Christian apologist Adam Coleman argues that young Black people drawn to Kemeticism are usually answering an older question than what happens after death: can I be fully African and still be a Christian? Kemeticism, the spirituality and philosophy built on ancient Egypt, offers an answer to that question first and a set of doctrines second. What many are looking for is belonging, a faith that feels like their own. The gospel can answer that search, but only after the church understands it.
That order matters. A Christian who answers only the doctrine can win the point and miss the person. Someone whose deepest objection is about identity will hear a list of theological corrections as one more voice telling them who they are not.
One name, two different worldviews
Start with the word itself. Coleman explains that Kemet is the name adherents use for Egypt, the name they regard as indigenous. Many will correct a Christian who says “Egypt,” because they see it as the Greek name. That small correction carries the whole movement in miniature. Using the older name is a way of taking something back. It says the land, and the story, belong to the people who first lived it.
Coleman also insists that Kemetics are not monolithic. He describes two broad groups. Kemetic spiritualists draw on the history and philosophy of ancient Egypt and also practice its spirituality in their daily lives. Kemetic non-spiritualists draw on the same heritage but do not believe in the deities. In Coleman’s description, they read the gods and goddesses as symbols of natural forces or principles, and many hold that there is no God at all.
This distinction tells you something about the draw. If a person can be a Kemetic without believing in a single Egyptian god, then the gods are not what holds the movement together. Heritage is. The spiritualist and the atheist share a sense of who they are and where they come from, even though they disagree about what is real.
The claim underneath the conversion
Coleman places Kemeticism beside other movements in what is often called the conscious community: the Moors, the Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam. He argues they all make the same first move with Black people. They try to persuade you that being a Christian and being of African descent are at odds.
He traces that move to a real wound. Africans were taken from their homelands and, in his words, “had our culture stripped away, had our beliefs stripped away, so on and so forth, which has left this like identity hole.” The movements step into that gap. They “are trying to fill that hole with something that they believed to be African, while casting off what they believed to be European.”
Notice whose experience is being described. Coleman is talking about descendants of people who were enslaved and transported, whose family lines, languages and religious memories were broken on purpose. That loss is historical. A young person who feels it is reacting to something that was actually done to their ancestors.
Coleman offers a picture to explain how the pitch lands. He says “all worldviews are like a puzzle,” a set of beliefs that are supposed to fit together. The Kemetic argument, as he presents it, tells a Black Christian that the Christianity piece of their puzzle clashes with the identity piece. Remove the religion that does not fit who you are, the argument goes, and adopt one that does.
Everything in that pitch rests on one premise: Christianity is European. If the premise is false, the puzzle does not clash at all.
Is Christianity foreign to Africa?
Coleman knows this question from the inside. He says he started his podcast while grappling with whether Christianity is the white man’s religion and what to make of Christianity, Africans and slavery, and could not find resources that dealt with them. His conclusion: “it’s obviously not the case that there’s something that is endemic or inherent about Christianity, that it doesn’t accord with who I am as a person of African descent.”
The New Testament supports him at the level of its own narrative. In Acts 8, Philip meets “a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” (Acts 8:27). The man is already reading Isaiah, hears about Jesus, is baptized and goes home rejoicing. Luke tells this story eight chapters before Paul first crosses into Macedonia in Acts 16. In the Bible’s own account, the gospel reaches an African court through an African official before it reaches Europe at all. Nobody had to strip this man of his identity to make him a disciple. He returned to his queen’s land a Christian and still an Ethiopian.
The prophets push the point further, and they push it toward Egypt itself. Isaiah looks ahead to a day when the Lord of hosts will bless, “saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance” (Isaiah 19:25). “My people” is the name God gives Israel. Here he gives it to the nation that once enslaved Israel. The passage says nothing in favor of Egyptian religion. What it does say bears directly on the Kemetic pitch. That pitch says reclaiming Egypt means leaving the God of Israel. Isaiah pictures the God of Israel claiming Egypt as his own.
The sources problem runs both directions
Lisa Fields raised an objection Black Christians hear often. Some dismiss the historical case for the resurrection because the scholars who make it are white. She then turned the question around, observing that “in the effort to escape white supremacy, people don’t realize that they’re using white sources” in groups like these.
Coleman answered with specifics. Much of what modern Kemetics know about ancient Egypt, he says, came through European archaeologists and translators, and he names Wallis Budge as the translator of one of the main editions of the Book of the Dead, a text adherents cite often. He argues that a good deal of popular Kemetic teaching traces to 19th century European writers he calls pseudo-scholars, such as Gerald Massey. He also says some newer practitioners borrow from New Age spirituality rooted in modern European thought rather than from Egyptian texts. These are Coleman’s historical claims, and a reader can check them. If they hold, the movement that rejects Christianity for its European channels leans heavily on European channels itself.
Coleman’s deeper point is that skin color cannot settle historical questions. He compares it to searching a beach for a plastic spoon with a metal detector: you will never find it, because you brought the wrong tool. “And what I’m saying is ethnicity is the wrong kind of tool to discover truths about certain areas.” Whether Jesus lived, or rose from the dead, is a historical question. It needs historical tools, whoever happens to be holding them. Nobody’s faith should rest on the race of the scholar who defended it, and nobody’s unbelief should either.
