Is Christianity a Western Religion?

The Whitewashing of Christianity by Jerome Gay

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Urban Apologetics: Restoring Black Dignity with the Gospel by Eric Mason

Urban Apologetics: Cults and Cultural Ideologies: Biblical and Theological Challenges Facing Christians by Eric Mason

How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity by Thomas Oden

From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story by Mark Noll

Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World by Katharine Gerbner

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Jeremiah Chandler, and I'm the guest host for today's episode through my internship here at the Hendricks Center. 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement and Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. We're pleased to have you here at The Table with what is an important topic. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yes. For a segment of the population, there's a growing sentiment that to be Black and Christian is an oxymoron, a belief that is firmly rooted in the idea that Christianity is a so-called white man's religion. This sentiment is fueled by the complicated history of Christianity's ties to colonialism, slavery, and oppression. In today's episode, we'll examine how Christianity developed this misleading perception and how to address this objection to Christianity. To help us do that, I'm joined today by two esteemed guests, Dr. Jamal Hopkins and Pastor Jerome Gay. 

Dr. Hopkins is the Associate Professor of Christian Scripture and Director of Black Church Studies at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary. He's also a pedagogy fellow with Yale University Center for Faith and Culture, and holds ordination credentials with both the Church of God and Christ, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dr. Hopkins earned his degree from Howard University, Fuller Theological Seminary, and PhD from the University of Manchester. 

Additionally, we were joined by Pastor Jerome Gay, who was raised in Southeast West Washington D.C and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1997 to attend St. Augustine's College where he earned a bachelor's degree in communications. He also holds a master's in Christian Studies and Ethics from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Pastor Jerome is also the Lead Pastor of Teaching and Vision at Vision Church. He's also the author of The Whitewashing of Christianity, which is what we'll be talking about today. Thank you guys for joining us. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Great to be here. Great to be here. 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah. Thank you for having us. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yes. To open up this conversation, there may be a lot of people wondering, "Christianity, a white men's religion? What does that even mean?" So I want to just start there to help people understand what is this objection, what do people mean by it. Pastor Jerome or Dr. Hopkins, you guys can start us off. What do people mean when they say Christianity is a white man's religion? 

Jerome Gay: 

Well, I can start. Essentially, when people are making that claim, they're responding to primarily imagery and culture. So when you think about the imagery that has been perpetuated in American culture as it relates to Christ and Christianity, people have been bombarded with white imagery, a white Jesus, 12 white disciples, white Moses. So this is what led me to write the book, The Whitewashing of Christianity, is that we are painting Jewish history white, which in turn, turns into a whitewashed Christianity. 

The other aspect of that is how the slave masters' eisegetic texts like Ephesians 6:5, "Slaves, obey your masters," how they viewed themselves as the new Jews when you read some of the literature by white supremacists. So, with all of this, they centered themselves as the people of God, and white as pure, and anything else as impure. So, over time, what you had people like the nation of Islam's, Moor scientists who saw this response of "Christians" who were in favor of racial supremacy, and so the moniker as it relates to Christianity, which was obviously false and misrepresented, over time, people begin to associate Christianity with white supremacy. Therefore, it's a white man's religion, and to be Black and Christian is to be a coon or to be in favor of the master's oppression of Black and Brown people. 

So that's how we got to this point through imagery, through culture, through other Black… what we call BRICs, Black Religious Identity Cults, castigating. Again, they are responding to things that actually happen, but we got to remember the people who claim to be representing Christ were misrepresentatives, and therefore, the response was to label Christianity a white man's religion. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Dr. Hopkins, did you have anything you want to add to that? That was really great pastor Jerome. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. No. I love the way that you laid that out. Yeah. Just backing into and just settling at the point of history, early America history, I'm thinking of some of the quotes and some of the writings of Frederick Douglass, and Frederick Douglass, he made and he identified this distinction. So as one who was a slave and who emerged out of slavery, he identified the Christianity of this land or the Christianity of the white man, particularly during this enslavement Antebellum period on into Jim Crow, and he identified the distinction between, I guess, I would call, the modalities of Christianity and the Christianity of America of this land, and the Jesus of enslaved or of Black folks and the Jesus of the enslaved Black folks. 

