Before Emilio Alvarez was a bishop, he was a young man in Paterson, New Jersey, on his knees in front of a Santeria priest, offering a sacrifice. He had grown up around church and walked away from it. The God he had been handed felt foreign, white, borrowed. So he went looking for something older, something that felt like his. That search is where his answer to this whole question begins.
Here is the short version. No, Christianity is not the white man's religion, and Alvarez does not prove it mainly with dates. He proves it with a story and a turn. The faith was in Africa before it was in America. And the pull he felt toward ancestral religion, the sense that whiteness had stolen something from him, did not get answered by an argument. It got answered by an encounter. That is the angle Alvarez brings that no one else does: the man telling you the faith is yours is a man who once tried to trade it away.
Why would a Black or Latino believer feel the faith is not theirs?
Because the picture they were handed often looked nothing like them. Alvarez sees a real pull among Black and Latino believers toward ancestral and African-diaspora religions, and he does not roll his eyes at it. He felt it himself. There is a sense, he says, that whiteness stripped something away, and that going back to older practices might recover it. The hunger underneath is not silly. It is a hunger for a faith that belongs to you, not one loaned to you by the people who once owned your ancestors.
The obvious objection is that this is just identity politics dressed up as theology. Alvarez would push back. The wound is real, and pretending it is not only drives people further out. But the cure he names is not a different religion. It is a truer account of the one they already have. The problem was never the faith. It was the frame someone put around it.
Does the history actually back him up?
Yes, and this is where he stops being gentle. Alvarez says the idea that Christianity reached Africans only through the slave ship does not survive contact with the record. The faith was in Africa first. He points to Athanasius, the man who held the line on orthodoxy at Nicaea, whose enemies nicknamed him the Black Dwarf. He points to the African councils that met before Nicaea and helped shape the great ecumenical councils everyone now treats as the foundation. To call this faith foreign to Black and Latino people, he says plainly, is bad history.
"Christianity was in Africa before it was in America, period." (Bishop Emilio Alvarez)
Other Jude 3 voices land in the same place from a different door. Chris Broussard notes that in the Old Testament, Ethiopia and Kush and the Black nations of Scripture are named far more often than the European powers people assume own the Bible.
"In the Old Testament, Ethiopia and Kush and Ham and black nations in the Bible are mentioned more than a thousand times. Greece and Rome, obviously two European nations, are mentioned less than 50 times combined in the Old Testament." (Chris Broussard)
Why do some Black and Latino Christians reject anything that looks old or liturgical?
Alvarez has a name for it: catho-phobia. He leads what he calls an Afro-Latino Pentecostal orthodoxy, a movement of charismatic believers recovering the historic Christian tradition. And he watches many Black and Latino Christians flinch at communion every week, at robes, at the church fathers, and wave it all off as Catholic. The reflex is understandable. It is also costing them. They are throwing away treasures that belong to them, from a church that was one for a thousand years before East and West ever split.
"For a thousand years, the church was one. And within that thousand years, the church practiced things like Eucharist or communion every week. That wasn't a Roman Catholic thing, that was a church thing." (Bishop Emilio Alvarez)
This is the part of Alvarez's answer that the other white-man's-religion conversations do not reach. It is not enough to win the history argument. You can know the faith was African and still hold the historic church at arm's length out of suspicion. Alvarez says the reclaiming has to go further than dates. Recovering the ancient church is recovering your own inheritance, not borrowing someone else's.
Someone I love is drawn to ancestral religion. What do I actually say?
Not a lecture, Alvarez says. Coming out of charismatic life, he leans on experience that is anchored in truth, not on a stack of historical data. He draws on the road to Emmaus, where the disciples walked with the risen Jesus and felt their hearts burn before their minds caught up. The encounter came first. The understanding followed. He says you cannot out-argue a spiritual hunger. You can only point it to a God who actually shows up.
