Tertullian and Athanasius were African, yet the version of them most Christians carry in their heads is European. The reason, as pastor Jerome Gay argues, is that the materials that form Christians have pictured them that way for generations: paintings, films, textbooks, seminary reading lists and children’s Sunday school lessons. Gay calls this process whitewashing. His central claim is that the forgetting has a mechanism. It runs through specific institutional channels, and each one can be named, examined and corrected.
That framing changes the question. The usual way to ask it is about memory: why don’t we remember? Gay points toward supply: who produced what we were handed, and what did those materials assume about their audience? Asked that way, the silence about African church fathers looks like the predictable output of how Christian knowledge has been packaged and passed on.
What exactly is being claimed?
Gay defines his term before using it. In his account, whitewashing is a tendency among white Christian scholars to depict the Bible, Christian literature, art and history with white figures, and to do so “at the expense of authentic diversity and authentic ethnicity to cater to white audiences that share their presuppositions and concerns.”
The weight of that definition falls on audience. Material gets shaped for the people its makers expect to read or see it. If the expected audience is white, and the makers share that audience’s assumptions, the picture of the past bends toward what feels familiar to them. The result can distort even when no one in the room intends to deceive.
Gay also separates two kinds of whitewashing. Historical whitewashing, as he describes it, paints Middle Eastern and African people white and then presents them as historical figures. Class whitewashing traces a longer story of how economic oppression became racialized oppression. He says he drew that line partly because any mention of race or whiteness now gets people sorted into a category “without actually hearing your claims.” The distinction lets him argue something specific about images and history without being forced to defend a whole political program. This article stays with the first kind, because that is where the African fathers disappear.
Where does the erasure actually happen?
Gay names the channels directly. He says “people are looking at all of this white imagery in our movies and our textbooks in our seminary books,” and he adds children’s church curriculum to the list. Each channel works a little differently, and together they explain why the pattern lasts.
The image comes before the argument
A picture teaches before anyone opens a book. A child who sees Athanasius drawn as a pale European in a Sunday school handout has learned something about who belongs in the story before learning anything about what Athanasius believed. And what he believed was consequential. Gay credits Tertullian with giving the church the concept of the Trinity, and he ties the Nicene confession that the Son is begotten, not made, to Athanasius standing up to Arius and his heresy. These are central figures, and Gay notes that they, along with the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity and the philosopher Origen, are routinely shown as white.
His sharpest observation here is about asymmetry. The recasting runs only one way. As Gay puts it, “we don’t have these brown images of John Calvin, these brown images of Martin Luther.” European Reformers are never reimagined as African, while African theologians are regularly reimagined as European. Random artistic license would cut in both directions. A one-way pattern points to a default.
In some cases Gay claims more than a default. He says missionary groups deliberately used only white imagery, and that “they even said they wanted to associate Christianity with whiteness and white with purity.” That is Gay’s assertion about the historical record, and his remarks here do not lay out the documents behind it, though he says his book carries over 200 reference citations. It matters for his argument because it marks the line between habit and strategy. Some of the imagery, on his account, was chosen.
The textbook moves the map
The second channel is classification. Gay argues that “what historians have done is they’ve made Northern Africa, Southern Europe, and they’ve presented people in this way.” This is a quieter move than a painting. Nobody has to lie about where Carthage or Alexandria sat. It is enough to file North Africa under the history of Europe.
Gay’s reasoning is that people ordinarily read geography as a clue: a figure from Africa suggests an African person. Reclassification, in his view, severs that link, so readers meet these theologians without ever being prompted to see them as African. He offers this as an explanation of how the effect works, not as a survey of particular textbooks. Confirming it would mean looking at actual survey texts and syllabi: where they place Tertullian, Cyprian or Athanasius, whether the word Africa appears in those chapters, and what the accompanying illustrations show.
The seminary sets the method
The third channel is the one future pastors pass through. Gay read a large ethics text by John Frame while he was a seminarian, and he responds to a section in which Frame offers reasons African Americans are not more engaged in Reformed theology. According to Gay, the first reason Frame gives is the intellectual nature of the Reformed tradition. Gay heard that as an implication that Black Christians are unintellectual.
He stays fair about it. “I don’t believe that Dr. Frame is a racist,” he says, describing the comments instead as insensitive. That fairness strengthens his point. The problem he identifies is a curriculum culture that treats one tradition’s habits in hermeneutics, preaching and worship as the only way to do things. Under that standard, other Christians look deficient by definition. Gay’s line here is pointed: “the gospel doesn’t need reform. We do.”
