Two people can both say salvation and mean opposite things. When someone you know uses Christian words in ways that feel slightly off, the words alone will not tell you what they believe. Ask what they mean, test those meanings against what Scripture says, and ask about the story behind the belief before you argue with it. Pastor Ernest Cleo Grant II, a pastor in Camden, New Jersey, named the gap plainly in his conversation with Lisa Fields: “Christians aren’t asking enough clarifying questions.”
Nick Cannon’s comments on The Breakfast Club are the starting point, but they are not the subject. The subject is your own circle: a cousin, a coworker, a friend from youth group, maybe your own habits of speech. You can work through these exercises alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. In a group, nobody should have to describe a real person or tell a personal story. Every prompt works just as well with a general example.
Begin with words you think you already know
Before reading further, take a sheet of paper and write one-sentence definitions for four words: sin, salvation, Jesus, and heaven. Don’t look anything up. Write what you would actually say if a friend asked you over lunch.
Now picture someone who uses all four words often and comfortably but means something different by each one. Could you tell the difference just by listening? Most of us couldn’t, at least not right away, because shared vocabulary feels like shared belief. Keep your sheet. You will come back to it at the end.
What Grant heard in one sentence
In Grant’s summary of the interview, Cannon said that “Christianity is his first language, but he’s fluent in many other spiritualities.” Cannon tied his turban to Moorish thought. Grant traced that reference to the Moorish Science Temple and its founder, Noble Drew Ali, and summarized what the movement’s own book teaches, as he reads it: there is no such thing as sin, heaven is a state of mind, humanity was not made in God’s image, and a person must look within for salvation.
The words sin, salvation, heaven and even Jesus survive in that system, kept and refilled with new meanings. Grant describes the same move in older movements such as Gnosticism, which he says involved “appropriating religious words like Christ redemption heaven” and using them “to describe their non-biblical notions.” That is the pattern this guide trains you to spot: a belief system can sound close to Christianity because it borrows the vocabulary, while the meaning has gone somewhere else.
Grant is careful about what he claims. Cannon’s remark was a short clip, and Grant says he would have loved to hear Cannon explain himself. He also notes that people who call themselves Moors today hold different views. The lesson, then, is about what to listen for and how to ask, with no license to diagnose a celebrity or label a neighbor.
Discussion question 1: What, if anything, does familiar vocabulary change about how a belief is received, by the person who holds it and by the people who hear it?
Test the meanings against the text
Scripture expects believers to test what they hear. Read 1 John 4:1 slowly: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” In the KJV, try means test or examine, the way a metal is tried. John is writing to churches facing teachers who sounded Christian and were not, and his instruction is to examine what is being claimed.
Paul gives a parallel warning in Colossians 2:8: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Spoil here is older English for carrying someone off as plunder. Paul’s measuring line is whether teaching is “not after Christ,” meaning it does not take its shape from who Christ is. Unfamiliarity alone is no fault.
Now do a short exercise. For each of your four words, read one passage and set it beside the alternative meaning Grant summarized.
- Sin. Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Paul is closing an argument that runs through the first three chapters of Romans: every group, with or without the law, stands in the same need.
- Salvation. 1 John 1:7: “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” The cleansing comes from outside the person, through what Christ has done.
- Jesus. John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” This is Jesus speaking about himself to his disciples on the night before his death.
- Heaven. Read John 14:1-3, where Jesus speaks of going to prepare a place and coming again. Ask whether the passage reads more naturally as a real place and presence, or as a state of mind.
Compare these with the definitions you wrote at the start. Where were yours close to the text? Where were they vague enough that someone could pour almost any meaning into them?
Sorting difference from contradiction
Christians use different words for the same truth all the time, and faithful believers disagree on secondary questions. A good listener sorts these cases instead of treating every odd phrase as a threat. Grant offers a clean test for the cases that matter most: “either there’s a hell or there’s not. Either Jesus blood washes away sin, or it doesn’t.” Some claims can sit side by side, while others cancel each other out. Of the Moorish teaching and Christianity, he concludes “they’re just not congruent views.”
For each phrase below, decide whether it is (a) a different way of saying something Christians already believe, (b) unclear until you ask what the person means, or (c) a direct contradiction of what the text says. Write down one question you would ask about each.
- God’s got me. I’m covered.
- Jesus was a great teacher, like a lot of great teachers.
- Everybody has their own truth.
- Heaven is wherever you find peace.
- I’m blessed and highly favored.
- The only devil you have to beat is yourself.
If you are leading a group, expect people to disagree about where some of these belong, especially numbers 1, 3 and 5. That disagreement is useful, because it shows that you often can’t place a phrase until you know what the speaker means by it. A sincere believer might say number 4 about a moment of deep comfort in prayer and still hold the full biblical hope. Push the group toward questions, not verdicts.