What the ancestors believed, and whether it was true
Coleman says the answer he hears most from Kemetics is some form of “the ancestors believed this.” He takes that seriously, then names its limit. Even a person who could trace their family back to ancient Egypt, and describe exactly what those ancestors believed, would have answered only what they believed. They would not have answered whether it was true. “So it’s not enough to say that ancestors believed it.”
That limit does not make heritage worthless. A young person can study Egypt, take pride in what Africans built and grieve what was taken. None of that requires adopting Egypt’s gods. A worldview still has to be true, and pride in a people is a different thing from worship of their gods.
What this worldview actually offers a wounded people
The belonging argument invites a harder question. Does Kemetic spirituality actually serve the people it claims to restore? Coleman argues that, at least in its spiritualist form, it does not.
He describes that form as a kind of pantheism: everything that exists is part of one divine whole, and the distinctions between things are ultimately an illusion. Within that whole, Maat stands for order and goodness, and chaos stands for what we would call evil. Coleman’s problem with this is moral. If everything is within the one, chaos is within it too. Apply that to American history, and the enslaved and the enslaver are both part of the same divine reality. Coleman puts it bluntly: “their God is both the oppressed and the oppressor.” He asks how such a worldview could “ever make a solid stance against oppression?”
For a movement whose appeal rests on repairing the damage of slavery, this is not an abstract puzzle. A worldview that folds the oppressor into the divine can describe injustice. It has no place outside the whole from which to condemn it.
Coleman presses one step further. If evil is part of the one, and we are part of the one, then evil is part of us, and on that view “it’s an eternal part of who we are.” He continues: “Now, this flies in the face of the gospel.” Scripture says God made humanity in his image, and “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Evil came afterward, as a corruption. Scripture also promises that it will end: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
The afterlife picture differs too. Coleman describes the scene from the Book of the Dead in which the deceased declares the principles of Maat, insisting they have not stolen or lied, and their heart is weighed against a feather. A heart that is too heavy is consumed. He calls this a works-based system with no one stepping in to deal with the sin inside us. Paul writes the opposite: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). A people told for centuries that they did not measure up are offered, in the weighing of the heart, one more test to pass. The gospel offers a welcome they do not earn.
The strongest objection: the church itself
None of this answers the most serious reason many young Black people walk away. They do not reject Christianity because they studied pantheism. They reject it because Christians enslaved their ancestors and preached obedience to the enslaved. That history needs to be named as sin, without hedging.
The question is what follows from it. Coleman’s moral argument applies here as well. The charge that Christianity belongs to slave owners assumes slavery was truly wrong, wrong no matter who approved of it. Christianity can say that. A God who is morally perfect and distinct from creation stands in judgment over the slaveholder, including the slaveholder who quoted Scripture. Kemetic pantheism, on Coleman’s reading, places the slaveholder inside God. The honest question is which worldview gives a wounded people firmer ground for their own grievance.
A belief system is also distinct from the institutions that used its language. Many Black Christians, then and now, read the same Bible their oppressors misused and found in it a God who frees slaves and judges oppressors. Coleman’s account of the pitch is his reading of how these movements talk, and it may not fit every Kemetic. But where the pitch treats Christianity as purely European, it can only work by leaving those believers out of the story.
Answering a belonging question with belonging
Coleman does not tell Christians to win these conversations with information. He tells them to ask questions first, to let the Kemetic show why their worldview matches reality, and to know the evidence for the resurrection; he points readers to the minimal facts case made by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona. His reason for that order is simple: “it’s not just about engaging questions, it’s about engaging people.”
Lisa Fields made the same point about listening: people are rarely chasing a ritual for its own sake. Someone burning sage to clear negative energy wants peace, and as she put it, “peace isn’t the absence of negativity or chaos.” Peace, she said, is the presence of God. Jesus promised that kind: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you” (John 14:27). With Kemeticism, careful listening usually finds a deeper need under the practices. It is the suspicion that the faith someone was raised in came from people who did not see them as fully human.
Scripture’s picture of the end speaks to that suspicion directly. John sees “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” (Revelation 7:9). The nations are still distinguishable in that crowd. Ethnicity survives into the new creation, and Africans stand before the throne as Africans. A young person looking for a faith where their ancestry belongs does not have to reconstruct one from a stolen past. Revelation already places them there.
Quick answers
Did Christianity copy the story of Horus?
Coleman argues the common parallels fall apart under primary sources. Scripture never says Jesus was born on December 25. He says Egyptian calendars celebrated Horus’s birth during the five extra days at the end of the year, not in December. The supposed Egyptian trinity also fails, in his view, because Horus was brought into being by Isis and Osiris, while the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are eternal.
Is burning sage or keeping crystals automatically wrong?
No. Jude 3 Project draws the line at intent rather than the object. Sage burned for its fragrance or crystals kept because they are beautiful are not spiritual practices. Using them to access spiritual power, energy or guidance apart from God is not compatible with following Jesus.
Can a Christian honor ancestors and study ancient Egypt?
Yes. Jude 3 Project honors the desire to respect heritage and the dead. Memory and honor belong in a Christian life. Veneration of the dead and attempts at spiritual contact with them do not.
What should someone read before these conversations?
Coleman recommends Greg Koukl’s Tactics for how to ask good questions, Habermas and Licona’s The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, William Lane Craig’s On Guard, and, for readers who want depth, N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.