When you think about Christianity, whose voice are you hearing? It might be the critic who calls it the white man’s religion. It might be the distorted Christianity that gave the critic his ammunition. Or it might be Christ himself. Most men carry some mix of all three and have never separated them. The practice here is learning to tell them apart, and then testing what is left.
You can work through this alone over a week or with a small group across two or three meetings. Bring paper, because several exercises ask you to write and sort short sentences. Nothing requires personal disclosure. In a group, every question can be answered in general terms, and anyone can pass.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Chris Broussard, the Fox Sports NBA analyst who founded the King Movement, a Christian men’s ministry. His story matters here less as an argument and more as an example of discernment done under pressure.
Start with your own room
Broussard did not meet the white man’s religion charge in a book. He met it from people he loved. He says he became a Christian in 1989, his senior year at Oberlin College. Within months his younger brother at Howard University had joined the Nation of Islam, and a close friend at Tennessee State was deeply influenced by it. As he recalls their argument, the claim was that “they only gave us Christianity to make us better slaves, make us more docile.”
He had no history to answer with. What he had was this: “I know what Jesus did for me.”
Before you study anything, picture your own version of that room, and answer privately:
- Who first put the charge in front of you? A brother, a friend, a podcast, a classmate, your own reading?
- Was it said in anger, in concern, or as a joke? How did it land?
- What did you say back, if anything? What did you wish you had said?
Hold on to that picture. The guide ends there.
Three voices, not one
The charge is hard to answer because it bundles three things together. Pulling them apart is the skill this guide is trying to build.
The critique. This is the voice across the table. It says Christianity belongs to the people who enslaved and colonized, and that a Black man who follows Jesus has been taken in.
The distortion. This is the Christianity the critique is reacting to. Broussard does not deny it. He describes what colonizing powers carried around the world as, in many cases, “white supremacy with sprinkles of Christianity on it.” He names the slave Bible directly, where “they cut portions out to support white supremacy and chattel slavery.” He also admits he did not always put it this way in his early apologetics.
Christ himself. This is what the Bible presents and what a man meets when he comes to Jesus. Broussard’s claim about the text is blunt: “there is no white supremacy whatsoever in the Bible.”
The critique and the distortion share an odd assumption. Both treat the slaveholder’s version as the real Christianity. One embraces it, and the other rejects the faith because of it. Discernment starts when you stop letting either of them define the faith for you.
Testing what you hear against Scripture
The apostle John gave the early church a discernment principle: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). John is warning believers about teachers who denied the truth about Jesus. Using the verse to test the voices in your own head is an application, not its first meaning, but the instinct carries over. You are allowed to test what you have absorbed, including what you absorbed in church.
Read each passage slowly and answer the question under it before moving on. In a group, have one person read aloud and give the room a full minute of quiet before anyone talks.
Galatians 3:28
“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” (Galatians 3:28).
Paul writes to churches arguing over whether Gentile believers had to become Jewish to belong. He is not erasing ethnicity. He is saying none of these categories rank people before God. Question: Which of the three voices does this verse correct: the critique, the distortion, or both? Be specific about how.
1 Timothy 2:5
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
Broussard reaches for this verse when he explains why many Black men resist Christianity. With so much else in life controlled by others, he says, men think: “Spirituality is the one thing, no man, no white man, black man, whoever can control that’s between you and God.” Lisa Fields restates the instinct as people saying, “you can’t have control over this area of my life.”
Broussard agrees with that instinct, because the Bible names only one mediator. His conclusion: “when you give your life to Jesus Christ, the white man has nothing to do with it.”
Question: What does this verse imply about who can and cannot control your faith? Does that satisfy the instinct Broussard describes, or does the instinct go deeper than the verse reaches?
Acts 11:19-20
“Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only. And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus” (Acts 11:19-20).
Cyrene was a city in North Africa. This passage describes who did what, so read it as history, not command. Here the message crosses toward the Greeks, and some of the men carrying it came from Africa. Question: In the picture of Christianity you grew up with, who carries the gospel to whom? How does this passage compare?
Test the strongest objection
Now argue against what you just read. A careful skeptic would point out that Cyrene had Greek settlers and a Jewish community. Acts 2:10 lists Cyrene among the places Jewish pilgrims came from at Pentecost, and Acts 6:9 mentions a synagogue of Cyrenians in Jerusalem. So the skeptic would say these preachers may have been Jews or Greeks who happened to live in Africa, and calling them Black reads modern categories into the text.
Write that objection out in your own words, as strongly as you can. Then ask what it actually defeats. It weakens any claim about the skin color of particular men in Acts. It does not touch the separate question of where the faith took root. The charge says Christianity is a European possession handed down to Africans. That is the claim Jude 3 Project calls historically inaccurate, because Christianity took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe. The geography stands even if the ethnicity of every Cyrenian stays uncertain. Question: After weighing the objection, which part of your own answer to the charge needs to change, and which part holds?
