The harm done in Jesus’ name is a matter of record, and the question it raises is fair: does that harm prove Christianity belongs to the people who used it as a weapon? This guide works toward an answer of no. Distrust of Christianity is a reasonable response to what was done. A faith misused is still different from a faith shown false, and you can tell them apart by comparing what was practiced with what the faith actually teaches.
The material comes from “A Way Forward,” the closing chapter of Jude 3 Project’s Unspoken curriculum, which speaks first to the person still on the fence and makes its case with a medical analogy. Here you will test that analogy, read the Scripture its critics and its defenders both appeal to, and then check one claim against a primary source yourself. Reading and reflection take about an hour alone. The source practice takes another evening. A group can cover the reading in one meeting and compare practice results at the next.
Name the claim, then grant the distrust
The phrase “white man’s religion” can carry a historical claim: Christianity came to Africa and its diaspora only through colonizers. It can carry a moral claim: the faith in America was so bound up with slavery and racial terror that it cannot be trusted. It can be personal: I saw what Christians did, and I want no part of their God. The historical claim fails on the record. As Jude 3 holds, the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe. That fact leaves the moral question standing, and the moral question is the subject here.
The curriculum names the history directly. It says that in America, Christianity was used as an arm of racial and economic oppression, and it locates the problem in a specific doctrine: “This faith that claims that all are equal before God was twisted and used to create a hierarchy amongst image-bearers built around race and power.” The sentence describes a teaching bent into its opposite. Because it names the teaching, it gives you something you can check.
The curriculum also takes the skeptic’s side before it argues. It cites Jackie Hill Perry’s observation that no one wants to believe in the God of their oppressor, and that people want a God of kindness, mercy and love, which the oppressors’ God did not seem to produce in them. Its response is a plain concession: “We understand your distrust of Christianity.” It cites Sho Baraka’s argument that people have the right to call out Christianity when it is made a weapon of racial terror, and adds that Christians carry a responsibility to remove stumbling blocks that keep others from seeing Jesus. The burden of proof sits with the Christian.
For reflection
- When someone calls Christianity “the white man’s religion,” which of the three claims is usually being made? Which one do you most often hear?
- In the curriculum’s sentence about the faith being twisted, which word carries the argument: claims, twisted or image-bearers? What changes if you remove it?
For facilitators: Your group may include committed Christians, people who have left the church and people who never belonged to one. Do not assume the room shares one experience of the Black church or of Christianity, and do not ask anyone to defend or disown a family’s faith. Aim for accuracy about the claim before agreement about the answer.
The malpractice argument
After granting the distrust, the curriculum adds: “However, we also believe your distrust is the result of malpractice.” The illustration runs like this. You have chronic abdominal pain. A doctor diagnoses colon cancer, and months of chemotherapy and radiation leave you worse. Another doctor finds your colon is twisted and needs surgery. Would you distrust the whole field of medicine or the doctor who got it wrong? If you seek more opinions, the curriculum says, “at that point, you’re not testing the field of medicine; you’re testing the practitioner.” It concludes: “Your issue isn’t with the field of medicine but with the practitioner’s malpractice.”
The argument rests on the difference between a body of knowledge and the people who apply it. Medicine has textbooks and a reality it tries to describe. When a doctor departs from them, the patient is harmed by the departure. For Christianity, the textbook is Scripture and the reality is Christ himself. So the question becomes whether those who used the faith for terror followed the textbook or departed from it.
Where the analogy strains
The skeptic will find the weak points, so find them first.
Malpractice usually means honest error. Much of this history was self-interest. Many who defended slavery with Scripture profited from the diagnosis.
This was more than one doctor. The misuse ran through churches, pulpits and institutions. When most doctors in town give the same wrong diagnosis, blaming one practitioner gets harder.
The distinction can become an escape hatch. If every harmful Christian is labeled a false practitioner, nothing could ever count against the faith.
The first two objections concern the doctors: their number and their motives. A corrupt medical establishment is still judged by whether its treatments followed the textbook. The third objection is the serious one, and it is answered only by opening the textbook, including the pages the abusers quoted. If Scripture really taught a racial hierarchy, the malpractice argument would fail.
For reflection
- Which pressure point seems strongest to you? State it the way a thoughtful skeptic would before you answer it.
- Have you ever walked away from something good because of the person who represented it? Were you rejecting the thing or the representative?