When the gospel was being preached and heard on the plantations, there was this irreconcilable notion that Jesus was one who was understood as one who was a liberator, but yet the ones that are preaching and those are holding slaves, the enslavers, are, essentially, holding human beings in bondage. So this distinction or these modalities of Christianity somewhat emerged, and so the idea that people of color, fast-forward to today, embracing Christianity, I think that modality of the Christianity of the slaveholders way back in slavery days is still in that mind or the mentality of those that would proclaim or label Christianity a white man's religion or even for that matter, Christianity, a western religion in its origins. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

What I'm hearing from both of you guys, it's in my prep for this, I realized that this idea that Christianity white man's religion is really multi-layered and multi-faceted. Dr. Jerome, you brought up the history, and you did too, Dr. Hopkins, the history of Christianity being tied to certain ideas or slavery, colonialism, but then you also talked about the imagery, and so I'm curious, Dr. Bock, you too, where should we start in terms of how do we address this question? Because obviously, there's a historical component to it, there's how the Bible was used, but where do you guys think we should start in this conversation in terms of how do we go about addressing this idea because it's very persistent, but also multi-layered in that sense? 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah. So, for me, one of the things I try to unpack in my book is I think we need to affirm their concerns, but then disagree with their conclusion. So the affirmation of the concern is that, again, how Christianity has been whitewashed. So when you whitewash all of the people in biblical history, and then you do the same thing with the Church Fathers, many of these people were African. Perpetua and Felicity were two African female martyrs. Augustine, a huge figure within Christianity and helped shape, helped shape how we see theology, was African. Athanasius at the Council of Nicaea, African. 

We can keep going, but they've been presented as white men, and so I want affirm like, "Hey, there has been, there was an intentional effort to whitewash scripture as well as Christian history." But that isn't Jesus' fault, and so we want to make it clear that we don't blame Christ for what "Christians," that's in quotes, what "Christians" do. 

So I do think you want to affirm like we can't deny white supremacy in history. We can't deny racial straddle, slavery, and we can't deny whitewashing, if we're honest. So that's what we want to affirm, but we want to disagree with the conclusion of saying that Black people should reject Christ as a result of people who misrepresent him. 

You can take a hammer. You can use it to build or you can use it to beat. That doesn't make all hammers wrong. So when people take scriptures intentionally out of context, that doesn't make the spirit who inspired the scriptures wrong, that makes the people who intentionally misuse them wrong. So we got to meet them with a common ground, but then try to help and challenge their thinking and their conclusions as it relates to the Christian faith. 

Darrell Bock: 

So the expression "whitewash," just to be absolutely clear, is taking some element of history and turning it in a direction in which the character or person is presented as white when they actually were not white. Is that correct, or so presenting only the white side or the white membership of the church as the representation of the entire church? 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah, that's a huge part of it. Essentially, what "historians," and I put that in quotes because I do address that in my book, they make Northern Africa Southern Europe in terms of the imagery. Even terms like that, we don't do that with Europe, Southern Europe. But Northern Africa and the more northern you get, the whiter it appears in terms of how we do imagery. But it also goes into philosophy, and theology, and apologetics that whitewashing is anything of nobility can't be Black or African, that, and then there were a lot of things like the teleological argument and the degenerative hypothesis that played into this false notion. 

Darrell Bock: 

So now you're appealing to the ways in which, I'll say it this way, race has been constructed and abused as a way of portraying what's going on, and the result is inherently a misrepresentation. 

Jerome Gay: 

Absolutely. 

