Two different accusations travel inside the phrase slave master’s religion. One says slaveholders used Christianity to justify bondage. That one is true, and nobody defending the faith should deny it. The other says slaveholders created Christianity, or remade it into something new, and imposed it on Africans who had no prior claim to it. That one fails against the oldest Christian record we have, which places Africans inside the church from its first generation, centuries before any slave ship crossed the Atlantic.
Don Carey, executive producer of the documentary Unspoken, names the strongest version of the charge without softening it. He says the film was made for anyone who knows someone struggling with the idea “that Christianity was beaten into slaves.” This article tests that claim on its own terms, separating what the evidence supports from what it does not.
Carey met the claim in its most confident form. In 2005, during his first year at Norfolk State University, he took an African studies course. By his account, the professor spent the first 45 minutes of a 90-minute session taking Christianity apart, though the course was about the peoples of Africa. The professor said Europeans invented Christianity and borrowed African traditions to make it more appealing, down to the experience of catching the Holy Ghost in church.
Nobody in the room, Carey says, had “the knowledge, the resources to combat the claims.” The result “completely destroyed my faith, completely destroyed the faith of a lot of individuals.” He describes years away from the faith before returning in 2011. His story matters here for one reason: it shows how the origin claim usually arrives, delivered with authority, mixed with real history, and never checked against the record.
What would the charge predict?
If European slaveholders created Christianity, we would expect the faith to have no meaningful African history before the slave trade. We would expect its founding documents to center Europe and treat Africans as late arrivals. We would expect enslaved people to receive only the version their masters handed them, with nothing older to measure it against.
If the charge is false, we would expect Africans in the founding texts, African centers of Christian life in the early centuries, and a Scripture that existed independently of the people who claimed to own it. Those predictions can be checked, starting with the oldest Christian source anyone has.
What the earliest record shows, and what it doesn’t
The book of Acts tells the story of the church’s first years, and Africans appear in it without comment, as though their presence were ordinary. At Pentecost, the crowd in Jerusalem includes people from “Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene” (Acts 2:10). They are among the first audience of the first Christian sermon. In Acts 8:26-39, an official described as “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27) is reading Isaiah in his chariot. Philip explains the passage, and the official is baptized. In Acts 13:1, the leaders of the church at Antioch include Lucius of Cyrene. Mark’s Gospel names Simon, a man of Cyrene, as the one who carried the cross of Jesus (Mark 15:21).
These passages establish something specific: in the faith’s own founding documents, Africans are participants from the start. They do not establish a continuous African Christian tradition running from the first century to the plantation. Acts tells us nothing about how far the faith spread in Africa afterward or how long it lasted in any given place. That is a separate historical question, and it needs separate evidence.
The conversation behind this article does not lay that later evidence out document by document. Carey summarizes it. He points to a moment in Unspoken where the apologist Adam Coleman names four early hubs of Christianity, Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome and Alexandria in Egypt, and he describes Alexandria’s catechetical school as “the first seminary anywhere in the world being on the continent of Africa.” He says the film is “sourced by peer-reviewed scholars, historians, philosophers” whose bibliographies are open to inspection, and that every participant reviewed the edited portion of their interview and confirmed it was accurate. He contrasts that with Hidden Colors, which he says rests on two sources that do not hold up. Whatever one makes of his judgment of a rival film, the standard he sets is the right one: a historical claim is only as strong as the sources under it, and that standard applies to the professor, to Hidden Colors and to Unspoken alike.
A reader who wants to test the point further does not have to take anyone’s summary. Two lines of inquiry are a good place to begin: the history of the catechetical school in Alexandria, and the conversion of the Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum. Standard histories of the church place both many centuries before the Atlantic slave trade. If those records hold, the origin claim has no chronology left to stand on.
Carey also admits something that clarifies the problem. He holds a master’s degree from Moody Theological Seminary, and he says he was surprised by “how much I did not learn in seminary” about African Christian history. The gap he describes was in the teaching, not in the past. A student who has never heard of early African Christianity can easily mistake that silence for proof it never existed.
But slaveholders did use the Bible
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a direct answer. Christian slaveholders existed, and they quoted Scripture to defend bondage. A reader who has heard that history is not imagining it.
The question is what the misuse proves about origin, and the answer comes from sequence. The Christian Scriptures were complete long before the Atlantic slave trade began. Africans appear in those Scriptures as members of the church. Slaveholders came to a text they did not write and a faith they did not found, then selected the parts that served them and muted the rest. Misuse can show that a faith was turned into a weapon. It cannot show that the people holding the weapon made it.
The sequence also explains something the origin claim cannot. Because the text was older than its abusers, it could be turned against them. Carey says 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 than those who held power over them. If he is right, the enslaved were measuring the master’s version against the faith it claimed to represent and finding it false.
Carey states this as a conclusion. The records that would demonstrate it, such as the sermons, songs and testimonies of enslaved believers, are not set out in this conversation, and his summary should not be treated as a substitute for them. Other work in the Jude 3 Project library examines that evidence directly. For the narrower question of origin, the logic holds without it: a faith that could be used to judge slaveholders was never theirs to begin with.
Where the evidence runs out
The professor’s claim that Christian worship practices were borrowed from African traditions is a different kind of claim from the question of origin. Carey reports it but does not walk through a rebuttal here. It remains a question to investigate, not one this article settles.
Carey also takes seriously why the charge persuades so many people. Describing the appeal of Hidden Colors, he says African descended people want connection to their ancient past, to purpose and to identity. “They wanna know that their Blackness is not a curse,” he says. He calls the case those films make compelling, then adds, “I think the case is wrong.” Their habit of presenting nearly everything in world history as having come from Black people, he says, goes too far: “That’s a stretch.”
That reading is fair to the people drawn to the charge. The desire for a dignified history is good. Carey’s argument is that it should rest on what is true, and that the true story already supplies the dignity people are looking for. He grounds that dignity in Psalm 139:14, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” and in the Psalm’s picture of God’s thoughts toward a person outnumbering the sand (Psalm 139:17-18).
Origin and coercion are different questions
The early African record answers one question decisively. Europeans did not invent Christianity, and slaveholders did not create it. Africans were in the church before Europe was its center, and the Scriptures were finished before the slave trade began.
That record does not answer a second question: whether particular enslaved people in the Americas were pressured, bribed or forced toward the faith. Some may have been. Ancient Alexandria cannot tell us what happened on a given plantation, and anyone defending Christianity should not pretend otherwise. That question has to be answered from the testimony of the enslaved themselves.
Keeping the two apart is what makes an honest answer possible. Coercion, wherever it happened, is a charge against the people who coerced. It is not evidence about who the faith belonged to. The slave master’s religion charge works by letting the first question stand in for the second. Pull them apart, and the faith turns out to be older than the people who abused it, with Africans present at its founding.