Yes, the church in America has failed Black Christians on justice, and Sho Baraka says so before he says anything else. Christianity was used to subjugate people, and critics are right to press that history. But Baraka argues that the ideologies people often adopt after they leave carry dangers of their own: certainty that cannot admit error, despair presented as realism, and hope placed in political systems that cannot heal a soul. Critiquing the church is necessary. The harder question is what the critic decides to trust next.
Most public arguments about this collapse into two camps. One says the church has gone too woke and traded the gospel for activism. The other says the church was never biblical enough, because for generations it ignored or blessed injustice. Baraka will not join either camp. He is an artist and filmmaker who says he has been rapping about police brutality since 2010, and he is also a former church elder. That combination shapes his argument. He does not defend the church’s record against its critics. He measures the critics’ new commitments by the same standard they used on the church.
What does Baraka grant the critics?
He grants more than many church defenders would. “I think the church and society has been complicit in a lot of ills, socially, physically, financially,” Baraka says. He is specific about where. “Christianity on this particular continent has not been the panacea that it should be, especially for people of color. And in a lot of ways it was used as a tool to subjugate and oppressed people.”
He does not treat this as a reluctant admission. He calls the awakening to these critiques healthy: “I think it’s amazing. I think it’s necessary.” He says he keeps encouraging that critique. His objection comes later and is narrower. Some of the conclusions people reach, and some of the methods they use to reach them, are ones he says he does not “think are healthy for the church, nor do I think it’s, um, biblical.”
This order matters. An argument that started by defending the church would only ask Black Christians to stop complaining. Baraka starts with the complaint and treats it as true. That lets him ask a better question: if the critique is right, does it follow that the faith is wrong?
Answering that requires a word that people rarely define. “Woke” means different things to different people, and Jude 3 Project neither flatly affirms nor flatly condemns it for exactly that reason. Jude 3 teaches that biblical justice, as God defines it through his character and through Scripture, is the measuring stick, and that both individual sin and systemic, structural sin are real. When Baraka criticizes “wokeness,” he is not criticizing concern for justice. He is criticizing a posture: moral certainty with no room for self-examination, a despair that rules out redemption, and a habit of treating the church as uniquely beyond repair.
Why abandon the church and not the bank?
Baraka’s first test is consistency. He agrees that every institution should be judged by its record. His question is why only one of them gets abandoned. “You can’t name an institution that hasn’t practiced some form of oppression and hasn’t been on the side of some sort of subjugation,” he says. He names science and eugenics. He names economics, redlining, and banks that mishandled Black depositors’ money. Then he gives the punch line plainly: “nobody’s going to abandon science.” And on money: “ain’t nobody gonna stop trying to make money.”
The argument is not that the church’s sins cancel out because others sinned too. Baraka’s point is about how people reason. If misuse of an institution proved its teaching false, the same logic would empty every university and bank account. People do not reason that way about anything else. “For some reason. We do this with religion,” he says. His verdict comes in two short sentences: “And I think that’s unfair.” And then: “I think it’s unwise.”
He also sees something many people miss in how they leave. They are not leaving institutions for open ground. They are moving from one institution to another. “So you have people who are leaving one flawed institution because academia is telling them one thing,” Baraka says, and adds, “Academia is a flawed institution as well.” What bothers him is the alliance that forms: “It’s funny to me how Christians are trying their best to shame the church with people who have no love for the faith that they will hold dear to their heart.” The new allies are useful only up to a point. “The moment you begin to expose yourself for whatever belief you have, they’re gonna shame you as well.”
Class is part of this, and Baraka will not let anyone pretend the Black community speaks with one voice. He describes the privilege academia claims in telling people how to think, and he notes that much of the Black community does not accept that authority. Lisa Fields gives a pointed example. After a brunch spent talking passionately about the marginalized, her companion refused money to a homeless man outside. Her conclusion: “that is the black elite.” Baraka extends the point. He thinks much of the justice talk he hears “is just totally situational,” held only as long as it costs the speaker nothing. Few critics of billionaires, he observes, will give up their own conveniences: “how many of y’all are gonna stop using Amazon to get y’all stuff?”
What does certainty cost a movement?
The sharpest part of Baraka’s case is not about any particular position. It is about a posture. “When you feel like you’re absolutely right about something, you put yourself in the most vulnerable place to perpetuate heinous evils,” he says. He warns that people who lack humility end up becoming the very thing they set out to fight.
