The claim is short: Christianity is the white man’s religion. It reaches most people as a verdict. It came through the slave ship and the master’s pulpit, and so, the reasoning goes, it is either false or it belongs to someone else. Much of the history behind that verdict is real. The verdict does not follow from it.
Between the history and the conclusion sits a premise almost no one states aloud: the way a belief reached you decides whether it is true and whether it is yours. Call it the reception premise. Without it, the slogan is a set of historical claims that can each be checked. With it, the slogan becomes an argument, and that argument fails at exactly this joint. The reception premise cannot be applied consistently, and once it is gone, the conclusion has nothing left to stand on.
The scholars in the Jude 3 Project library test different pieces of this argument. Some check its account of origins, some its account of slavery and some its logic, while a few complicate the case the others build. Adam Coleman, a Christian apologist, describes the habit that keeps the slogan alive: “Most people are bad historians and even worse philosophers.” His remedy is to take each reason apart, after which, he argues, “I don’t think that they stand up logically or historically for that matter.” That is the method here.