The confusion is a forced choice: Keep your people or keep your Lord. Honor where you come from, or follow Jesus the way someone modeled him for you, which may have meant talking, dressing and worshiping like someone else. The sources gathered here answer it plainly. Your identity rests on Christ, because it rests on the God who made you in his image and claims you as his own. Your race and ethnicity are real and good, and they come from that same God. They belong on the foundation. They cannot be the foundation.
Two opposite mistakes keep the forced choice alive:
- The first reads Galatians 3:28 as if ethnicity switches off when a person comes to Christ, so the most spiritual Christian is the one with the least visible culture.
- The second answers centuries of degradation by making Blackness itself the ground of worth, so faith becomes one more expression of racial identity.