Christians have often held correct doctrine while treating people unjustly. The American record shows it plainly: enslavers who professed Christ, churches that defended segregation, and institutions that kept Black believers out of the room where theology gets decided. That history does not prove doctrine is worthless. It proves that doctrine can be recited without being obeyed. Lisa Fields puts the test this way: right belief that never reaches practice has to be examined, because “if it doesn’t translate to practice, then we have to interrogate the belief.”
Dr. Jemar Tisby, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, has spent his career following that gap through time. His reading of the record is a good guide to what the pattern looks like, where it came from, and what the people who suffered under it understood about Christianity that their oppressors missed.
Where does the record first show belief and practice splitting apart?
One of the clearest early witnesses is Frederick Douglass. His first autobiography describes life under slavery, and the Christianity in its pages is mostly the religion of the men who held him. Tisby points out something many readers skip: Douglass added an appendix after the narrative. In Tisby’s account, Douglass had finished writing and worried that readers would take him for an enemy of religion. So he went back and drew a line. The Christianity he had attacked was the Christianity of this land, the slaveholding kind. The Christianity of Christ he did not attack at all.
The placement matters. Douglass did not lead with the distinction as a slogan. He arrived at it after laying out the evidence of his own life, and only then said what that evidence did and did not mean. The enslavers’ cruelty was a fact. Their claim to represent Jesus was the thing in question.
Tisby states the contradiction Douglass saw in plain terms: “how are you gonna claim to follow Jesus while enslaving people made in God’s image and likeness? Those two don’t make sense.” The force of that question is that it uses the enslavers’ own confession against them. They claimed a Bible that teaches every person bears God’s image. Their practice denied it. Something in that arrangement had to give, and Douglass refused to let the practice redefine the faith.
Tisby treats this as an inheritance, not a single clever move by one writer. “So this has a very long history where black folk recognize what’s real and what’s counterfeit when it comes to Christianity,” he says. Enslaved and formerly enslaved Christians had every reason to reject the religion outright. Many did not. They separated the faith from its abusers, and that act of discernment became part of the Black church tradition.
Is it fair to call some Christianity counterfeit?
Lisa Fields says yes, and she frames it as a feature of anything valuable: “anytime you have an authentic, you’re gonna have counterfeits.” A counterfeit bill does not prove money is fake. It proves real money is worth imitating.
Tisby adds a limit that keeps the claim honest. He grounds the judgment in Jesus’s teaching about fruit, but he separates two kinds of verdict. “So, you know, when it comes to the state of somebody’s soul, that’s between them and Jesus,” he says. What Christians can assess is visible fruit, and some who claim the name of Jesus, in his words, “are not exhibiting the fruit of spirit.”
The text he has in mind supports that distinction. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns about false prophets who look harmless and are not, and then gives the test: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” (Matthew 7:16). In context the warning is aimed at teachers who claim to speak for God. Jesus does not tell his hearers to ignore what such people say. He tells them that what they produce will expose what they are. Paul later names the fruit Jesus has in view when he lists what the Spirit produces: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith” (Galatians 5:22). A theology that keeps producing cruelty toward image bearers is producing the wrong crop.
That is a narrower claim than it first sounds. It does not hand anyone the power to declare a neighbor damned. It does let the church say that a system calling itself Christian has contradicted Christ, which is exactly what Douglass said.
Did the pattern end with slavery?
Tisby’s first book, The Color of Compromise, follows the pattern forward through American history. He describes its subject bluntly: “there were so many white Christians who used their faith as an excuse for injustice.” But he also says that even while writing it, he kept thinking about the other side of the ledger. Many Black Christians read the same Bible and understood their faith as a force for liberation and justice. His later book, The Spirit of Justice, tells their stories.
Put those two books side by side and the historical point sharpens. The difference between the two groups was not access to Scripture. Both had it. Both often held similar creeds. What differed was who was doing the reading, from what position, and what they were willing to let the text demand of them.
Lisa Fields sees the same dynamic in the present. She describes white evangelicals who are “heavy on orthodoxy, but it doesn’t translate to their practice.” Her concern is pointed at her own field too. In apologetics, she notes, there is heavy emphasis on calling out people who do not get every point right. If precision alone were the cure, she argues, the American church would not be in its current state.
How does theology itself get colonized?
The second half of the history is quieter. It is not about open cruelty. It is about whose thinking counts as theology in the first place.
Tisby names it from his own life. He came to faith through a white evangelical youth group, found the teaching thin, and went looking for depth. He found it in the neo-Reformed movement, drawn by systematic theology that sorted belief about God into clear categories. He still calls that good as far as it goes. The problem was what came along with it: “what tends to sneak in is a certain elevation of that kind of theological formulation.” Once the multi-volume systematic theology became the measure of serious thought, other kinds of theology quietly dropped in rank. Black sermons, spirituals and gospel songs carry real theological content, Tisby argues, even when they never appear in a seminary syllabus. He admits he did not see that until years later.
He places a turning point with James Cone. In Tisby’s telling, Cone earned his PhD in systematic theology from white institutions, then looked at Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and saw Black people suffering while the theological establishment said little. Cone’s response, as Tisby describes it, was to bring the lived experience of an oppressed people to theological formulation. The result was black theology, and the establishment pushed back, partly because the work indicted them and partly because it drew on experiences they had never drawn on before.