"The experience was there before their understanding. And because of that, there was an education through an experience." (Bishop Emilio Alvarez)
Here other Jude 3 scholars sharpen the line he is drawing. The pull toward African spirituality is not nothing, and they refuse to flatten it. Mahlatse Mashua presses for honesty about what ancestral practice actually claims to do.
"We don't pray to ancestors. We pray to God through our ancestors. They sense their places as mediators in the relationship between man and God." (Mahlatse Mashua)
That is the exact point where Alvarez says a Christian has to be clear-eyed. Justice Okoronkwo puts the danger bluntly: you cannot keep one foot in each. The mediator question is the whole question, because the gospel says there is already one, and his name is Jesus.
"Having one leg in Christianity and the other in African traditional religion is setting yourself up for a great fall." (Justice Okoronkwo)
What if the real problem is church hurt, not theology?
Often it is, Alvarez says, and he says it as someone who was once the angry one. Much of the drift toward the occult begins in resentment, frequently among people raised in church who were never actually converted. His counsel is to make a distinction most hurting people skip: between the way someone introduced you to God and who God actually is. The catch is that you cannot make that distinction while you are still angry. So he tells people to put the fight down, get to a place of center, and ask God for a real experience of his love before they decide what they believe.
"You have to make the distinction between what hurt you and who God is." (Bishop Emilio Alvarez)
Chris Broussard names the same barrier from the outside. For a lot of Black men, the obstacle between them and Christ is not the evidence. It is the long association of the faith with the people who oppressed them.
"Between the black man and Christ in a lot of cases is this barrier, this obstacle, this stumbling block of racism and white supremacy, Christianity's a white man's religion. So if we can remove that barrier, then brothers can look at the gospel for what it is." (Chris Broussard)
Alvarez would add: removing the barrier is necessary, but it is not the finish line. After the barrier comes the encounter. You clear the lie so the person can finally meet the Lord without someone else's hand on the picture.
Is the generational curse real, or is it an excuse?
Alvarez is blunt here, and this is the line that stays with people. He says the popular teaching on generational curses lacks biblical footing, and worse, it has been used to brand African and Latino culture with the old curse-of-Ham idea, the same idea once used to justify slavery. He points to Ezekiel 18, where God forbids the proverb about fathers eating sour grapes and the children's teeth being set on edge. The one who sins is the one who answers. What gets called a curse, he suggests, is usually repeated habit and unforgiveness wearing a spiritual mask.
"You don't have a generational curse. You have a generational excuse." (Bishop Emilio Alvarez)
It sounds harsh until you sit with it. A curse you cannot fight. A habit you can. Calling the pattern what it is hands the power back to the person standing in it. That is mercy, not condemnation, even if it does not feel like it at first.
Quick answers
Is Christianity the white man's religion? Alvarez says no. He argues the faith was in Africa before America, with African church fathers like Athanasius and African councils that shaped the early church.
What is Afro-Latino Pentecostal orthodoxy? Alvarez's term for charismatic Black and Latino believers recovering the historic Christian tradition, including practices like weekly communion that predate the East-West split.
How do I respond to someone drawn to ancestral religion? Alvarez leads with a real experience of God anchored in truth, not data alone, and helps the person separate the God who is real from the church that wounded them.
What is catho-phobia? Alvarez's term for the reflex among some Black and Latino Christians to dismiss anything old or liturgical as Catholic, which he says cuts them off from their own inheritance.
Are generational curses biblical? Alvarez says no. He points to Ezekiel 18 and argues that repeated habit and unforgiveness are often mistaken for a curse.
Listen to the full conversation
Hear Bishop Emilio Alvarez talk with Lisa Fields about Afro-Latino Christian identity, the early African church, his own road out of Santeria, and how to answer the pull toward ancestral religions. The full episode is linked in the metadata below.
Bishop Dr. Emilio Alvarez is the founding bishop of the Diocese of Christ the King, a network of Afro-Latino charismatic churches recovering the historic Christian tradition. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, he holds a PhD in religious education from Fordham University and serves a congregation in Rochester, New York.