The charge that Christianity is a white man’s religion usually carries a second question inside it. If the faith came to you through people who used it against you, shouldn’t you build your sense of self on your race instead? Pastor Jerome Gay answers both. The faith was never white at its root, and race, though real and good, cannot hold up a whole identity. His sentence for it: “we can’t make a feature of who we are, the foundation of who we are, the foundation of our identity is our creator, not our race or our ethnicity.”
That answer only works if the pull toward race is taken seriously first. People do not reach for racial identity as a foundation out of nowhere. They reach for it because the Christianity they were shown often looked like it belonged to someone else. Gay’s argument is useful because he refuses to wave that experience away, and he also refuses to let it have the last word.
Why race looks like the stronger ground
The white-man’s-religion charge is usually a conclusion drawn from images, not from texts. Gay defines whitewashing as the tendency of white Christian scholars to paint the Bible, Christian literature, art and history with white people, at the expense of real ethnic diversity, to serve audiences who share their assumptions. Jesus, the disciples, the African church fathers and the early African martyrs show up white in movies, textbooks, seminary books and children’s church curriculum. A person raised on those images can reasonably conclude that the faith was built by and for white people.
Gay does not treat that conclusion as foolish. Skeptics who make the charge, he says, are “not just pulling this out of the air.” His stated aim was twofold: “I wanted to give legitimacy to their concerns, but I wanted to confront their conclusion.” Those are separate moves, and much church conversation collapses them. Either the concern gets dismissed along with the conclusion, or the conclusion gets accepted because the concern is real.
Once the concern is granted, racial identity starts to look like the safer foundation. If the faith was handed down by people who used it to rank you lower, grounding yourself in your own people seems like self-respect. It feels like the one thing no institution can take from you. That instinct deserves respect. The question is whether it can carry the weight people put on it.
What goes wrong when a feature becomes a foundation
A feature is a real, good part of who you are. A foundation is the thing that decides what everything else means. Your ethnicity can shape how you worship, which history you carry and what you notice about injustice. Making it the foundation means it now settles your worth, your loyalties and your reading of everything else, including God.
Gay’s own self-introduction shows the order he is arguing for. Before his marriage, his children, his church or his books, he begins: “I am a son of Yeshua. That’s my most important title.” The difference between that title and a racial one is not that one is a gift and the other is not. Nobody chooses their race either. The difference is who defines the category and who can revoke it. Race is a human category. People drew its lines, and people keep redrawing them, deciding what it means, who counts and what it is worth. Adoption by God is defined by the One who made every person, and no human court can take it back.
Gay’s treatment of internalized racism shows why that matters. Alongside liberation theology and apologetics, he describes a third response to whitewashing: self-hatred. His example is Leo Africanus, a man taken from his homeland and taught everything supposedly wrong with him and people of color, who went on to write against people of color himself. Gay wants readers to see “the danger of internalizing racism.” Notice how it happened. Leo’s sense of what his race meant was handed to him by the people with power to define it. When race is the ground of worth, whoever controls the definition of race controls your worth. That is the instability. The same foundation that one person uses to build pride, another can be taught to use for self-contempt, because the meaning was never fixed by the person standing on it.
The case of liberation theology
The most serious alternative is Black liberation theology, and Gay handles it with care rather than dismissal. He traces a line of liberation thought through Nat Turner, Albert Cleage, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers before arriving at James Cone. He wants readers to understand Cone’s setting. Gay describes a period when white people would hold a lynching after a church service and children would applaud the killing of a Black person. Cone wrote Black Theology and Black Power, and later The Cross and the Lynching Tree, against that backdrop.
Gay credits the tradition with something many critics skip. It insisted that people of color are made in God’s image and worthy of dignity and respect. Cone did not phrase it this way, Gay says, but the heart of much of his writing is that “value and dignity starts at creation, not salvation.” That point has real force. A Black person’s worth does not wait on anyone’s approval, including a church’s. Genesis 1:27 grounds it: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Gay’s disagreement is precise. His concern with Cone is that “a lot of it is relying on blackness within itself.” The image of God gives dignity to every person, but it does not make any race the source of that dignity. Gay brings the question back to Philippians 3:20, which the KJV renders, “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” In older English, conversation meant one’s way of life as a member of a community, and many modern translations render it citizenship. Paul was writing to believers in Philippi, a city proud of its Roman status, and telling them their primary belonging lay elsewhere.