Christians still disagree, sometimes sharply, about Cone’s conclusions, and readers should weigh his work on its own merits. Tisby’s historical point here does not depend on settling that debate. His point is about a hidden assumption: that one community’s reading of the Bible is simply the reading, free of context, while everyone else’s is shaped by their situation.
From there Tisby gives the problem a name. Black Christians, he says, have to watch out for theological colonialism, which he defines as “white centered ways of thinking and categorizing around God sneak into the church through songs, through sermon subjects, through approaches and formulations, and even through the unspoken hierarchy of who is authoritative.” The last item on that list is the one that lasts longest. A church can sing different songs and still assume, without ever saying so, that real authority lives somewhere else.
His test is concrete. Walk into a pastor’s study and look at the books the pastor opens to prepare a sermon. That shelf shows who the pastor treats as authoritative. Tisby reports that it is often a sea of white authors, even in many Black churches. That detail keeps the history from becoming a story about other people. The colonized assumption does not stay in the institutions that started it.
Who has history treated as authoritative, and who has it overlooked?
Tisby’s historical figures show what the colonized hierarchy missed. Sister Thea Bowman, as he tells it, was a Black woman from Mississippi who felt called to religious life as a teenager after attending a local Catholic school, traveled to Wisconsin for her formation, and became a Catholic nun. She worked with Black Catholic priests to pull the Roman Catholic Church out of its white centeredness. In the episode Tisby writes about, she addressed the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, a room he describes as full of white men, and told them, in substance, that Black Catholics could be Black and Catholic without needing the bishops’ oversight or approval. She also sang. Tisby notes she held a PhD.
He reminds readers that Martin Luther King Jr. also earned a PhD in systematic theology, a fact that popular memory of King the preacher tends to drop. The point is not that degrees settle authority. It is that trained Black intellectuals have always existed, so excuses for ignoring them do not hold.
Then he widens the category. Fannie Lou Hamer, he notes, did not get past sixth grade. Yet when it came to breaking down Scripture and applying the ethical commands of the gospel, Tisby says, “couldn’t nobody touch Fannie Lou Hamer.” He calls her a folk theologian, and argues she belongs on theological stages as much as anyone.
Lisa Fields names how the same hierarchy works today. When predominantly white spaces fill a stage, she observes, “they want educated PhDs. But when they go to black people, they just want artists.” She is clear that artists have valuable things to say and should not be removed. Her complaint is that Black voices get cast as inspiration while white voices get cast as authority. Tisby adds a deeper layer: “it’s still their stage.” Inviting guests onto a platform you control is different from learning on platforms others built.
What changed, and what did not?
Some things clearly changed. Douglass’s distinction became a lasting resource. Black Christians across generations, from Hamer to Bowman, practiced a faith that did not wait for permission from the institutions that had misused it. Their witness answers the charge that Christianity belongs to the oppressor. They read the same Scripture and found in it grounds to resist.
The hierarchy of authority changed more slowly. Tisby notes, while saying he does not recall the exact statistic, that multiracial churches are still mostly led by white men. Diverse teams appear, he says, but where the final decision rests shows where the line still sits. Bring that observation together with the pastor’s bookshelf and the stage, and the old question from Douglass’s appendix is still open in a quieter form: who gets to define what real Christianity is?
Does this history mean doctrine does not matter?
No, and neither speaker argues that. Lisa Fields says outright that she believes in doctrine and in right belief. Tisby’s own story begins with hunger for deeper theology, not contempt for it. The history does not set belief against behavior. It shows what happens when a community treats belief as finished once it is stated correctly.
The strongest objection is that this line of argument could slide into judging every theology by whether its holders behave well, which would make truth depend on the virtue of its advocates. The fruit test does not go that far. A true doctrine held hypocritically is still true. What the fruit test exposes is whether a person or institution actually believes what it recites. Tisby makes that point when he talks about moments of pressure: “our true beliefs come out in times of pressure and times of call for courage.” On his reading, the history of slaveholding religion is a record of what people actually believed, revealed when belief cost them something.
Lisa Fields offers a word for what was missing. Writing about integrity, she found that one definition was wholeness. Tisby picks up the thread: “coming to Jesus is about wholeness.” The counterfeit Christianity in this history was not usually ignorant of doctrine. It was divided. It kept the creed in one room and the whip, the segregated pew or the all-white bookshelf in another. The witnesses who saw through it, from Douglass to Hamer, refused that division. They took the doctrine whole, which meant taking it seriously enough to let it judge the people who taught it to them.
Quick answers
What is counterfeit Christianity?
A faith that claims the name of Jesus while producing fruit that contradicts him. Frederick Douglass distinguished the Christianity of this land, which upheld slavery, from the Christianity of Christ.
What does Tisby mean by theological colonialism?
White-centered ways of thinking about God that enter a church through songs, sermon topics and formulations, and through an unspoken ranking of who counts as authoritative.
Can Christians judge whether someone is really saved?
Tisby says the state of a soul is between that person and Jesus. What believers can and should assess is visible fruit, following Matthew 7:16.
Does the history show Black churches are immune to this problem?
No. Tisby says the pastor’s study in many Black churches is still filled mostly with white authors, which shows how deep the colonized assumption runs.
Is the answer to stop emphasizing doctrine?
No. Both Lisa Fields and Tisby affirm right belief. The lesson is that belief which never reaches practice should be examined, not excused.