A few years ago, an African pastor spoke at a conference I attended in Toronto. With a thick Ghanaian accent in fluent English, he opened with his testimony, “Only God can call an African to pastor an English-speaking Chinese church in French-speaking Quebec in North America.” What a beautiful testimony he had, and what a creative God we serve.
The false accusation in politics and social settings is that somehow Christianity is a white man’s religion. The lie goes that Christianity was designed by white people and is hostile to black people, or that Christianity is an artifact of culture that belongs only to white people. It’s “their” culture; they shouldn’t impose it on everyone else. Let’s start with a quick guide to why this accusation is patently false!
1. Christianity is a philosophy anyone can investigate.
The Judeo-Christian Scriptures make truth claims about ultimate reality, like God, human nature, and the origin of all material things. Alongside these claims come axioms about moral accountability, relational ethics among family and foreigners, and spiritual phenomena. Such concerns are not the exclusive pursuit of white people but of all ethnicities and cultures around the world.
2. Biblical law and Christian ethics are universal.
When it came to legal matters of justice, right and wrong, for example, the Jewish law did not favor Jews over foreigners. God demanded that the Jews treat the foreigner with impartiality. In Numbers 15:15–17, it says, “The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the Lord: The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the foreigner residing among you.’” The Mosaic Law was designed to explicitly protect the underprivileged from being taken advantage of by the powerful. The ethics of Jesus heightened the law even further by demanding that his followers love people groups that had been traditionally considered defiled or adversarial, see Matthew 5:43-48.
3. Christianity was founded by a Middle Eastern Jew.
Jesus was an olive-skinned, Middle Eastern Jew who lived in Asia. In fact, the Western “whiter” Romans were seen by many as the enemies of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. Before his death, Jesus was already being followed by non-Jewish Gentile converts from many different backgrounds. And after his death, he commissioned his followers to “go, make disciples of all [ethnos].” The word ethnos, as you can hear, is where our word for “ethnicity” derives from. Jesus was commissioning his disciples to invite every ethnic people group to believe in him and follow his commands.
4. All Ethnicities in Heaven
The Apostle John saw a heavenly vision of all nations worshipping Jesus on his throne. Revelation 7:9-10 says, “I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb…And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God,
who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”
The historian Luke also records that at Pentecost, through the Holy Spirit, people from “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, Cretans and Arabs” all heard the gospel of God’s saving grace in their native language. How inclusive is that?
5. Christianity spread to India, China, Africa, and Europe in the first three centuries.
The Biblical book of Acts chronicles the spread of Christianity from a Jewish sect to becoming an international movement. Jesus’ disciple Philip famously shared the gospel with the Ethiopian eunuch. The Christian historian Eusebius writes that Peter’s biographer, Mark, first proclaimed Christianity in Egypt. There’s also a significant tradition that connects the Apostle Thomas to having traveled to India and later died as a missionary-martyr in that subcontinent. We know for certain that the Persian empire persecuted a significant minority population of Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries. There was clear evidence that, by the seventh century, the first monk had walked into the Chinese empire and shared the gospel. It turns out the children’s song I grew up singing, “red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight,” was true of history. Is it still true today?
6. The Epicenter of Christianity today is Brown and Black.
Today, Christianity is practiced by more people in the Global South than in the Global North, specifically, South America, Africa, and the South Pacific. The Asian and African continents are experiencing the fastest growth, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. In 2020, more Christians lived in Africa than in any other region of the world, and that continues to accelerate. While “white” Europe and North America are on the decline, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Non-denominational movements elsewhere around the world are growing.
7. Black America.
In the book Fortress Introduction to Black Church History, Anne Pinn chronicles the explosion of African American Christianity during the Second Great Awakening. She notes that the Africans found great reception in the Baptist faith, especially. Why? Once accepted, a man was the equal of everyone else in the church, despite the system of slavery oppressing the black community. “The Baptist message promised full humanity and democracy, despite the restrictions of the unchurched world.”[1] By 1936, the Black church included over 30,000 church buildings and 5 million people among all seven major denominations of Christianity. By 1970, the Black church had grown to include more than 10 million Christians in the United States alone. [2] Even to this day, the number of American Black people who self-identify as Christian is 66%.[3] Eight years ago, they had the highest percentage of any demographic group in the United States who self-identified as Christian, higher than Hispanic, Caucasian, or Asian groups. [4]
8. Where then does this accusation that Christianity is a “white” religion come from?
Black nationalism emerged in the 20th century during the thirties, forties, and fifties as one of the diverse responses to the oppression of the “white-Christian” majority. Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, strove for Black separation, self-reliance, and racial solidarity. He taught that Christianity was a tool in the hands of white slave masters to control the minds of Black people. Muhammed fused political, ethnic, and religious identity together in one ideology, identifying Islam as the alternative religion of the indigenous Africans. Malcome X, in his early years, was a prodigy of this movement. “For many African-Americans, adopting Islam served to set them apart from white society, Muslim or not.”[5] In many ways, we can blame the abuse by Christians for the origination of the white-religion lie.
9. Didn’t Christians use the Bible to justify the oppression of black people?
Many Christians and pastors, in order to satisfy their greed or pride, distorted the truth of the Scriptures and falsely applied them to justify their oppression of black people during the antebellum South. That was an enormous sin system that committed horrors in the name of Jesus. The evil of racism and segregation lives in the human heart to this day. And our nation is still attempting to dismantle the structures that have destroyed black lives, families, and communities. The answer isn’t to deny that racism still exists, nor is it to accuse everything the white man does as being racist or oppressive.
The abuse of Christianity gave rise to this cancer, but Christianity also carries the antidote to deliver us from it. “For (Jesus) himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility“ (Ephesians 2:14). In Christ, ethnic and cultural differences are not devalued but honored. And the law, ethics, and teachings of the Christian faith make everyone brothers and sisters of equal value to their common Creator and Redeemer.
In Summary
The sin of American slavery performed in the name of Jesus is partially to blame for creating the conditions that birthed the lie of the white man’s religion. Yet, when we investigate the Christian faith closely, we see these traits,
- One Creator and Father birthed all peoples and races.
- One Savior died for all people groups.
- One Spirit was poured out equally on men and women of all national and linguistic backgrounds.
- One global Church family of varied ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds celebrates together.
- Our common hope and future is living in harmony under God’s law of love.
What a beautiful promise of relational generosity we have in our common faith in Jesus.
Footnotes:
[1] Pinn, Fortress Introduction to Black Church History, 67.
[2] Ibid, 15.
[3] Pew Research Center: Faith Among Black Americans, February 16, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/02/16/religious-affiliation-and-congregations/
[4] Lifeway Research: Black Americans Are the Most Bible-Engaged Ethnic Group, May 16, 2018
https://research.lifeway.com/2018/05/16/black-americans-most-bible-engaged-ethnic-group/
[5] Smith, Islam in America, 102.
Bibliography:
--Pinn, Anne H., and Anthony B. Pinn. Fortress Introduction to Black Church History. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2002.
--Smith, Jane I. Islam in America. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
