Adam Coleman
He almost believed it. So he bought the slave narratives and read what the enslaved said about Christianity in their own words, and what he found was a slaveholder class fighting to keep the gospel away from them.
Adam Coleman. Founder of Tru-ID Apologetics and host of the Tru-ID Podcast. Master of Social Work, Virginia Commonwealth University; a mental health professional who has worked in youth and family therapy, veterans' services, and community organization. Contributing author to Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel, edited by Eric Mason (Zondervan Reflective, 2021).
Also anchors session 4.2 of the learning path
Who he is
Adam Coleman is not a church historian, and that turns out to matter twice over. He is a mental health professional with a Master of Social Work from Virginia Commonwealth University, and he has spent his working life in youth and family therapy, veterans' services, and community organization. He founded Tru-ID Apologetics, hosts the Tru-ID Podcast, and contributed to Urban Apologetics, the volume Eric Mason edited.
It matters the first time because he came to this question the way the people he serves come to it. It was hurting people he knew. It matters the second time because he almost went the other way. He heard the argument, thought maybe that's right, and then did something almost nobody on either side of this does: he went and bought the primary sources.
At sixty-one minutes, his is one of the longest interviews in the archive, and it is also the most methodical. He does not just have answers. He has a taxonomy, a research trail, a logic lesson, and one place where he says out loud that he used to be wrong.
What you are getting in this dossier
His four-category map of every objection he has ever received, which is the most useful organising tool in this archive. The single sentence in a slave narrative that broke his assumption. The legal history that explains why slaveholders fought to keep the gospel away from the enslaved. Josiah Henson at his old plantation, which is the best scene in these interviews. The named logical fallacy underneath the whole argument, with a thought experiment about The Simpsons. His account of Nicaea, including a detail about Constantine that almost nobody knows. And the place where he says he was mistaken and corrects himself.
Four categories
Before any of the history, this. Coleman takes the framework from his own field, where the question is always how you foster wellbeing in a person, and applies it to objections.
"So you have the identity category, morality, productivity, and validity. And in social work, we talk a lot about wellbeing. How do you foster wellbeing in a person? And so what I find is that when I apply that lens to the kinds of objections that I come across, these four categories kind of correspond to the elements of wellbeing that you would talk about in the mental health field as well. Everybody wants to know, 'Who am I?'"
The rest of this dossier is part of Unspoken
3,728 more words and 13 more clips of him making the case, including the three objections he answers and the place he refuses to flatter his own argument.
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