When Eric Mason started college in 1991, the hardest challenges to his future faith did not come from atheist philosophers. They came from hip-hop, from the Five Percenters and from a conscious community that called Christianity a white man’s religion, said Jesus was white or never existed, and taught that Black people were the original man. Those are different questions from the ones most apologetics training prepares for. Mason, pastor and founder of Epiphany Fellowship, argues that the Black church needs its own apologetics because its people face their own questions. He also argues that the church can only answer them if it knows its own faith from the inside.
That second claim carries the argument. Mason is not asking for a separate gospel or a softer one. He wants to know why so many Christians in Black communities lose arguments they should win. He finds the answer in what the questions are and in what the church failed to teach before anyone asked them.
A pressure that keeps returning
Mason became a Christian in November 1992, his sophomore year, at a time he remembers as a hard one to be a believer. In his telling, the people pressing the challenges mostly read the same books and held a few shared convictions, including that the white man was the devil. He calls this conscious community language and notes that the same outlook now often goes by the word woke.
He does not treat any of this as new. He traces waves of it to the 1920s, to the 1950s through the 1970s, to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and to roughly the last ten years. The movements change names while the pressure keeps coming back. What is different now is the medium: “And because of the internet, it’s not going anywhere.”
The people leading the pressure have also changed. Mason recalls that women once mostly followed men in these groups. Today he sees women as leading voices in the Nation of Islam and the conscious community, which is one reason he wanted women among the contributors to his book Urban Apologetics. He is specific about where believers should expect to be tested: historically Black colleges, urban neighborhoods and higher education. Those settings are where the challenge concentrates. He is describing particular places, not every Black Christian.
The movement that keeps your Bible
Mason groups these movements under a term from his book: BRICs, short for Black religious ideological communities. He refuses to flatten them. Of Hebrew Israelites he says plainly that “all of them aren’t the same,” separating the more aggressive camps from groups some would call moderate or messianic. The ethnic claim alone does not trouble him much. What troubles him is that the movement so often leads into theological error. He says he has met perhaps one Hebrew Israelite who still holds to historic biblical truth.
He calls Hebrew Israelism the fastest-growing of these movements in the world and reports hearing from people in Zambia, South Africa and the UK, and from hundreds of pastors trying to understand it. Those are his own reports rather than measured figures. His explanation for the growth is more useful than the numbers. He calls the Nation of Islam’s account of how the world began mythological and incoherent. Some other groups, in his description, split between science-minded and philosophy-minded followers. Hebrew Israelism has a simpler advantage: “they don’t make you leave the Bible.”
A movement that asks you to give up Scripture first has to beat your loyalty to it. A movement that keeps your Bible and changes who it is about never has to fight that battle. Mason sees the same method in Louis Farrakhan, who he says uses Christian words with different meanings underneath when he speaks in Christian settings. The vocabulary sounds familiar, so the hearer misses how far the meaning has moved. Mason puts the strategy bluntly: “Everybody is evangelizing Christians.” Church members are not bystanders in this debate. They are the people being recruited.
He tells of a group in a large Black city that approached young women on the street. One man gave a woman about ten Scriptures, then asked whether he had just given her more Scripture than her pastor did on Sunday. She said yes. Mason’s verdict cuts both ways: “the amount of scriptures you give doesn’t matter if you’re not explaining them right.” The man’s pile of verses proved nothing, yet it persuaded her because she had nothing to measure it against.
The strongest form of the challenge
A fair answer has to start with the Hebrew Israelite case at its strongest, and it has two parts.
The first part is textual. Mason names the passages that get pressed: the psalm that speaks of God giving his statutes to Israel, and Jesus’ own words in Matthew 15:24, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Read alone, those lines seem to say God’s promises belong to one people. If Black Americans are that people, the argument goes, then the church has been preaching someone else’s covenant to them.
The second part is moral, and it is harder. Lisa Fields recalls a Hebrew Israelite at a campus event who went from hostility to near tears and asked why people like him were being gunned down in the street. To her, the moment showed that some of these men and women are wrestling with the problem of evil. Their deeper charge is not about a verse. It is that the church in America has watched violence against Black people and offered them a faith whose public face did not look like them. A Christian who wins the verse exchange and never hears that question has not answered him.
Mason does not dodge the second part. On the first, his answer is the whole story of Scripture, which comes later. On the second, he starts with an admission.
History, pictures and an admission
The white man’s religion charge works on two levels, and Mason separates them. On the historical level, he believes the case has largely been won. After years of apologetics work in Black communities, he says of the movement’s leaders, “I don’t even hear the bigwigs say that anymore.” He describes a sequence of arguments pressed and then abandoned: that Jesus never existed, that orthodoxy was invented under Constantine, that a church council created Christianity. That is his account of how the debate shifted, and it is worth testing, but it shows the historical charge can be met.
The pictures are another matter. “I don’t think we really understand the impact of iconography,” Mason says. He describes the dominant church art of the Western world as saturated with European images, a kind of image genocide. He also explains why so many Black congregations still worship under white figures. When white churches left the inner cities in the 1950s and later, they sold their buildings to Black congregations, and the art stayed. He mentions one historic Black church whose figures are all white except for art added later, and declines to name it out of respect for its legacy.
