system of the Americas. That does not make ancient slavery benign. It does mean a reader should not assume Paul was describing an auction block in Charleston. These letters also tell believers how to live inside institutions they did not control. They describe conduct within a fallen order. They do not command anyone to create that order or hold human beings as property.
The same passage turns on masters four verses later: “And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him” (Ephesians 6:9). Richardson points to Paul’s letter about Onesimus, where Paul tells the owner to regard the man as a brother in Christ. Paul asks Philemon to receive him “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved” (Philemon 16). A slaveholder who read the whole chapter honestly would find his own position judged by it. That is exactly what Lisa Fields means when she warns, “When you look at texts isolated from the verses before or the verses after, you can conclude anything you want to from that.”
What a longer view makes visible
Once the timeline stretches back to Aksum and Alexandria, and the slave Bible is read as evidence rather than as the original, the cultural claim changes shape. Throwing away Scripture no longer looks like resistance. Fields names where that path leads: “But that does what white supremacists wanted us to do in the first place.” The edited Bible and the discarded Bible end in the same place, a Black person who does not know what the whole book says. “So to protest white supremacy, you need to read it from Genesis to Revelation to see what they’re trying to hide from you.”
Fields does not let that conclusion stay comfortable. Slaveholders are not the only ones who pull verses out of context. She describes believers who treat the Bible like a lottery, opening an app, grabbing the verse of the day, and claiming it apart from its chapter. Her challenge is aimed at her own audience: “what are the ways in which we’re misusing the Bible in our own life?” The same reading habit that let enslavers build a counterfeit can let anyone build a smaller one.
That is why the counterfeit argument cuts deeper than a defense of the faith’s reputation. It asks for something. If the abuse came from cutting the book apart, then faithfulness looks like reading it whole, including the parts that indict us.
Quick answers
Was Christianity forced on Africa? Not originally. Richardson traces it to North Africa and Ethiopia in the first centuries and to Aksum as a Christian kingdom by the fourth, well before European colonization.
Doesn’t the Bible endorse slavery? It speaks into a world that already had several forms of servitude, and it condemns the act that built the Atlantic trade, stealing and selling human beings (Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10).
Why does the slave Bible matter? Because, as Lisa Fields argues, slaveholders would not have edited a book that already served them. The cuts reveal what they feared in the whole.
Does this excuse the church’s record? No. The claim is narrow: the abuse betrayed the text instead of obeying it. The people who committed it still answer for it.
The enslaved believers at Salem were offered a building and a cut-down gospel, and they chose the woods and the whole word. The question was never whether Black people could hold a faith they had not invented. It was whether they would let its forgers define it. Many of them would not, and the record they left is the best answer to the claim.
Go deeper in the Jude 3 library
- Is Christianity the White Man’s Religion? What Scholars Say (Premium)
- Is the Black Church Dead (Study guide)
- Is Christianity a White Man’s Religion (Study guide)
- Is Christianity the White Mans Religion (Article)
This article draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Justin Giboney and Damon Richardson. Hear it in full on the Watch page.