Discussion question 2: Which phrase was hardest to place? What would you need to learn from the person to decide?
The reason underneath the vocabulary
Grant does not think most people blend faiths because they have weighed the doctrines carefully. He names a preference first: “we want the loving Jesus, but we don’t like the one that is bringing judgment and condemnation for sin.” Beneath the preference he often finds a wound. When he asks people why they walked away, he says, “usually from my experience, it’s because they’ve gone through some type of church hurt.” Someone disrespected them or tried to take advantage of them, and the whole church became suspect.
Lisa Fields adds that this is not only a pattern in the inner city. She sees the same mixing among young professionals who keep a sense of spirituality while leaving the church, and she observes that “if you get to the core, it’s the same reason.”
That changes how you hear redefined vocabulary. A person who says heaven is a state of mind may be making a doctrinal claim, and may also be telling you, without saying so, that the people who taught them about heaven were hard to trust. Take church hurt seriously. What leaders did was real and may have been grievous. It is also not the same thing as a failure of Christ, and keeping those two apart lets you be honest about what happened without letting the hurt decide what is true about Jesus.
Two ways this skill goes wrong
Listening for redefined words can turn sour. One failure is suspicion: every conversation becomes an inspection, and your questions become traps set to catch someone in error. The other is over-reading: deciding that every doctrinal difference is really a wound, so you stop taking the person’s actual reasons seriously. Grant himself says “usually,” not “always.” Some people have thought carefully and simply disagree, and they deserve to be answered on the merits.
A simple test guards against both. Before you ask a question, ask yourself whether you would ask it the same way of a Christian friend you trust. Then let the person name their own reasons, and do not supply reasons for them. If you are already sure of the answer before you ask, you are not asking yet.
Discussion question 3: Grant connects a preference for a Jesus without judgment to experiences of church hurt. Where does that connection seem to fit, where might it not, and how would you find out without assuming?
Practice: the three-question conversation
Grant’s approach to a real conversation is built on questions. When he imagines meeting Cannon, he says he would ask “what exactly do you mean? Where are you getting this from” and see whether Cannon knew the history of what he had picked up. On the street, when someone tells him Christianity reached Black people only by force, he asks, “How do you know that? Who told you that that happened?” And to people who have left the church, he asks, “Like, what happened that made you feel like you don’t need to be involved in church or don’t want Jesus anymore?”
That gives you three questions, in order:
- Meaning: When you say that word, what do you mean by it?
- Source: Where did you first hear it put that way?
- Story: What happened that made this way of seeing things make sense to you?
In pairs, one person picks a phrase from the sorting exercise and speaks as someone who holds it sincerely. The other may only ask the three questions, plus follow-ups. No corrections and no Bible verses yet. After five minutes, switch roles. Working alone, write out a realistic conversation on paper using the same rule.
James 1:19 gives the posture: “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” Grant’s reason is plain: “Because oftentimes people just really wanna be heard.” Paul shows the order in Acts 17:23, telling the Athenians, “For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” He had looked closely at what they worshiped, and then he declared the true God clearly.
Afterward, talk through which question was hardest to ask without sounding like a trap, and whether the person playing the believer felt heard or examined.
Discussion question 4: At what point in a conversation like this is it right to move from asking to stating what Scripture says? What signs would tell you the moment has come?
When you don’t have the answers
Grant tells his listeners to ask clarifying questions and “relieve yourself of the burden of needing to know everything.” His reason is theological: “The knowledge that I communicate is not what’s bringing them. It’s the Holy Spirit.” He still wants believers solid on who Christ is, the Trinity, and how Scripture came to us, but knowledge serves the conversation rather than standing as the price of entry. Sometimes his invitation is as simple as “Hey, can I take you out for a bite to eat? Can I listen to your story?” He also apologizes when people have been hurt by other Christians, telling them, “man, I am deeply sorry that my brothers and sisters have treated you that way.”
Discussion question 5: Grant apologizes for harm he did not personally cause. What does that kind of apology accomplish, and what are its limits?
Before the next conversation
Grant also says to pray for the people you hope to reach, pointing to Paul’s request in 2 Thessalonians 3:1: “Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you.” Paul’s concern is for the word to move freely.
For the coming week, listen for one moment when a familiar Christian word is used in a way you can’t place, whether by a friend, a podcast guest, or yourself. Ask at least the first of the three questions, gently and without a correction ready. Then go back to the four definitions you wrote at the beginning and revise any that turned out too vague to tell a borrowed meaning from a biblical one.
One question is worth keeping after that. If someone asked you what you mean by salvation, could you answer in words that only the gospel could fill?