Lisa Fields locates the problem in visibility rather than ability: “it’s often that our people don’t get the shine that majority culture does.” The seminary channel never has to deny that African theologians existed. It simply leaves them in the dark while keeping others constantly in view.
Conspiracy or inherited default?
Gay’s material supports both readings, and the honest answer keeps them apart. The missionary imagery he describes was deliberate. The textbook reclassification and the seminary assumptions look more like inherited defaults: decisions made once, then copied for generations by people who never thought to question them.
The distinction changes what a fix requires. A conspiracy needs exposure. A default needs replacement. You cannot argue a children’s curriculum out of its pictures. Someone has to draw new ones. That is why Gay commissioned original artwork from an artist named Melissa Campbell for his book. The response to an institutional channel is new material placed in the same channel.
It also guards against writing off the whole Christian intellectual tradition as hostile. Gay explicitly declines that move. Celebrating the African contribution, he says, “doesn’t mean we demean what our European brothers who stood for Orthodox have done.” His complaint concerns proportion and accuracy.
Doesn’t this just trade one distortion for another?
This is the strongest objection. Ancient North Africa was not modern America, and nobody has photographs of Tertullian. Someone could fairly ask whether recasting the fathers as Black is whitewashing in reverse.
Gay anticipates it. “I am not saying that the answer to whitewashing is blackwash,” he says. His stated goal is to color correct, aiming at authentic ethnicity rather than a new flattering default. He also says plainly that “confronting whitewashing isn’t white bashing.”
The evidentiary limit is real, and it cuts both ways. We cannot be precise about the complexion of any particular ancient bishop. That uncertainty gives the European default no special standing. A picture that confidently renders an Egyptian bishop as a northern European makes a claim with no better evidence than the alternative, and arguably worse, since it ignores the geography entirely. The responsible position refuses to let one culture’s face stand in for everyone.
Gay’s correction also has a theological anchor. He appeals to the Acts teaching that all people share one common ancestry. Paul’s speech in Athens says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). In context, Paul is telling a Gentile audience that every nation stands within God’s purposes. Read alongside Gay’s argument, the verse works against any picture of the faith that quietly treats one people as its true owners, whichever people that happens to be.
Why it matters beyond history class
For Gay, the stakes are evangelistic. Many people conclude that Christianity is a white man’s religion, and he insists “they’re not just pulling this out of the air.” They are drawing a reasonable inference from what they have been shown. If every image, textbook and reading list shows a European church, it looks, in his words, “functionally that only white people contributed to philosophy and theology.”
So his approach has two parts: “I wanted to give legitimacy to their concerns, but I wanted to confront their conclusion.” The concern is the whitewashed record, which he says Christians must admit is real. The conclusion, rejecting Christ, rests on the false picture that record created. Hence his plea: “let’s not blame Christ for the actions of people who claim to be Christians.” Separating the faith from the institutions that misrepresented it is the hinge of the whole argument.
Gay presses the point with people who reject Christianity in the name of African heritage. He names Tertullian, Athanasius, Perpetua and Felicity, and Origen as African ancestors in the faith, while noting that Christians do not embrace everything Origen taught. Then he asks, “How come you only want to give credence to the ancestors that fit your ideology?” The question exposes a selective memory on the other side too. The whitewashed curriculum and its critics can end up agreeing, without meaning to, that Africa had no place in the early church. Jude 3 Project teaches the opposite: Christianity has deep, ancient African roots, so African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. Gay’s analysis shows why that claim keeps surprising people. A fact spoken once in a sermon competes with a lifetime of pictures.
That is also why he insists Christians “must stop giving faith-based answers to fact-based questions.” When someone asks who the early Christians were, a testimony will not do. The question is historical, and it calls for names, places and dates. Gay’s posture toward skeptics follows from this: “We don’t cater to nonbelievers, but we engage them.” A false picture of who built the church is an obstacle that has nothing to do with the gospel, and it sits in the places Christians control most directly, the art on the classroom wall and the books on the syllabus.
His deepest reason is the simplest: “we should care about truth, we should care about accurate history.” A faith that rests on real events in real places has every reason to show its people as they were. Each lesson that leaves the African fathers out repeats a claim about whose faith this is, and that claim gets answered only when someone writes a better lesson.