If a friend has come away from the Hidden Colors films convinced that Christianity is the white man’s religion, the most useful thing you can bring is a timeline. The record places Christianity in Africa from the first generation of the church, centuries before any slave ship. Your friend is looking for an honest history that gives Black people their dignity, and that history includes African Christians. This study helps you learn it well enough to tell it, check it, and offer it to a friend without contempt.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation in which Lisa Fields talks with Damon Richardson, who was born and raised in the Nation of Islam, became a Christian at sixteen, and has spent his ministry on urban apologetics. You can work through it alone over a few evenings or with a small group in one or two sittings. If you lead a group, plan the most time for the timeline exercise. That is where the learning happens.
Begin with what your friend is actually after
Before any history, understand why the films persuade people. Lisa Fields names the reason. She says many people in the Black community do not trust the history they were handed, and with good reason. She points to textbooks and school systems that have misinformed young people about what slavery was. In that setting, she says, films like Hidden Colors gain traction because “people are looking for real history.”
That sentence describes your friend. The hunger is legitimate. Fields also names the trap inside it: “You combat revisionist history with the accurate depiction of history.” When the official story has lied, a new story can feel trustworthy just because it contradicts the old one. Contradicting a bad account does not make a story accurate.
Damon Richardson describes what the series sets out to do. In his reading, “it looks to reconstruct a history for black people in order to demonstrate that we are a great people.” He does not dispute that goal. His complaint is that “in the process of that mission, it derails itself because it attempts to reconstruct a spiritual and theological history.” So the disagreement with your friend is narrower than it first appears. You and your friend may both want Black greatness told truthfully. The open question is whether the films tell the Christian part of that story truthfully.
Pause here. Write one sentence describing what you think your friend most wants from the films. Don’t write what they believe. Write what they want. Keep that sentence. You will come back to it.
Read the earliest African scene in the record
The earliest piece of evidence is not a council or a kingdom. It is a short story in Acts 8. Read Acts 8:26-39 aloud, slowly, before reading any commentary.
Luke introduces the traveler as “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). A few observations from the text itself:
- He is a high royal official, entrusted with the queen’s treasury, not a servant or a captive.
- He has traveled to Jerusalem to worship, and he is already reading the prophet Isaiah on his way home.
- He asks for help understanding the text. Philip begins from that same passage and tells him about Jesus.
- He asks for baptism himself, and afterward he continues his journey home.
Now separate what the passage says from what readers have built on it. Acts is narrative. It describes events. It tells us that an African official received the gospel and went home a believer. It does not tell us what he did after he arrived. Richardson reads the scene as the gospel traveling back to Africa with him. That is a reasonable reading, but it is an interpretation. When you talk with your friend, keep the two apart. The text alone already does a lot of work. The first African convert in Acts was baptized at his own request, and no colonial power was anywhere near him.
Observation prompt: Who in this story holds power, and over whom? What does the official choose for himself? Write down your answers before you discuss them.
Build the timeline yourself
This is the main practice of the guide. Richardson’s case comes down to chronology. In his words, anyone claiming Christianity is a white man’s religion “has to discount your first 1000 years of Christian history.” To test that, you need to see the sequence, and you need to know what kind of evidence sits behind each item.
Take a sheet of paper or a set of index cards. Make four columns: What is claimed, Who says so, What kind of source, and How I could check it. Then place these items from the conversation in order:
- First century. The Ethiopian official in Acts 8. Source type: Scripture.
- First century. Richardson says the Coptic church holds a tradition that Mark planted a church in Egypt in AD 48, which he notes is less than fifteen years after the resurrection. Source type: church tradition, as Richardson himself frames it, not a document written that year.
- Before the fourth century. Richardson points to the writings of Tertullian and the story of the martyr Perpetua as evidence of an established North African church. Source type: early Christian writings and martyr accounts.
- Era of Roman persecution. Richardson says the heaviest persecution fell on North Africa because “the greatest expression of Christianity at that time was on the continent of North Africa.” Source type: a historian’s summary, which needs checking against the histories.
- Fourth century. Richardson names King Ezana of Aksum, in the region of present-day Ethiopia, as one of the first Black kings to lead a Christian nation. He says Athanasius, as bishop of Alexandria, approved a church plant there. Source type: a historian’s summary.
- About two centuries later. Richardson says a Christian king of the same region gave refuge to Muhammad’s followers for at least seven years. Source type: a historian’s summary.
- Much later. The transatlantic slave trade.
Look at the distance between item six and item seven. Richardson’s phrase for it is “hundreds and hundreds of years before slave ships would’ve arrived.” His conclusion about the films’ version of events is that “their history is just way too late.”
Now do the part most debaters skip. Look at your Who says so column. Except for Acts, almost every entry rests on Richardson’s spoken summary, given from memory in a conversation. That does not make the entries wrong. It does mean they are claims to verify, not proof to recite. One example shows why this matters. When Richardson describes the persecution, he connects it to the period just before the Edict of Milan and also to the late first and early second centuries. Those may not be the same period. Look up when the Edict of Milan was issued, then decide where that card belongs on your timeline. If you find a date that needs adjusting, you have done exactly what you will be asking your friend to do with the films.
