Some Black men reject Christianity because they have watched it used as an instrument of white power: to defend slavery, to sell colonial rule, to put a European face on a Middle Eastern Jesus. Chris Broussard, a Fox Sports NBA analyst who founded a Christian men’s ministry called the King Movement, does not dispute that record. His answer is narrower and harder to dismiss. The charge correctly describes what many white Christians built. It does not describe the Bible, the African church or the faith of the Black heroes the charge’s own defenders admire.
Where the Charge Comes From
For Broussard the question was personal before it was academic. He became a Christian in 1989, during his senior year at Oberlin College. Within months his younger brother, a student at Howard University, joined the Nation of Islam, and a close friend at Tennessee State was deeply influenced by it. They pressed him with the familiar lines: the faith was handed to Black people to make them more docile slaves, and he was worshiping a white Jesus. He had no history to answer with, only conviction: “I know Jesus ain’t no racist.”
Years of reading later, he locates the source of the charge in the conduct of the people who carried the faith. As white nations colonized much of the globe, they brought a version of Christianity that was often “white supremacy with sprinkles of Christianity on it.” The pattern reached well beyond Black Americans. Asian, Indian and African peoples received the same package, and the faith became associated with the people oppressing them.
Broussard goes further than many Christian apologists will, and he admits he did not frame it this way in his early years: “White people, white Christians or so-called Christians have, whether knowingly or unknowingly, whether consciously or subconsciously have promoted Christianity as a white religion.” His evidence is specific: the twisting of Scripture and theology, the slave Bible where “they cut portions out to support white supremacy and chattel slavery,” and a European picture of Jesus that he calls historically far from the truth. He adds a present-day judgment, that much of white evangelical right-wing politics largely promotes white interests, while granting that he agrees with parts of it.
When a skeptic says Christians used the Bible to defend slavery, the honest answer is yes. An apologetic that starts by denying this has already lost the listener.
Separating the Faith From Its Carriers
The charge fuses two things that need to be pulled apart: a belief system, and the institutions and individuals who claimed its name. A slave Bible is evidence about slaveholders. It shows what they feared enslaved people would read. If the full text had served their purposes, they would have had no reason to cut it.
Broussard offers three lines of evidence for why the charge fails once that separation is made.
The first is the content of the Bible itself. Anyone who knows what Jesus and Paul taught, he argues, will find that “there is no white supremacy whatsoever in the Bible.” He adds a claim about proportion: by his count, Ethiopia, Kush, Ham and related African nations are mentioned more than a thousand times in the Old Testament, while Greece and Rome together appear fewer than fifty times. Those figures are his, and anyone repeating them should check them. The underlying observation holds without exact numbers. Europe sits at the edges of the Bible’s world, and Africa sits near its center.
The second is the presence of Africans within the biblical story. Simon, the man made to carry Jesus’s cross, is identified in Mark 15:21 as “a Cyrenian,” from a city in North Africa. The Ethiopian official of Acts 8 hears the gospel on a desert road, one of the first conversions recorded beyond Jerusalem and Samaria. In Acts 11, believers scattered by persecution had been preaching “to none but unto the Jews only” (Acts 11:19), until some of them, “men of Cyprus and Cyrene,” came to Antioch and “spake unto the Grecians, preaching the Lord Jesus” (Acts 11:20). The text pairs Cyprus with Cyrene, so not every one of those preachers was African. Still, the step that carried the message across an ethnic line in Antioch was taken partly by Africans. Two chapters later, Acts 13:1 lists “Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene” among that church’s prophets and teachers. Luke is describing who was present, and that description shows a movement whose earliest leadership already included Africans.
The third is the history of Christianity on the African continent, from the first century until Africans encountered Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries. Broussard names Nubia as a great Christian nation, calls Ethiopia the first or second official Christian nation, and describes Egypt as one of the hubs of early Christianity, perhaps the leading one. The precise rankings belong to specialists, but the direction of the evidence is not seriously in doubt. This is the ground on which the Jude 3 Project calls the white man’s religion claim historically inaccurate: the faith took root in Africa centuries before it reached much of Europe.
Broussard did not discover this on his own. He credits an earlier generation of writers who documented Black presence in Scripture, including Tony Evans, Dwight McKissic and Walter McCray, whose The Black Presence in the Bible he considers the best book on the subject. He sees a newer generation, among them Eric Mason and Vince Bantu, moving from documentation to direct engagement with the movements that teach the charge.
The Strongest Objection: The Christianity Black Americans Actually Met
A serious skeptic can grant all of this and still object. Nubia and Ethiopia are not where most Black American Christianity came from. The faith that reached enslaved people in the Americas came through the slaveholders’ churches, the slaveholders’ preachers and, in some cases, the slaveholders’ edited Bibles. On this view, ancient African Christianity is a fact about a different people in a different era, and it changes nothing about how the faith arrived here.
