The question has a short answer and a long one. The short answer is that faith was woven through Juneteenth from the beginning. The longer one is that what you mark in time shapes who you become, and this particular day has more to teach the church than most Christians have been told.
Pastor and teacher Rasool Berry did not grow up knowing much about Juneteenth. The more he researched it, the more he found something he had not expected: the church was not peripheral to this story. It was at the center of it.
What Exactly Is Juneteenth, and Why Did Freedom Arrive So Late?
Most people were taught that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. In practice, it did not. The Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, but it applied only to the Confederate states and required enforcement to have any effect. Many enslavers moved west to Texas specifically to keep holding people beyond the reach of Union forces. It took more than two more years for freedom to reach the last enslaved people in the Confederacy.
“That happened on June 19th, 1865, when they arrived in Galveston, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.”
— Rasool Berry
“It was like a wave of freedom that swept over that place.”
— Rasool Berry
Two and a half years. The gap between a declaration and its enforcement is not a footnote. It is the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of people who were free on paper and held in practice. Juneteenth marks the day the wave finally reached them.
Dr. Charlie Dates has described how the Black church became a survival institution in periods like this, when official declarations did not match material reality. During the Great Migration, when millions of Black Southerners moved north into difficult conditions, Black churches met them with housing, schooling and work because no other institution would. The same pattern runs through the Juneteenth story. When freedom finally arrived, it was not the government that organized the celebration. It was the people, and it was the church.
What Does Faith Have to Do With Juneteenth?
This is where Berry’s research surprised him most. The deeper he went, the more he found the church at the center, not the edges, of how Juneteenth was born and how it spread.
“One of them was Jubilee Day. And I was like, ‘Wow. Jubilee Day?’”
— Rasool Berry
One of Juneteenth’s earliest names was Jubilee Day, a direct reference to the year of release described in Leviticus 25:
“And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you” (Leviticus 25:10).
The people who chose that name were not making a rhetorical move. They were making a theological claim: that what happened on June 19, 1865, was a kind of Jubilee, a moment when debts were cancelled and the captive went free. They read their experience through Scripture because Scripture had been the map they used to survive.
“The people just spontaneously make their way to Reedy Chapel and start having a praise break and a worship session.”
— Rasool Berry
The first celebration was a worship service, not a political rally or a civic ceremony. People gathered in a church and praised God. The freed pastors who led those first celebrations went on to build schools, churches and whole neighborhoods. The gospel they preached was holistic. It addressed the soul, the mind and the material conditions of the people they served.
Was Faith Used Against Black People, or for Them?
Berry does not flatten this history. He holds both sides honestly.
The same Bible was twisted by enslavers and held as a promise of freedom by the enslaved. Slaveholders produced a Bible with the liberation passages removed. The Exodus story of deliverance was cut out, and passages about obedience were kept. The intent was to use Scripture as a tool of control.
“They tried to take out all liberation passages so that folks wouldn’t get any idea. Why they go through the whole effort of taking out like 90% of the Old Testament?”
— Rasool Berry
The answer to that question is the answer to a lot of questions: because they knew what the text said. They knew that if enslaved people read the Exodus story, they would see themselves in it. They knew the Bible was not on their side, so they cut the parts that were most dangerous.
What the enslaved did with what remained, and with the full text they preserved through memory and gathered worship, is one of the central stories of American Christianity. B.J. Thompson, in a Jude 3 Project conversation on ethnic identity and faith, makes a related point: following Christ does not ask you to bury your history or your heritage. The enslaved understood this intuitively. They held onto their ethnic memory and their faith at the same time, because they recognized that the God of Scripture was interested in their full humanity, not just their souls.
“From them calling Harriet Tubman Moses to what Frederick Douglass writes, the faith of the oppressed outlasted the faith of the oppressor.”