Gay is not claiming liberation theology was a mistake from the start. He is saying that a legitimate protest against white supremacy cannot become a new foundation without repeating the error it opposed. Whitewashing made whiteness the hidden center of the faith. Moving blackness to the center changes the color of the error, not its structure. In his words: “I am not saying that the answer to whitewashing is blackwash.”
Choosing Christ does not mean leaving your ancestors
If the faith really were white at its root, putting Christ first would mean adopting someone else’s identity. Gay’s historical case points the other way. He asks skeptics whether they know about African Christianity before the Atlantic slave trade, in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia, and about African figures such as Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Then he turns the charge around:
How come you only want to give credence to the ancestors that fit your ideology?
That question exposes a tension inside the race-as-foundation position. It claims to honor the ancestors, yet it often has to skip the African ancestors who were Christian, who argued about the nature of God and died for their confession. Rejecting all of them, Gay argues, amounts to saying those ancestors could not tell biblical Christianity from white supremacy. Rooting identity in Christ actually keeps more of Black history, not less.
The same logic covers slavery. Gay’s claim is that slaveholders “did not try to beat Christianity into us and our ancestors, they unsuccessfully attempted to beat inferiority,” and that they twisted Scripture to do it. Readers who want to weigh his historical details can check the citations in his book. The main point does not depend on every detail. People who used Christian language to rank human beings were contradicting the faith’s own claim that every person bears God’s image. As Gay puts it, “let’s not blame Christ for the actions of people who claim to be Christians.”
The objection: isn’t “Christ first” a way to avoid race?
This is the strongest objection, and it comes from experience. Plenty of Black Christians have heard “our identity is in Christ” used to end a conversation about racism, often by people whose own cultural preferences were being treated as simply Christian. If the third option is a colorblind dodge, it is no option at all.
Gay’s work suggests it does not have to be. He names whitewashing as something Christians must confront, while insisting that “confronting whitewashing isn’t white bashing.” He calls for color correcting, portraying African figures as African, because Christians should care about truth and accurate history. And he grounds it in Acts, where all people share one ancestry while appearing in different hues. Acts 17:26 says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” One blood does not mean one color. It means no color is the original and the rest copies.
Galatians 3:28 works the same way: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Read in context, Paul is not claiming ethnic differences vanish. He still calls himself a Jew elsewhere in his letters. His point in Galatians is that none of these categories decides who belongs to God’s family or who inherits the promise. That is the feature-and-foundation distinction. Ethnicity stays. It stops being the gate.
Gay’s critique of his own tradition shows the distinction doing real work. Though he holds to most of Reformed theology, he challenges Reformed culture for presenting one approach to preaching, interpretation and music as if it were the gospel. He disputes John Frame’s suggestion that the tradition’s intellectual nature explains low Black participation, while saying he does not believe Frame is a racist, and he names R. L. Dabney’s racist remarks. Reformed theology is great, he says, “but the gospel doesn’t need reform. We do.” Someone whose foundation is a theological culture could not say that without losing their footing. Someone whose foundation is a racial identity might be tempted to throw out the theology along with the culture. Because Gay’s ground is Christ, he can criticize white Christian culture sharply and keep the faith.
What a sturdier foundation changes in an argument
The practical payoff shows up when the charge is thrown at you, sometimes with hostility. If your identity rests on race, a challenge to Christianity’s racial history lands as an attack on you. You either defend the faith defensively or give it up. If your identity rests on Christ, you can agree that whitewashing happened and still disagree with the conclusion.
That freedom allows a different kind of answer. Gay argues that Christians “must stop giving faith-based answers to fact-based questions.” When someone raises a historical claim, a testimony about what Jesus did for you is the wrong reply. The secure response is to know the history and engage the actual question.
It also allows a different tone. Debates with hostile challengers, including groups like the Hebrew Israelites, can turn into trading insults. Gay’s counsel is that “We can disagree without being disrespectful,” and that disagreement does not require disengaging. He points to 1 Peter 3:15, which tells believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” The verse gives both the content and the manner. His own warning is pointed: “we can confront sin sinfully.”
That posture is hard to keep when race is the foundation, because every insult lands on the core of who you are. It is easier when the core is somewhere no insult reaches.
The choice is often framed as two options: accept a faith that seems to belong to someone else, or root yourself in your race. Gay’s argument removes the premise that makes those the only two. The faith never belonged to whiteness, so choosing Christ does not mean choosing whiteness. And a self built on race rests on ground that other people keep redrawing. A son of Yeshua stands on a title no one else defined and no one can revoke, and from there he can tell the truth about every color in the story, including his own.
