The African church fathers were bishops, teachers and martyrs of the early church who lived and worked in Africa, especially North Africa and Egypt. Tertullian, Athanasius, Origen, Perpetua and Felicity are among them. Their documented place in the church, centuries before European ships carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, is one of the clearest historical answers to the claim that Christianity is the white man’s religion. This guide helps you build that answer as an evidence file you can check, defend and use in a real conversation.
The material comes from a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation in which Lisa Fields interviews Jerome Gay, pastor of Vision Church and author of The Whitewashing of Christianity. You can work through the guide alone over a week or with a group in one or two meetings. You will need a notebook and a willingness to grade claims honestly, including the claims you would like to be true.
Start with the claim, not the comeback
Before you collect evidence, state the claim precisely. When people say Christianity is the white man’s religion, they usually mean one of two things. Some mean the faith began with Europeans and reached Africans and their descendants only through colonization and slavery. Gay hears a version of this often: if it were not for slavery, Black people would never have known Jesus. Others mean something about ownership. Whatever its origins, they say, the faith has been shaped by white people and for white people.
These are different claims, and they need different evidence. The first is historical and testable. If it were true, you would expect to find no African Christians, churches or theologians before European colonial expansion. If it is false, you should find them, named and located, centuries earlier. The second claim is about how the faith has been presented, and Gay does not wave it away. People who reach that conclusion, he says, are “not just pulling this out of the air.” He describes his aim this way: “I wanted to give legitimacy to their concerns, but I wanted to confront their conclusion.”
This guide’s file mainly answers the first claim. It also shows why the second feels true to so many people. Gay argues that paintings, films, textbooks, seminary books and children’s church curriculum have pictured African figures as white. He also says that “what historians have done is they’ve made Northern Africa, Southern Europe” in how they present the people of that region. If the only church history someone has ever seen is European, the conclusion follows from the materials, even though it is false.
For groups: before going further, ask each person to write one sentence describing what the claim means when someone they know says it. Read the sentences aloud. You may discover that you have been answering different claims.
Exhibit one: the oldest Christian documents
Gay starts with history and then moves to Scripture. In his conversation with Lisa Fields, he puts it this way: “I can defend my faith without the Bible, but ultimately I want to get them to the Scriptures.” For an evidence file, the biblical books do double duty. They are Scripture, and they are also the oldest Christian sources we have. Start there.
Read Acts 8:26-39. The man Philip meets on the desert road is introduced with these words: “And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship” (Acts 8:27). He is a royal official from an African kingdom. He is already reading Isaiah, and he is baptized before the chapter ends.
Then read Acts 13:1: “Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.” Cyrene was a city in North Africa. Lucius is named among the leaders of the church that sent out Paul.
Now do what an investigator does and separate what these texts state from what people often add to them. Acts 8 tells you an African official believed and was baptized. It does not tell you what he did when he got home, so any later tradition linking him to the founding of a church in his country is a tradition to examine, not something the verse states. Simeon’s nickname, Niger, is a Latin word for dark or black, but the verse does not say where Simeon came from. Treat that detail as suggestive, not as proof. Lucius of Cyrene is the firmer evidence.
Write two short lists in your notebook: what the text says, and what the text does not say. The first list is what you can say to a skeptic with full confidence.
Exhibit two: the named fathers and martyrs
Gay names several African figures who, he says, are routinely pictured as white: Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicity, Athanasius and Origen. Below, each entry records what Gay claims and what you should check before repeating the claim. Notice that these are his assertions in an interview. They are serious leads, and they are still his.
- Tertullian. Gay credits him with giving the church the concept of the Trinity. Check whether historians describe Tertullian as the source of the idea or as an early writer who gave the church its Latin vocabulary for it. The difference matters. Christians hold the Trinity because of what Scripture reveals, not because of any one ancient writer. Repeat the careful version.
- Athanasius. Gay says this African man stood up to Arius and his heresy at the Council of Nicaea, and he connects the creed’s confession that the Son is begotten, not made, to that stand. Check what role Athanasius held at the council and how his later writings defended its creed.
- Perpetua and Felicity. Gay calls them two African female martyrs. Find the ancient account of their deaths in translation and note where it places them and how it describes them.
- Origen. Gay includes him while noting that Christians do not accept everything Origen taught. That honesty strengthens the file. Find out which of Origen’s ideas later Christians rejected and why. A witness to African Christianity does not have to be a model of orthodoxy to be evidence that African Christianity existed.
- The churches. Gay points to the Coptic Church, Christianity in Ethiopia and Christianity in Nubia. For each, separate the community’s founding tradition from the earliest documents and archaeology. Both are worth knowing, but they carry different weight.
Exhibit three: the timeline
Gay’s most direct argument is about dates. In the interview, he places Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and dates the transatlantic slave trade to 1619. He concludes that Nicaea came more than a thousand years earlier, and he says to the skeptic: “Your timeline doesn’t add up.” He adds, “We don’t even have to go to the Bible yet.”