Open the textbook, including the hard pages
Start with the texts the curriculum’s language rests on. Genesis 1:27 grounds human worth in creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Worth is given to humanity as a whole, with no reference to ancestry. In Acts 17:26, Paul tells the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Nations means peoples. The verse describes common origin.
Now the hard page. Defenders of American slavery cited passages like Ephesians 6:5: “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;” Read honestly, this text does not command anyone to abolish slavery, and a skeptic is right to say so.
Context still changes what the verse can be used to prove. Paul is writing household instructions to churches inside the Roman world, describing a social order that already existed and telling believers how to live faithfully within it. That is description of a setting, which is different from a command to create one. The same passage turns at once to the masters. Ephesians 6:9 reads: “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.” Paul places owners under a Master who shows no partiality between them and the people they hold. Many interpreters also note that Roman household servitude differed in important ways from the race-based, hereditary chattel slavery of the Americas, though it was still slavery and could be brutal.
The decisive point concerns how American slavery began. Exodus 21:16 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.” The Atlantic trade was built on kidnapping and sale. A proslavery reading had to quote Ephesians 6:5 while passing over Ephesians 6:9 and Exodus 21:16. That selectivity is the malpractice: real texts, with the surrounding text removed.
Scripture expects this kind of failure. Jesus warns in Matthew 7:21, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” In Romans 2:24, Paul tells people who taught God’s law while breaking it, “For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written.” The Bible assumes outsiders will judge God by his people and holds the people responsible. James 2:14 presses the same point: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?” Drawing on James 2, the curriculum argues that a faith without care for the oppressed leaves people doubting God’s goodness, and states the positive case: “Christian advocacy is an apologetic for the work and person of Jesus Christ.”
For reflection
- Read Ephesians 6:5-9 aloud as one unit. What would a slaveholder have had to leave out to use it in his favor?
- Does the silence of these texts on abolition weaken the malpractice argument for you? What would you need to know about their setting to decide?
- Romans 2:24 assumes outsiders judge God by his people. What does that ask of a Christian who hears a skeptic’s distrust?
Counterexamples inside the history
The claim that Christianity belongs to the oppressor must account for the oppressed who held it. The curriculum names Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, founders of the first Black denomination and of the Free African Society, which supported newly freed people. It describes Ida B. Wells investigating lynchings after losing friends to them and publishing her findings despite threats and the burning of her newspaper office, and it presents her work as God-glorifying.
A skeptic can say these people were Christians despite the faith. Still, they read the same Bible their oppressors held and found in it a judgment on those oppressors. That shows people at the time could already tell the textbook from the malpractice.
A practice: get a real second opinion
The curriculum’s advice to the skeptic is direct: “We encourage you to get a second opinion.” It suggests reading the Bible, rereading the sources, bringing your questions and visiting the church of a trusted friend. It also urges readers to “give priority to primary resources over secondary and tertiary resources to get a direct account.”
- Write down one claim you have heard about Christianity and race, in one sentence. It might concern slavery, a historical figure or what the Bible says about a group of people.
- Identify where the claim came from. Is it a primary account, such as a firsthand writing or the biblical text? A secondary account built on one? Or a summary of a summary, such as a social media post?
- Find at least one primary source that bears on it. For a biblical claim, read the whole chapter. For a historical person, look for that person’s own writing.
- Write two sentences: what the primary source establishes, and what it does not.
In a group, assign different claims to pairs and compare results at the next meeting. Facilitators can model the exercise with a claim they once believed and later corrected.
For reflection
- Did your primary source support the claim, contradict it or complicate it? Which step of the exercise changed your view of the claim most: finding its origin or reading the source?
Where the second opinion leads
The curriculum’s goal is a personal answer, beyond winning an argument. Reading Mark 8, it notes that Jesus asked first what others said about him and then what his disciples said, because he “desired genuine faith; not feigned loyalty.” Mark 8:29 gives the question in the KJV: “But whom say ye that I am?”
The whole problem began with borrowed verdicts. The oppressors gave a false account of Christ, and many people reasonably rejected it. The malpractice argument asks you to replace that verdict with your own judgment, formed by reading the textbook and looking at Jesus directly, whatever that judgment turns out to be.
Choose one primary source from the exercise and finish reading it this week, before you hear anyone else’s opinion of it.