Darrell Bock: 

One other thing, I want to go back to Frederick Douglass because I think he's an important figure and a key figure, and I think, at least in the white community, many people don't understand and appreciate his significance. We're dealing with someone who was a key figure during the Civil War period. Very famous exchanges that are published and one can read about between him and Abraham Lincoln explaining, really, the perspective of Blacks in America at the time in a context in which their story was rarely told. They were almost invisible in terms of people's understanding. You want to elaborate on that because that gives a Christian take from a community whose voice tended not to be heard about what was going on at the time. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. So Frederick Douglass was one, and so in many of his narratives, particularly, on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he talks about his experience being on a plantation as a slave in Maryland. He talks about a number of his experiences, but he often talked about what it was like to be on the plantation of those enslavers or those who were his masters who professed Christianity where they were Bible-toting on Sunday and slave-whipping on Monday and throughout the week, and just a grotesque market differences that these individuals had. 

So he documents this, he writes about this, and so he's a pivotal figure, particularly with the Abolitionist Movement. We hear about Harriet Tubman, who he interacted with, John Brown, who he interacted with, and the distinction between Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman where they were radical abolitionists, where they were willing to and even actually led some revolts, slave revolts that led to the death of whites, white enslavers. 

Frederick Douglass was more… after learning to read. He talks about learning to read from one of his mistresses, from the slave mistress. I think her name was Ms. Auld, Auld, and he talks about he learned just enough to motivate him, but when a word spread or when word got back to Mr. Auld, that she was actually teaching him the letters of the alphabet and teaching him to read, he basically said that's the most dangerous thing you can do is to give an enslaved person the ability to read because they'll begin to have a sense of hope, begin to read and engage, thought, and begin to critically think. That was something that those who were enslaved or those who were enslavers did not want. 

Now, mind you, these were Christian persons in the land. So, in conversation with that, I like this quote Mark Noll talks about in his classic work, Civil War as Theological Crisis. He says as much as slavery was about oppressing Black bodies and economics, it was probably more so about who controlled the meaning of the Bible in pulpits across the land. 

So, here, you have these variant modalities of Christianity that, fast-forward today, is still in their minds or their imaginations of those that are suggesting Christianity being the white man religion. But yeah, I think this layered history deserves to be unpacked, and these key persons, Frederick Douglass, abolitionists at the time, William Lord Garrison, those who walked contemporaneous with Frederick Douglass, really tried to help, like what Pastor Jerome talked about, identifying how we read text in their own historical context first and foremost without divorcing them from their historical context to contextualize them because if you take one biblical passage, let's say Genesis 9, and you marry that with some of the household codes in Pauline writings, and you marry those together, then you create these new backgrounds or histories, if you will. I call it conflation, biblical conflation. Then, you have these all kinds of interesting things where Black people are read into the biblical text as being born and benign into slavery, if you will. 

So it's very layered, and I think, like you said, Darrell, that… I think it's probably maybe good to start where we are, and back in, and just peel the pieces maybe like an onion, just peel the layers out because I can even think of the politics that we are in today where you have one particular party proposed to be Christian, the other one is said not. But I think these layers really need to be peeled back in looking at the history, and it's messy. What I tell my students, biblical exegesis, and I think a subject and a topic like this, is somewhat like a toilet bowl exercise, we need our gloves to handle this with care. 

Darrell Bock: 

It's an interesting image. I would commend the reading of Frederick Douglass's little autobiography, really, to anyone who wants to understand the history of the slave experience during the Civil War period, et cetera, and also, his exchanges with Abraham Lincoln, back and forth, about what could be done about it. It is, in many ways, eye-opening in terms of what it represents. 