Check both dates. When you do, you will likely find that 1619 is usually tied to the arrival of enslaved Africans in English-colonial Virginia, and that the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans was already underway before then. That correction does not weaken the argument. It shortens the gap, but the gap is still many centuries long. The careful version of the timeline is also the stronger version, because a skeptic cannot dismiss it over a date.
Where the file is thin
A good file marks its own weak points before someone else does. Here are four.
Some claims need documents. Gay says that missionary groups “were intentional about only using white imagery” and that they wanted to associate Christianity with whiteness. He also asks why enslavers would “create a slave Bible that took out the Book of Exodus.” The interview does not present the documents behind these claims. Gay says his book has “over 200 reference citations,” and he adds, “So you’ll be able to go behind me and see where I’m referencing to get this from.” Take him up on it. Until you have seen the source, file these as attributed claims, not established facts.
Complexion is not the point. No one has a portrait of Tertullian drawn from life. Gay is explicit: “I am not saying that the answer to whitewashing is blackwash.” The file does not need to prove what any bishop looked like. It needs to show where these people lived, worked and died. That is what the evidence can establish.
The Roman objection. A skeptic may answer that the North African fathers wrote in Latin or Greek inside the Roman Empire, so they were Roman, not African. Being part of an empire did not make someone European. Carthage and Alexandria were African cities. Gay’s complaint about historians filing North Africa under Southern Europe is aimed at exactly this move. Be fair, though. Ancient North African populations were mixed, so describe these figures as African by place and history rather than projecting modern racial categories onto them.
What the file does not prove. Showing that Christianity is ancient in Africa does not prove that Christianity is true. That question turns on Jesus and the resurrection, and it needs its own evidence. The file also does not erase the misuse of the faith. Gay says enslavers twisted Scripture, including the so-called curse of Ham, to devalue Black people, and that “they did not try to beat Christianity into us and our ancestors, they unsuccessfully attempted to beat inferiority.” What the file removes is a false barrier. In Gay’s words, “let’s not blame Christ for the actions of people who claim to be Christians.”
One more guardrail comes from Scripture. Paul told the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). The African roots of the faith do not make it an African possession any more than European art made it a European one. The file’s point is that no people owns the gospel by default.
The practice: build a one-page file
Set aside about an hour this week. With a group, assign one figure or church to each person or pair.
- Choose one entry from Exhibit two.
- Write Gay’s claim about that figure in your own words, and attribute it to him.
- Find two sources that do not depend on each other. One should be ancient, such as a writing by or about the figure in translation. The other should be a work by a historian. Note whether the modern source simply repeats a single ancient one.
- Grade the claim: established if independent sources agree, attributed if only one person says it, or disputed if credible sources conflict.
- Write one sentence you could say to a skeptic that claims no more than your grade allows.
When the group meets, read the sentences aloud. Did anyone have to soften Gay’s claim? Did anyone find it stronger than expected? Both outcomes are success. The file is only useful if it is accurate.
Taking the file into a conversation
Gay’s method opens with a question, not a lecture: “are you familiar with African Christianity prior to the Transatlantic slave trade?” He also challenges people who reject Christianity in the name of African heritage while ignoring African Christians: “How come you only want to give credence to the ancestors that fit your ideology?” Use that question gently. It is meant to make someone reconsider, not to score a point.
He also insists on matching the answer to the question. “We must stop giving faith-based answers to fact-based questions,” Gay says. If someone asks a historical question, your testimony is not the answer. Your file is.
Posture matters as much as content. Peter writes, “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Many modern translations render that last phrase as gentleness and respect, which is the wording Gay uses. He applies it this way: “We can disagree without being disrespectful.” He adds, “We can also disagree and we don’t have to disengage.”
Jude 3 Project teaches that Christianity is not foreign to Africa, that the faith has deep and ancient African roots, and that African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. Your file is how you show someone that claim rather than simply assert it.
For groups: practice in pairs. One person voices the skeptic’s version of the claim. The other may answer only with a question or with a sentence from their file. Then switch roles. Afterward, talk about which answers kept the conversation open.
Questions for discussion
- Which version of the claim have you heard most often, the historical one or the ownership one? Which piece of evidence in this guide speaks to it most directly?
- Gay wants to legitimize the concern while confronting the conclusion. What, specifically, would you concede to a skeptic, and where would you draw the line?
- In your source work, which claim was hardest to verify? What did that teach you about repeating things you have heard in church?
- Why might a corrected claim, such as the more careful timeline, be more persuasive than a dramatic one?
- Origen is in the file even though Christians reject some of his teaching. What does including him say about the kind of evidence you are presenting?
- If a friend accepted every item in your file and still did not believe, what question would you be left with? What evidence would that question require?
Before you close the notebook, look at your one-page file and underline the single sentence you are most confident saying out loud. Then mark the claim you still need to verify. Find that source before the next time the question comes up.