This guide is for a specific kind of reader: someone who has learned that slaveholders used the Bible to defend owning people, who is angry about it, and who wonders whether staying in this faith means making peace with that abuse. It will not ask you to stop being angry. It will ask you to look closely at where the anger is aimed, and then at whether the faith itself belongs to the people who abused it.
You can work through it alone in one or two sittings, or with a group over a single long session. Every written exercise is private unless you choose otherwise. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone your story.
The wound has a name and a date
The charge that Christianity was forced on Africans is often treated as an argument to defeat. For many people it is first a loss.
Don Carey, a former NFL player, describes meeting it in 2005, in his first year of college. He says a professor in an African studies course spent much of a class session tearing down Christianity, claiming Europeans invented it and took African traditions to make it appealing. Carey remembers that no one in the room had the resources to combat the claims. His summary of what followed is blunt: it “completely destroyed my faith, completely destroyed the faith of a lot of individuals.” He describes the years after as a life lived on his own terms, until, in his words, “it’s only by the grace of God that in 2011 he brings me back.”
Notice what made the loss so complete. The professor mixed real history with false conclusions, and the students could not tell them apart. The real history included something true and terrible: people who called themselves Christians held other people in bondage and quoted Scripture to justify it. When the true part and the false part arrive together, rejecting the whole package can feel like the only honest response.
So begin by separating them in your own mind. Take a few minutes with these two prompts.
- Write down, as plainly as you can, what you know slaveholders actually did with Christianity. Stick to what you are confident is true.
- Now write down what you have been told that conclusion proves. Where did you hear it? Do you believe it, or do you suspect it?
You do not have to resolve anything yet. You are only making two lists where there used to be one.
What not to say to yourself
Some familiar religious responses to this anger do more harm than good. If you have heard them, you may have learned to hide the anger rather than examine it.
One response says the past is the past and Christians should move on. That treats a real moral evil as a mood problem. Another says God used slavery to bring Africans to the gospel, as if that settles the matter. Whatever a person believes about God’s providence, that line is usually offered to end a conversation, and it asks the wounded to feel grateful for their wounding. A third says true Christians never did these things, so the history does not count. That one is false on its face. People who were baptized, preached sermons, and sat in pews did these things.
Jude 3 teaches that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Both halves of that sentence matter. You are not asked to soften the first half to get to the second.
Anger Scripture already knows
It may help to see that the Bible does not treat outrage at religious oppression as foreign. Read these passages slowly. For each one, note who is speaking, who is being addressed, and what the speaker is angry about.
The story of Israel begins with God hearing people in forced labor. “And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows” (Exodus 3:7). This is narrative, so it describes what God did for a particular people at a particular time. It does not promise a specific outcome for every sufferer. What it does show is the direction of God’s attention in the founding story: toward the enslaved, against the taskmasters.
The prophets go further. Amos speaks to people who were faithful worshipers and unjust neighbors. God says through him, “I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21), and then, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). The worship was real in form. God refused it because of what the worshipers did to the poor. Ask yourself what it means that the Bible itself contains a word against religion that serves oppression.
Jesus speaks just as sharply to religious leaders of his own day. “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew 23:4). He is addressing a specific group in his setting, so this is not a blanket statement about every later leader. Still, it shows that Jesus did not treat religious authority as beyond criticism.
Then there is lament, which gives anger a direction. “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). The psalmist says this to God, not about God behind his back. Paul’s instruction in Ephesians 4:26, “Be ye angry, and sin not,” assumes that anger can be right and still needs to be handled with care. He goes on to warn against letting it fester.
- Which of these passages surprised you, if any?
- In these texts, whose side is the anger on?
The thief is not the owner
Here is the distinction that changes the question. If slaveholders made Christianity, then your anger at them is also anger at the faith, and staying would mean keeping their property. If they took up something older than themselves and twisted it, then your anger is aimed at thieves, and the faith they stole is not theirs to define.
