D.A. Horton has sat with many young Black men who love God, who embraced Christ years ago, and who now find themselves listening to Black Hebrew Israelites tell them that Christianity stole their name. Why does that message land with men raised in church? These movements win on identity. They tell a young man who he is and why his history matters, often before the church has said anything about it. The gospel answers that same hunger more truly, because it grounds his ethnicity in the God who made him on purpose rather than in a bloodline he has to keep defending.
Horton is not describing strangers. “I’ve talked to countless of young black men that love God, that have embraced Christ,” he says, “but their hearts and their ears are being swayed by black Hebrew Israelites that are approaching them by saying, you are Israel.” His own encounter with the movement as a teenager shows how the pitch works on someone carrying a question nobody at church has answered.
What did the movement say that the sermons never did?
Horton grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and is Mexican and Choctaw. When he was 17, Black Hebrew Israelites approached him with a story about who he really was. They told him he was a Sephardic Jew, that the white man had stolen his ethnic identity, and that he was Israel. Then they opened the Bible to Deuteronomy 28:68, with its warning about being brought back into bondage by ships, and read it as a description of the slave trade.
What stayed with him was less the argument than the silence it exposed. “And they would just break down all these things that I never heard a sermon talk about.” The sermons he did hear were how-to messages, “five ways to be a better you, six ways to get your checkbook in check,” teaching “that wasn’t dealing with the identity issues that I had.”
When he asked questions, the answer he got was a verse: in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female. So the movement engaged his question, and the church, when pressed, offered a text that seemed to say the question should not matter at all. That sequence is the pattern he now sees in the young Black men he meets. They are not hostile outsiders. They are believers with a real question, and someone other than their pastor is answering it.
Is this really about identity, or about doctrine?
Both, but in a particular order. Horton sees the same pattern in the Five Percenters, whose influence on early hip hop he knows well. They came with teaching “that got the ears and then capture the hearts of a lot of young African American and Latinos because we were being affirmed in our ethnic identity.”
The method has two moves. First comes dismantling the version of Christianity a young man only nominally knew, with talk of Constantine and claims that the church is pagan. Then comes the offer: “Now we’ll put you up on the real way of life.” The doctrine arrives attached to the affirmation, and the affirmation is what the young man came for.
That order explains a familiar frustration. A Christian answers a Hebrew Israelite talking point with a better argument and gets nowhere, because the argument is aimed at the wrong place. The man is responding to being told he is somebody, and he will not hand that back just because one claim was refuted.
There is a second, more uncomfortable reason these groups win: they form their people. “Like when you talk to a five percenter, they know what they’re talking about.” They went through a catechesis and can argue their case. Many believers Horton meets can quote a favorite rapper or a popular preacher but not the apostle John, and his verdict on that kind of faith is that “it’s grown wide, but not deep.” The movements offer a story about who you are along with a disciplined way to hold it, so a church that offers neither should expect to lose the argument.
Why does the church’s own history make this harder?
The movements are not inventing every grievance. Young adults raised in church, Horton observes, are asking why their pastor only quotes men from Europe, and why nobody told them that Augustine and Athanasius were North African. Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, ties this to Howard Thurman’s conviction that one of the deepest needs of Black America is to be affirmed as children of God. When a white Jesus is pressed on a child, she notes, he can grow up assuming he sits outside the image of God. She also names the question excluded people reasonably ask: why accept a church’s orthodoxy when its practice failed them?
Horton states the history directly. Enslaved Africans were treated like animals, and some ministers taught that they had no souls, so that “even if there was a proclamation of the gospel, the practice of the gospel was withheld.” The movements plant in that gap. Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish teaching told Black Americans to give Christianity back to Europe and return to what it called their native religion, and Horton calls the result a false dichotomy in which the white God belongs to Christians and the real God belongs to us.
The distinction that matters is between a faith and the people who abused its language. In Horton’s diagnosis, the false choice spreads because the church neither deals honestly with history nor says plainly that those abuses were not what God communicates in his word. Naming the history costs the church nothing true, while refusing to separate the abuse from the teaching hands the movements their strongest claim.
Scripture itself pushes against the idea that the faith arrived in Africa as a European import. In Acts 8 one of the first people baptized after Pentecost is an official from Ethiopia, returning home with the good news. Horton’s point about the North African teachers of the early church carries the same weight: the African story of Christianity is old, and much of the church has simply failed to tell it.
Doesn’t Galatians 3:28 say ethnicity should not matter?