Fields supplies the evidence of what that art can do. She describes a FAMU student who had only seen Adam and Eve pictured as white and had come to believe his dark skin was a product of the fall. He was nearly in tears. His mistake was not a historical error that a lecture on early African Christianity would fix. It was a theological conclusion about his own body, drawn from images no one had taught him to question. That is why the slogan outlives the scholarship. Mason says it still circulates across income levels in Black communities.
He offers a working distinction: “intellectual barriers is bad information,” while “emotional barriers is bad experiences.” Better facts can answer the first kind, but the second needs more. He turns to 2 Corinthians 4:4: “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” Paul is describing spiritual blindness, and Mason does not reduce the verse to art history. He still draws a pointed conclusion for Western Christianity, saying it must admit that “it’s played a role in blinding black people to the gospel.”
The admission separates the faith from the people who packaged it. Christianity did not become white because European churches painted it that way. The packaging did real damage, though, and the honest response to the weeping Hebrew Israelite starts by owning that damage instead of defending it.
Same gospel, different questions
The obvious objection is that the gospel is one message for every people, so a distinct apologetics for Black communities might seem to divide the church. Mason’s reply is that the gospel stays the same while the questions differ. He says “our people ask different questions than their community does.” Nobody in his community, he notes, has asked him about the Jesus Seminar or new academic debates over Paul. They do ask whether Jesus was a historical person.
Some questions are shared, and the standard answers still serve. What changes is how a question arrives and what sits behind it. Whether Jesus existed sounds one way in a philosophy seminar. It sounds different coming from a movement that also says Christianity was built to oppress you. An answer to the first version leaves the second unanswered. Mason does not want the label to carry the case either. He shrugs off whether people call the work urban. What matters to him is that the questions get answered.
Defending a faith you actually know
Mason’s central move is to locate the problem upstream. Too many believers, he says, “study the faith through apologetics versus doing apologetics from their faith.” A defense should grow out of discipleship. Facts collected only for an argument rarely hold up under pressure.
He illustrates with seminary. Greek was harder than it needed to be because he did not yet understand English grammar well enough to follow its tenses, so he went back and learned it. By the time he reached Hebrew, “Hebrew was actually easier for me than Greek.” Neither language was simpler. He simply knew his own language better. A Christian who knows the shape of their own faith can hear when someone bends it.
Fields recalls a faithful church member in Richmond, Virginia, who brought a Hebrew Israelite group’s questions to his pastor. The pastor said he would get back to him. The man concluded the group had answers the church lacked, and he left. A pastor’s delay became a verdict on the faith. Weak sources make it worse, Fields adds, because most people are getting their scholarship from YouTube videos. And since “people study how you preach,” a congregation that only hears topics never learns to work through a text.
Mason’s practical counsel follows. Talk one on one or in small groups rather than taking on a pack of street preachers in front of a camera. Keep the conversation on topic: “Let’s stay in this passage and let’s work in this passage.” Verse-hopping is the method, and the person who chases each verse loses the thread.
The thread is the larger story. Against the claim that God’s promises are for one ethnic people, Mason answers that “God from the beginning wanted all people globally to represent him.” He traces this through Genesis 1, 10 and 12, through Exodus 19:6 and on to Revelation 7 and 19. In Exodus 19:6 God tells Israel, “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Mason reads that priestly calling as outward-facing: Israel was chosen to represent God before the nations, not to keep him for itself. That is his interpretation of the verse’s purpose, and he sets it inside the whole arc of Scripture rather than resting it on one line. The arc ends in Revelation 7:9 with “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.” Mason does not erase Israel’s place. He notes that most of Scripture tells Israel’s story. His point is that Israel’s purpose was always larger than Israel.
He also shows why context matters with a favorite proof text. Isaiah 28:10 reads, “For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.” It is often quoted as a Bible study method. Mason points out, “That’s a passage on judgment,” aimed at Ephraim. Reading the surrounding chapter changes what the verse can be used to prove. A believer taught to read that way does not need a rebuttal for every verse.
For pastors, the same principle means knowing what young adults are watching and posting. “You have to know what’s pastoring your people so that you can pastor your people.”
Dignity that starts before the argument
Mason’s book is subtitled around restoring Black dignity with the gospel, and that is where his apologetics finds its center. He argues that “our dignity didn’t start at justification. It started at creation.” Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” In his reading, “the fall, of course, defaced it, but didn’t erase it.” Christ, “the image of the invisible God” in Colossians 1:15, restores what was damaged. Mason sets this against centuries in which Black people were treated as less than human, from slavery to the counting of an enslaved person as three-fifths. He insists the body shares that dignity, because God formed humanity with his own hands and promises a resurrection body.
That answer reaches both people this argument has followed. A movement may tell the FAMU student he is the original man, and church art may have told him his skin came from the fall. Genesis tells him something older than either: his worth begins at creation, before any group, nation or painter weighed in. The same doctrine gives the grieving Hebrew Israelite a God who does not rank image-bearers by color, which is the reverse of what the pictures taught him.
Mason wants young Black believers to become “indigenous missionaries to their own people.” The phrase reverses the charge he heard in 1991. The claim was that Christianity came to Black people from outside. He wants a generation that carries it from inside, because they know their faith well enough that no one can tell them it was never theirs.