The paired article on this question walks through the historical record. The point for this guide is personal. Don Carey says that God revealed himself to enslaved people “who could not read, who could not write, but yet through the work of the Holy Spirit, were more faithful interpreters” of Christianity and its message than the people who held power over them. That is his claim, and the records behind it deserve your own study. Hold it as a possibility worth testing: the enslaved may have heard in the Scriptures something that judged the people quoting them.
Read Luke 4:18, where Jesus opens his public ministry by reading from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” Imagine hearing those words read aloud while someone claimed to own you. Which reading of the faith would sound more like the Jesus of that passage, the master’s or the captive’s?
This does not erase the harm. It relocates it. The harm was done by people misusing a text that, read honestly, condemns what they did.
A practice: write a lament
This exercise borrows the shape of Psalm 13, which moves from complaint to request to trust. You may not reach the last part, and that is allowed. Some psalms never do.
- Complaint. Write to God directly about what was done in his name. Use specific language. If you know family history, you may include it. If you do not, write about what you know happened to others.
- Request. Write what you are asking God for. It might be justice, understanding, or the ability to trust again. It might be an honest admission that you do not know what to ask.
- Trust, if it is there. If any part of you can say something you believe about God, write it. If nothing comes, write that instead. An honest blank is better than a forced ending.
Keep this private unless you want to share it. In a group, invite people to describe only what the exercise was like, not what they wrote.
If you find that this anger is tied to experiences of racism in your own life that keep replaying, or that it is affecting your sleep, your relationships, or your ability to function, it may help to talk with a trained counselor. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. Prayer and qualified care can go together.
Ground you can recognize as yours
Carey links the appeal of alternative accounts of Black history to something good. Of the people drawn to them, he says, “They wanna know that their Blackness is not a curse.” He argues that this hunger is right and that it should rest on what is true. His hope for viewers of the documentary he produced is that they will conclude “the lies about Christianity that have been told about me are just that, they’re lies.”
He points to Psalm 139. Read it from the King James text: “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalm 139:14). A few lines later: “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand” (Psalm 139:17-18).
This is a poem, a prayer by David, so it does not offer an argument about history. It offers something the slaveholders could never grant or take away: an account of where a person’s worth comes from. The psalmist locates it in God’s knowledge of him before anyone else had a say. Carey says he finds it deeply important that the God of the Bible “has been intentionally and purposefully involved in the lives of African descended people.”
Standing in the faith as your own does not require pretending the history was clean. It means recognizing that your dignity was never the slaveholders’ to assign, and that the God they claimed to serve says so in the very book they misused.
- Read Psalm 139:13-18 once more. Underline the phrase you would most need to hear if someone told you your faith was borrowed.
Questions to talk through
- When you first heard that Christianity was forced on enslaved Africans, what did you assume followed from that? Has any part of that assumption shifted?
- Carey describes a classroom where no one could answer the professor. What is the difference between losing faith because of evidence and losing it because no one showed you the rest of the evidence?
- Amos and Jesus both criticize religious people for injustice. How does it affect your anger to find that criticism inside Scripture itself?
- Is it possible to stay angry at what slaveholders did and also trust the faith they misused? What would that look like in daily life?
- Carey suggests the enslaved were sometimes more faithful readers than their masters. What evidence would you want to see before you believed that, and where might you look for it?
- What would it mean for you to call this faith your own rather than something you inherited or received?
For anyone leading a group
Some people in the room may be carrying anger at the church that has nothing to do with history and everything to do with their own experience. Do not hurry anyone past it. If a participant says they are not sure they believe anymore, treat that as trust and not as a problem to fix before the session ends. Follow up privately.
Resist turning this into debate preparation. Lisa Fields has said she hopes students entering college classrooms will have “the tools they need to respond,” and the history matters for that. But this guide comes first for the person whose faith is wounded, not for the person who wants to win.
Make the lament exercise genuinely optional. Some people will want to write and some will not. Both are fine.
A question to carry this week
Carey once described the person who needs this conversation as someone told that “Christianity was beaten into slaves.” Before the week ends, write one honest sentence answering this: if the people who abused this faith did not create it, who gets to tell you what it means? Keep the sentence. You may find your answer changes over time, and that change is part of making the faith yours.