What Broussard’s story actually shows
It would be easy to read Broussard’s account as a recipe: learn the history, win the argument. That is not the order he describes.
He says he visited his brother during spring break. Alone in the apartment, he compared the Quran and the Bible, saw that they disagreed about whether Jesus is the Son of God, and concluded they could not both be from God. He prayed, “Lord, I just want to serve you,” willing to follow wherever that led. What came to him, in his account, was an overwhelming sense of Jesus and the conviction: “I can never leave Jesus.” He describes the result this way: “I had stood up solely on faith, no historical knowledge, no apologetic knowledge, nothing but my relationship with Jesus Christ.”
The history came afterward, through years of reading about Black people in the Bible and Christianity in Africa before colonialism. Two things follow. His experience is a description, not a promise; no one should expect to repeat it on schedule. And the history did not create his faith. It cleared an obstacle: “So if we can remove that barrier, which is what we’re trying to do, then brothers can look at the gospel for what it is.” With the barrier gone, he says, the real question is the old one: “do you need a savior for your sins?”
He also warns against assuming every man has the same struggle. He says the charge has rarely come up with the NBA players he talks to about faith. Most grew up with some Christian influence, and for them “the challenge is just, do they want to live it out.” For some men the charge is the real obstacle. For others it covers a different question.
A sorting exercise
This is the center of the guide. Give it at least thirty minutes.
- Write down every belief about Christianity you can think of in ten minutes, positive or negative, in short sentences. For example: Jesus is usually pictured as white. Christians supported slavery. Jesus died for my sins. Do not filter.
- Draw three columns labeled Critique, Distortion and Christ. Move each sentence into the column it came from. Sort by where you got it, not by whether it is true.
- For every sentence in the first two columns, mark T if it is a claim about what the Bible says, or P if it is about what people did with it.
- For each sentence marked T, find a passage that supports or challenges it. If you cannot find one, note that too.
- Look at your whole sheet and ask one more question: Is the charge my real obstacle, or is it covering something else, such as whether I want to live this out? Write a one-line answer, even if it is I don’t know yet.
- Look at the Christ column. If it is short, or full of things you were told rather than things you have read, that shows you where to study next.
A group can do steps 1 and 2 individually and compare only step 3, which keeps the exercise from becoming a confession.
The quiet version of the problem
Broussard says the larger damage is not done to men who join the Nation of Islam or become Hebrew Israelites. Most never do. The damage is to men who stay in church while doubt hollows them out, “even as they claim to still be a Christian.” His summary of where that leaves them: “They have no victory.” That is his observation from his own ministry, not a study, but the slow leak is easy to miss in yourself.
Look back at your sheet. Is there a sentence in the Critique column you have never said aloud but have quietly believed for years? You do not have to tell anyone. Just notice it.
For those who love these men
If you are working through this for a husband, son, brother or friend, find the room where he first heard the charge, and resist leading with facts. Broussard’s story suggests the history helps most once the door is already open. Resist, too, the urge to defend everything done in Christ’s name. A man who hears you minimize the slave Bible will reasonably conclude you are defending the distortion.
Broussard calls Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X the three pillars of the conscious community and argues that Turner and Garvey were committed Christians. Of their choice, he says: “They had other alternatives, and they still believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” Before you repeat that, test it. Find a speech or essay by Garvey and the best-known account of Turner’s words, and read them yourself. Ask what each says about Jesus, and who recorded the account you are reading. Then decide whether Broussard’s reading holds, and what a skeptic could fairly say against it.
Practice: one fair conversation
Within the next two weeks, have one conversation with someone who holds the charge or leans toward it. The goal is to understand, not to win.
- Before you respond, restate his view so well that he says, yes, that’s what I mean.
- Name the part of his grievance that is accurate, out loud, without qualifying it.
- Ask one question that separates the three voices: Is your problem with what the Bible says, or with what people did with it?
- Listen to the answer. Do not reach for every fact you know.
If no willing skeptic is available, do it on paper. Write the strongest version of the charge you have ever heard, as its best defender would put it, in about a page. Then write your answer using the same four steps. In a group, practice in pairs, switch roles, and discuss which step was hardest.
Discussion questions
- Broussard faced the charge from his own brother. How does it change a conversation when the critic is someone you love rather than a stranger online?
- In the sorting exercise, which column was hardest to fill honestly? What does that tell you?
- Broussard argues that Christ already guarantees what the skeptic wants, a faith no other man controls. Make the strongest case against that reasoning, then the strongest case for it. Where do you land, and why?
- Where have you seen someone reject the distortion so completely that he also rejected Christ? Where have you seen someone defend the distortion because he thought he was defending Christ?
- Broussard says he stood on faith before he had any history. What are the strengths and risks of that for someone facing these arguments?
- If your identity rested on Christ rather than on either the critique or its distortion, what would change in how you talk about race, history or the church?
Back to your room
You still may not win every historical point with the person you pictured at the start. Broussard could not either, at first. But when that voice speaks now, can you tell whether it is describing Christ, or describing the people who used his name against you?