This is not relativism, and Baraka shows why. He says plainly that “Jesus had standards,” and that a faith deconstructed until it believes anything is “no faith at all.” His concern is the person who has stopped checking themselves. A movement that cannot imagine being wrong has no brake. Lisa Fields describes what this looks like among friends: people become judges of who is right, and even the figures they once praised end up condemned when they fail to fit.
Baraka models the alternative with his own habits, and he includes his own failures. He says he caught himself tweeting claims about policing he was not sure he believed, so he changed how he reads. Now he pairs a book that argues for sweeping police reform with academic work that disputes parts of the popular account. He came out of that reading still convinced that too many people die and that police are called into too many situations. He also concluded that “every particular issue is not a racial animus issue.” He admits that he, like many others, has quoted writers he never actually read. He describes his stance this way: “I come saying, I think I’m confident in this. However, change my mind.”
Does despair belong to the Black Christian tradition?
Baraka understands why hopelessness appeals to people. He acknowledges, bluntly, that Black people have been through a great deal in this country and that it can feel hopeless. But he hears much of what is being taught as nihilism, a kind of Black pessimism that says nothing will ever change. He calls that view opposed to what the Bible teaches, and he says it also does not fit Black history.
“We’ve seen people live through much worse times than we live in right now,” he says. “And guess what? They had the greatest of hopes in the gospel.” He points to the music first: “They sang about it. That’s how we got Negro spirituals.” He names James Weldon Johnson’s poetry and Harriet Tubman. Then he states the charge directly: “And I can’t believe that we’re taking on these ideologies, the theologies of pessimism and nihilism, and promoting this lack of hope as if there is no redemption and reconciliation.”
His argument is cultural memory used as evidence. If the people who lived through slavery and Jim Crow found reason to hope in the gospel, then despair is not the more honest heir of their legacy. It departs from it. Baraka makes the same point at a smaller scale with his own marriage: “We have problems in our marriage. And then we wake up and say, let’s work on it.” Reconciliation is not naive. People who love each other practice it every day.
Baraka’s argument also has a limit. He does not name specific pessimist writers or engage their texts here. His charge is a judgment about the mood and effect of these ideas in Christian spaces, not a close reading of their literature. A reader who has studied those thinkers will want that engagement. What Baraka does establish is a historical contrast that is hard to dismiss: the Black Christians he names did not take their suffering as proof that God had abandoned them.
What do Isaiah’s woes teach about self-reckoning?
Lisa Fields brings a passage into this conversation that clarifies the whole question. Isaiah’s opening chapters are prophetic indictments of Judah. Their concern is justice in the plain sense: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). In chapter 5 the indictment becomes a series of woes against the powerful, including “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).
Then the word turns around. In the temple vision of chapter 6, the prophet who has pronounced woe on others pronounces it on himself: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Read in context, this is not a retreat from social critique. Isaiah does not take back anything he said in chapters 1-5. He sees that he belongs to the people he has been condemning. Only after his own lips are cleansed does he hear the call to go and speak (Isaiah 6:6-8).
Fields uses that sequence as a mirror for the present. She warns against wanting to be “prophets to the people outside of our doors, but don’t wanna be a prophet to the person in our mirror.” Her diagnosis follows: “when we see ourselves as fixers, we see ourselves as saviors, not somewhat in need of a savior.” This is her application of the passage, not the only way to read the chapter’s place in the book. But the textual movement she points to is really there. The woe that Isaiah aims outward in chapter 5 lands on himself in chapter 6, and that confession comes before his commission. Baraka agrees: everybody wants justice, he says, but few want it applied to themselves.
Can politics carry the weight of salvation?
The third danger is the subtlest, because it looks like engagement. Fields describes progressive friends who reject the American system in theory yet are devastated to the core by political setbacks. “Their hope is very much in the American system,” she observes, and she wonders whether people have “put their hope in systems they don’t even believe in.” Her question to them is pointed. She asked, in effect, whether they ever expected those systems to rescue them: “did you think they were really gonna save us”.
Neither speaker is telling people to stay out of public life. Baraka says, “I do think political change is quite important.” He also calls for attention to Black economic and institutional strength in local communities. Fields explicitly says that she fights for justice and reparations. What they reject is putting too much weight on politics. “Justice won’t bring you the healing that you think it will,” Fields says. Her example makes the point: when a parent is killed, “you getting justice and that person going to prison doesn’t replace that parent or heals the pain of that parent’s absence.” Baraka puts it in his own terms: “I’ll take a reparations check, but that don’t mean that it’s gonna make my life that much better.”