— Rasool Berry
That is not a small theological claim. It is the claim that authentic Christianity, the kind practiced by the enslaved and not the kind taught by the enslaver, had a different center of gravity. It was oriented toward the God who sees, who hears and who comes down to bring his people out (Exodus 3:7–8). The editors of the Slave Bible knew that, and they cut accordingly.
Why Should the Church Mark Juneteenth Specifically?
Berry’s argument here is fundamentally about formation, not politics or guilt. It is about what happens to a person, and to a community, based on what they set aside time to remember.
“What you mark in time matters.”
— Rasool Berry
This is an old idea in the Christian tradition. The liturgical calendar is built on it. Easter is not just the day you talk about the resurrection. It is the day the church rehearses what the resurrection means for how it lives. Christmas is not just the day you talk about the Incarnation. It is the day the church practices wonder at the fact that God entered the world. What you set aside shapes what you actually believe, because practice forms conviction faster than argument does.
“Honoring this day gives us an opportunity to see how God cares about the whole person, the mind, the body, and the soul.”
— Rasool Berry
That phrase, the whole person, is the theological key. The version of Christianity that enslaved people resisted was a gospel of souls only, stripped of the Exodus, stripped of liberation, stripped of the God who comes down. The version they held onto was the real one, the one that cared about bodies and conditions and communities, not just inner states.
Marking Juneteenth is one way the church can rehearse that fuller gospel. It names a God who cared whether freedom actually reached the last person waiting on the news. It honors the people who celebrated in a church when the news finally arrived. And it asks the church today whether its gospel is as wide as the one they preached.
Don Carey, in a Jude 3 Project conversation on whether Christianity was forced on Africans during slavery, captures the larger claim in a phrase worth holding onto: “The God of the Bible has been intentionally and purposefully involved in the lives of African descended people, and we can find our hope, our identity, our purpose in that God.” Juneteenth is one piece of evidence for that claim. The wave of freedom that reached Galveston on June 19, 1865, was not a secular event that the church happened to celebrate. It was an answer to prayers prayed across decades of captivity.
What Does It Mean to Mark the Day Well?
Marking Juneteenth well is not about performing awareness or checking a box. Berry frames it as an invitation into a story that is already yours if you follow the God of the Exodus.
That might mean learning the actual history: the gap between the Proclamation and its enforcement, the first worship service at Reedy Chapel and the Rev. Jack Yates, who helped purchase Emancipation Park in Houston so freed people would have a place to gather and remember. It might mean sitting with the vision of Jubilee in Leviticus 25, which Berry says the freed people were reading themselves into, and asking what your church’s version of that vision looks like now. It might mean bringing honesty about what has not been finished into a day that marks what was finally begun.
The struggle did not end in 1865, and Berry is clear about that. That is exactly why remembering 1865 well matters. A people that knows it has survived hard places before has something to draw on when hard places come again.
Quick Answers
What is Juneteenth? It marks June 19, 1865, when Union troops reached Galveston, Texas, and enforced freedom for the last enslaved people in the Confederacy, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
Why should Christians care about it? Faith was woven through the story from the start. One of Juneteenth’s first names was Jubilee Day, and the first celebration was a worship service. Marking it practices a gospel that cares about the whole person.
Wasn’t everyone freed by the Emancipation Proclamation? No. It applied to the Confederate states and required enforcement. Freedom reached the far edges of the Confederacy, including Texas, much later.
Isn’t Juneteenth political? Berry roots it in worship and Scripture. He calls marking it a form of discipleship, a way of being formed by what you set aside time to remember.
What is the connection to the Slave Bible? Slaveholders removed the Exodus story from a Bible produced for enslaved people because they knew what the liberation passages meant. The enslaved held onto the full gospel anyway, and it outlasted the faith of their enslavers.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on the Jude 3 Project episode “Why Is Juneteenth Important?” featuring Rasool Berry. The full episode includes the history of figures like the Rev. Jack Yates and Opal Lee, and Berry’s own documentary work on the faith history of Juneteenth. Rasool Berry is a teaching pastor in Brooklyn and a content developer with a national Bible ministry.