The objection deserves a precise reply. African church history answers the claim of ownership: Christianity was not invented by white people, was not first theirs, and did not depend on them to reach Africa. It does not erase the route by which many Black Americans received the faith, and it cannot make that route less painful. What answers the second problem is the first line of evidence, the text itself. If the faith’s own Scriptures contain no racial hierarchy, and slaveholders had to cut those Scriptures to make them serve slavery, then the slaveholders’ version was a distortion that the full text exposes. Black Americans who read the whole Bible were reading something older than and opposed to the religion of their enslavers, however the book first came into their hands.
Why the Charge Persists
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, asks why the idea still holds despite all the information in circulation. Broussard agrees there is no good intellectual reason for it, and his answer is about power.
Whites, he argues, control the economic, educational and judicial systems Black Americans live under, even after a Black president and a Black vice president. Against that background, faith looks like the last unoccupied ground: “Spirituality is the one thing, no man, no white man, black man, whoever can control that’s between you and God. And so brothers do not want the white man controlling that too.” Rejecting Christianity becomes a way of keeping one door locked.
Broussard does not treat this instinct as foolish. He agrees with it, and then turns it: “I get that because biblically there’s only one mediator between God and man, and that’s Jesus Christ.” He is drawing on Paul:
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
In its setting, Paul’s point concerns access to God, and race is not in view. But the principle reaches exactly this fear: no human institution stands between a person and God. If the text is right, the white man never held the position the skeptic is trying to deny him. As Broussard puts it, “When you give your life to Jesus Christ, the white man has nothing to do with it. It is between you and God and Jesus.”
The desire for spiritual independence, then, is something the faith already grants. Walking away from Christ to keep white Christianity at a distance gives that distorted version more authority than it ever had.
Broussard names one less flattering reason for persistence. For some teachers in the conscious community, “this is what they do to make money.” He says he does not begrudge anyone a living from teaching, and notes that mainstream schools also pay people to teach things that are wrong. A livelihood built on one claim simply gives a person strong reasons to defend it after losing the argument.
What the Conscious Community Is, and What It Costs
Broussard defines the conscious community as a loose community of Black Americans who are skeptical of America, who want to identify with an African past and who care about the uplift of Black people. It holds very different groups: the Nation of Islam, the many strains of Black Hebrew Israelites, other forms of Islam, Kemetic movements and more. What unites them is the conviction that Black Americans must reconnect with that African past and work together against racism.
He is fair to the movement’s history. From roughly the 1950s through the early 2000s, the Nation of Islam set its tone, and a moral seriousness came with it. Calling yourself conscious implied a clean life and respect for Black women, and he says his brother lived an incredibly clean life during his eight years in the Nation. As the Nation weakened, that moral center faded, and much of the online conversation now resembles battle rap fought with historical claims.
His sharpest observation concerns who is actually affected. Most Black men never join the Nation of Islam or become Hebrew Israelites. The damage is quieter. They stay in church but absorb enough doubt that their faith hollows out: “They have no victory.” After he appeared on a popular conscious-community channel to defend Christianity, men in corporate America, people he never expected to follow those debates, thanked him because they had begun doubting their faith. That comes from his own ministry rather than any survey, but it shifts where the cost shows up: in believers who keep the label and lose their confidence, well beyond anyone’s membership rolls.
His experience with professional athletes keeps the picture honest. The white man’s religion question has rarely come up with the players he knows. Most grew up with some Christian influence, and their struggle, as he describes it, is whether to live the faith out. Black men are not one audience with one objection.
The Movement’s Own Heroes
Broussard’s most pointed argument uses the conscious community’s own figures. He calls Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X its three pillars, and then notes: “Two of them were Christians.” Turner and Garvey, he insists, “weren’t nominal Christians. They weren’t just churchgoers.”
The usual reply is that they did not know any better, or had no other options in their era. Broussard answers with a claim about Garvey: “One of Marcus Garvey’s closest confidants was a Muslim. So he knew about Islam. They had other alternatives, and they still believed in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.”
The argument has limits. Plenty of slaveholders were also sincere Christians, so the faith of admired men cannot prove Christianity true, and Broussard’s account of Garvey’s circle and of both men’s devotion is his reading of their lives, open to a historian’s check. The argument targets one claim only: that the faith is nothing more than a slave’s leash. If that were so, the men honored most for their defiance should have been the first to throw it off. By Broussard’s account, two of the three held it deliberately, with alternatives in view.
He pairs that with a prediction offered without hostility: “A lot of y’all will get saved.” He points to the many Black Christians who were once in the Nation of Islam, among the Hebrew Israelites or in Black Power and Afrocentric movements, and he urges men to come while young enough to strengthen the community. He treats the men he debates as future brothers.
Clearing the Road
Broussard’s stated aim is to remove what stands “between the black man and Christ in a lot of cases, is this barrier, this obstacle, this stumbling block of racism and white supremacy.” That is also why he worked to get Christian scholars onto conscious-community platforms, where every faction had been attacking the faith with no one there to answer. The history clears the way so the gospel can be heard, and then the old question returns: whether a person, facing God, wants to stand on his own record or on the record of Jesus.
White Christians did evil in Christ’s name, and that history stands. The open question is whether the evil came from the faith, or was something its own text, its African church and its Black witnesses stood against. On the evidence Broussard sets out, the people who used Christianity as a tool of control were late arrivals to a faith Africans already held.