For groups: Give each person or pair one item to research before the next meeting, using a solid church history. Richardson recommends Justo González’s The Story of Christianity and his three-volume History of Christian Thought. He says that in González’s work “you can see the development of Christianity from century to century in a beautiful picture.” Have each person report what the history confirms, what it complicates, and what it adds.
Notice where the films reverse the sequence
Once the timeline is in front of you, the films’ Nicaea story turns into a question of order. The series presents the Council of Nicaea as the moment the Bible and the faith were manufactured. Your timeline already places African churches, writings and martyrs before that council.
Richardson adds a second point about sequence, taken from the debate itself. The council argued over Arius’s teaching that Jesus was a created being. Arius’s opponents held that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Richardson observes that “both sides were aware of Jesus’ existence, or else the debate would’ve been moot.” He also says, “There was already agreement about the historicity of Jesus.” People cannot argue about the nature of someone their religion has not yet invented. The debate assumes centuries of belief that came before it.
He also flags a confusion in one presenter’s account. The Arians were followers of Arius. The Aryans of Hitler’s racial ideology belong to a much later and unrelated history. A good habit for your friend and for yourself: when two words sound alike, check whether they come from the same place.
Here is what changed at Nicaea and what did not. According to Richardson, the council produced a creed, and the church held to it even after Constantine himself leaned toward the losing side. What did not change was that the faith already existed, and Africa was one of its strongest centers. Later imperial involvement does not explain an earlier belief.
Test the idea that older means truer
Richardson thinks the films persuade less through any single claim than through an assumption planted early in the series. In his reading, the films treat ancient Egyptian religion as truer because it is older. He calls this an argument from antiquity and tests it by flipping it: nobody accepts that an idea is right just because it is new. His verdict: “The age of it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of it.” He uses the Epic of Gilgamesh as an example. It predates Genesis, he says, yet most of it is fable.
He explains why the assumption has so much pull: “once you bite the hook or the bait for that, everything else starts making sense to you.” This is worth bringing into your own conversation honestly. It also limits what you can claim. Christianity’s early African history does not make Christianity true. It answers one specific charge, that the faith is foreign to Black people. Whether Jesus rose from the dead is a separate question with its own evidence. Keeping those questions apart is part of offering your friend honest history rather than a counter-pitch.
On the narrower question, Jude 3 teaches that the claim Christianity is a white man’s religion is historically inaccurate, since the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe, and that following Jesus is not a betrayal of Black identity.
Practice the conversation
Knowing the history is half the work. The other half is how you offer it. Try this with a partner, or on paper if you are working alone. Spend about ten minutes on each step.
- Restate your friend’s view until they would agree with it. Your partner plays the friend and explains why the films convinced them. You repeat it back in your own words. Your partner tells you what you got wrong. Keep going until they say, yes, that’s it.
- Name what is true in it. The distrust of official history is earned, and Christianity has been misused by people who enslaved others. Say so plainly, and don’t hurry past it.
- Offer one item from your timeline, with its source type. Don’t offer all seven. Choose the one you have checked most carefully, and say what kind of evidence it rests on. For example: this one is in Acts. This one is a Coptic tradition. This one I looked up in González.
- Invite your friend to check something too. Ask which claim in the films convinced them most, and whether they would look into its source with you.
Your partner should then tell you whether you came across as listening or as waiting to win. Take that feedback seriously. Richardson closed the conversation by pointing 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” (1 Peter 3:15). The word meekness belongs to the instruction as much as the word answer does.
For leaders: If someone in your group has a family member or close friend in this situation, let them decide whether to talk about it. Never ask anyone to describe a real person’s views for the group to dissect.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at the sentence you wrote about what your friend wants. After building the timeline, does the Christian history speak to that want, or to a different one? Where does it fall short?
- Fields says real history is the answer to revisionist history. What would it look like for you to hold your own side to that standard?
- In Acts 8, which details would matter most to someone who believes Christianity reached Africa only through force? Which details would they be most likely to question?
- Which item on your timeline was hardest to verify? What does that tell you about how confidently you should present it?
- A friend might say their own ancestors first met Christianity through enslavers. How is that question different from the question of where Christianity came from? How would you honor the first while answering the second?
- Richardson describes a premise that makes everything else seem to fit. Is there an assumption you hold about this topic that does the same work for you?
- What would change your mind about any part of the history in this guide? Name the specific evidence.
Something to carry into the week
Pick the timeline item you checked most thoroughly. Learn it well enough to explain where it comes from, what kind of source supports it, and what remains uncertain about it. You don’t need the whole history to start the conversation. One accurate piece, offered with its sources, shows your friend that you are not asking them to trade one story they were told for another. You are inviting them to look at the record with you.