Fields carries the point to its hardest conclusion. Many of her ancestors who were lynched, raped and murdered never saw their killers face any earthly justice. If this life is all there is, she says, that history leaves no hope. Her hope rests on trusting that God is just and will judge. Baraka adds a second clause that makes the hope less comfortable. God is just, he says, but “he’s a forgiving God and he’s a gracious God,” and we need that grace too. He points to American consumption and pollution that create poverty in other countries. By that measure, people who demand justice now are also implicated. Even here, the Isaiah 6 move applies.
This fits Jude 3 Project’s teaching that a Christian’s ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician. Political outcomes can right real wrongs. They cannot carry the weight that only God can bear.
Shouldn’t the church be held to a higher standard?
This is the strongest objection to Baraka’s consistency argument. The church claims to represent a holy God, so its failures should count for more than a bank’s. Baraka partly agrees: “Well, I think it should be high.” He says expectations should be greatest for those who shepherd souls, and he insists that pastors who neglect justice or stand in its way “need to be corrected and challenged as well.”
Where he draws the line is between failure of the people and failure of the message. “The Bible teaches us how to address systematic issues. The Bible teaches us how to reason,” he says. “The church, in its essence is for justice. It’s for marginalized people.” So if someone concludes the gospel itself cannot address injustice, he says, “then you may have a problem with Jesus and not a problem with your pastor.”
Fields offers a practical way to tell the two apart: deal with your church hurt before you take apart your faith. A pastor who abuses his position is one problem. Teaching you do not want to live by is a different one. Scripture itself shows God correcting corrupt priests and prophets, so the God those leaders claimed to serve is clearly on the side of the people they harmed. Her aim is to “interrogate our own hurt and our own trauma so we can process things as they are” rather than as pain has blended them together. Jude 3 Project’s position on church hurt holds the same line: the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failure of Christ.
Baraka’s image for this comes from 2 Corinthians 4:7: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” In his words, “we are fragile, broken people who carry a wonderful truth,” and “the treasure that is inside is way more valuable than the vessel.” He notes that people keep the ideas of deeply flawed founders in other movements, including a father of Pan-Africanism who, he says, held ugly views about Native Americans. A faith that collapses at the first flawed Christian, he warns, was “a very fragile faith.”
What does a better way forward look like?
Baraka’s counsel to people trying to separate their faith from white supremacy begins with reassurance. Asking who shaped your beliefs is a healthy question. He also refuses to give up justice to make that point: a theology detached from justice, he says, means “that theology and that gospel is anemic.” Around 2010, he says, he realized his library held mostly white Calvinists and Reformers, and he went looking. He found Ethiopian and North African Christianity, and figures such as Richard Allen, Francis Grimke, Anna Julia Cooper and Jarena Lee, who held historic faith and the demand for justice together.
Then he gives the test that matters most: “if wisdom is not teaching you to love better, then it’s demonic. It’s not helpful.” He wants “the information we obtain should make us wiser and make us people who love God more and love our neighbor more.” He also admits his own failure. After a year of church hopping with no elders to answer to, made worse by pandemic isolation, he says, “it’s been a detriment to my soul, honestly.” His call is for real community where people build one another up through Scripture, not just conversations about how broken the world is.
The question this leaves for a reader is not which side of the woke argument you are on. It is whether your convictions about justice are making you more humble, more hopeful and more loving toward actual people, or less. Baraka thinks the Black Christian tradition already answered that question under conditions far worse than ours, and that its answer was hope.
Quick answers
Does Sho Baraka think the church’s critics are wrong?
No. He calls the critique of Christianity’s role in racial oppression necessary and keeps encouraging it. His concern is with conclusions and methods that he believes lack humility and hope.
Is it fair to leave the church over its racial history?
Baraka argues that no institution survives that test, including the universities and economic systems people keep using. He separates the failures of leaders, which should be confronted, from the truth of the gospel they misrepresented.
Why does Isaiah 6 matter here?
Isaiah pronounces woe on an unjust society and then on himself. Lisa Fields reads that turn as a pattern: honest critics have to include themselves in the diagnosis before they are ready to speak.
Are Baraka and Fields against political action?
No. Both support justice efforts, and Fields names reparations among them. They reject making politics the source of hope, because justice cannot heal grief or save a soul.
What should someone reconsidering their faith read?
Baraka points to Black and African Christian thinkers who held orthodoxy and justice together, and to committed community. His test for any new idea is whether it helps you love God and your neighbor more.