This is the verse Horton heard as a teenager, so it deserves a careful reading. Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Paul is not issuing a statement about erasing culture. Across Galatians he argues that Gentile believers do not have to become Jews to belong to God’s people, and the next verse finishes the thought: “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). The point is standing. Every believer is an equal heir, and nobody gets a better seat because of birth, legal status or sex.
Horton passes on an argument from a professor that makes this concrete. People quote the verse to get ethnicity turned off, not merely turned down. Yet the same verse says no male and female, and nobody stops being a man when he trusts Christ, nor does conversion move anyone up three tax brackets. If the verse does not erase gender or economic circumstance, it cannot be the verse that erases ethnicity. As Horton puts it, “there is one race, the human race, but God has created a multitude of ethnicities that need to be celebrated.”
Read in context, Galatians 3:28 becomes part of the answer to the young man’s question rather than a dismissal of it. His ethnicity does not decide his standing before God, and it does not disappear either.
What does the gospel say to this hunger that the movements cannot?
Gospel conversations with this generation, in Horton’s view, have to begin with the image of God. Every person shares, in a finite way, qualities God gave to all humans: personality, moral sense, reason and the ability to love. Against a history that treated Black people as less than human, that starting point carries real weight. In Horton’s words, “you’re not a replica of God, but you’re called to represent God.” From there the story moves to the problem every person shares, an image marred by sin inherited from Adam, and then to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
Inside that story, ethnicity gets a source: “God has sovereignly elected you to be the ethnicity you are.” Set that beside the Hebrew Israelite offer. The movement rests a man’s worth on a lineage he must keep proving against everyone who doubts the genealogy. Horton rests it on a decision God already made, which nobody can steal because nobody but God gave it.
Scripture backs the shape of this. Paul told the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26), so the human family is one and the nations within it are God’s idea. The end of the story confirms it. In Revelation 7:9 John writes, “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb.” John can still tell the nations apart before the throne, and Horton draws the conclusion: “So our ethnicity is gonna be present in the eternal state.”
That is why Horton guards against two errors at once: “Don’t idolize it, don’t ignore it, but at the same time celebrate it.” The movements make ethnicity the deepest thing about a person, while many churches have treated it as nothing. Jude 3 Project keeps the order explicit, holding that before we are Black, we are Christian, and Horton says the same in his own terms: a believer is now “a part of a spiritual ethnicity, which is the body of Christ,” held alongside the ethnicity God gave him. Christ comes first, and the gift remains a gift.
Horton has watched what happens when men hear this. Brothers in their thirties, walking with God since their teens, have wept and told him, “Because this whole time I’m thinking I gotta flush my faith down the toilet because it doesn’t speak to me as a black man in America.” For many of them, he says, it “might be the first time they ever hear that coming out of a conservative Christian’s mouth.” In those moments the drift is caught before it finishes, and nothing was added to the gospel to do it.
What about the movement’s strongest point?
The serious objection runs like this. The movements told young men the truth about a buried history while churches stayed silent, so why trust the church to tell the story now? That objection should land, and it does. But it lands on the conduct of churches and Christians. It does not show that Jesus is someone else’s property or that the Bible belongs to Europe. Horton rejects the reflex of calling people bitter for naming history, treating honesty about the past as part of faithfulness rather than a threat to it.
The movement’s use of Scripture deserves the same honesty. Deuteronomy 28 is a covenant warning spoken to Israel, listing curses that would follow unfaithfulness. Verse 68 threatens a return to Egypt, a reversal of the exodus, with Israel sold as bondmen and bondwomen. Reading it as a coded prophecy of the Atlantic slave trade requires links the passage does not supply, starting with its own named destination. A Christian can grant that the text is painful and that the slave trade was a horror without accepting that this verse describes it. And even if someone stays convinced of his descent, the gospel’s offer does not depend on settling the genealogy.
What would it take for the church to speak first?
Horton’s answer is that “it’s not just a gospel proclamation that the church has to give, it’s a gospel presence.” The teaching about the image of God and Revelation 7 has to show up in congregations where different peoples worship together. He describes planting a church in South Los Angeles and North Long Beach with a Mexican pastor, an African American pastor and a Samoan pastor, with the aim of telling the neighborhood, “this is what a snapshot of heaven looks like.”
That means churches preaching the identity question instead of changing the subject, telling the African history of the faith, and forming disciples who know Scripture well enough to answer a confident street teacher. For the young man himself, the practical point is simpler. Wanting to know his roots is not the problem. The question is which account of those roots holds up when the texts are read in context, and which one asks him to give up Christ in exchange for an identity God had already given him.