I tell people, people in the Black community, they know this history. They experienced it, if I can say it that way. They've passed it on, and people are aware of it. But oftentimes, in the white community, there isn't that exposure and that awareness of what that experience was like, and how it was viewed, and even how it was framed. So it's a very important conversation, and the rootedness of Christianity in the Black community while all this was going on is also something that people are not very aware of, which is an important part of this conversation. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

I think, also, a great partner along with Frederick Douglass to read, it would be Angela Grimke, a white woman who's living in this time, and she's talking about the horrors of slavery, but she's also talking about the misuse of the Bible as purporting pro-slavery advocacy, if you will. So, I mean, she's another important voice. Harriet Jacobs is a great voice as well as Sojourner Truth. We're just reading this history of these persons who lived. I'd say both white and Black. John Brown's story and how he came to become a radical abolitionist. We know the story of him in Harpers Ferry in Kansas City. 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

So those are very important figures historically to really get a sense and to capture what that period was like- 

Darrell Bock: 

It even extended into education. I'm on the board at Wheaton College, and Wheaton College was founded as an abolitionist institution. It was the first institution in Illinois to offer college education to African-Americans in the US during the time. It was founded in the midst of the Civil War, and here's a Christian institution opening its doors to anyone who seeks a Christian education at that level. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yes. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Dr. Bock, you pointed out… and you too, Jerome Gay, I want you to comment on this because you wrote a lot about this in your book. We mentioned it with the theological. You mentioned Genesis 9, the Curse of Ham. But for those listening who don't know how the Bible was misused and used in a way to make it seem like it wasn't in favor of Black people, could you guys give some examples for the listener on how was the Bible used specifically in this way, and also, a little bit, like Dr. Bock mentioned, in academia, how did academics and education play a role in this idea as well? 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah. When you mentioned Genesis 9, the "Curse of Ham," that text was eisegeted. When you actually read, it says, "Curse be Canaan." But they read into that text that the cursed ones were anybody non-white, and so they used that to justify the dehumanization, degradation, and destruction of Black and Brown bodies. 

Then, you go fast-forward to Ephesians 6:5, "Slaves obey your masters." So they imposed on the text because Paul wrote that in a Roman prison 60 AD. The transatlantic slave trade happened in 1619. So this actually helps us address both sides For those that want to purport that Christianity is in favor of oppression or it's a white man's religion. 

What they have to wrestle with, Black people who want to affirm that position, is that they're actually siding with white supremacy. They're siding with a white supremacist interpretation of the text. They're saying that Paul was saying that when that's actually what's called an anachronism, which is a timeline error because, again, he wrote this in 60 AD in a Roman prison way before race-based chattel slavery. 

So Paul has indentured servitude in mind, but white supremacists used that, and they eisegeted the text, and now you have Black people buying into a white supremacist view of the text. So there's a timeline issue, there's an application issue, and thirdly, there's a scriptural issue because verse 9, Paul talks to the master, and they never make it to that verse. They stopped at verse five, and they never make it down to Paul's directives to the master. So he's not having chattel-based slavery in mind. So when you couple Genesis 9, Ephesians 6, and the eisegesis and hermeneutical gymnastics that these white supremacists played, it just doesn't add up. 

Lastly, 1 John 4 says, "You cannot love God who you can't see if you don't love your brother who you can see." So anyone who's willfully hateful is not a Christian. They were not believers, and we have scriptural basis to be able to make that claim to be unrepentantly, willfully hateful to someone on the basis of the color of their skin goes against what's actually in the scripture. So we got to be able to engage people who are affirming, and asserting, and actually regurgitating a white supremacist take on the text while trying to oppose white supremacy at the same time. That's one of the ways we can apologetically engage Black people who are making some of these claims. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. What Pastor Jerome said is… I mean, that's really apropos on this Genesis 9, and I want to go back to that Mark Noll text, Civil War as a Theological Crisis. I think that's a wonderful text in that how he engages a cultural period in time and crisis as a theological crisis. But on the Genesis 9, he talks about a certain rabbi, Rabbi Raphall, who suggested that the treatment, the early rabbinic treatments of the Genesis 9 text where you would have the marrying of Genesis 9 with the Genesis 4 and Genesis 5, that the curse that was placed or the mark that was placed upon Cain, Cain who was… Cain was cursed, was a blackening in the skin. So this is within the rabbinic writings as an attempt to try to flesh out what rabbinic interpretations try to fill in the gaps. 

So they're proposing or suggesting that as Cain realizes that God has cursed him, he looks up in the sky, and there's a hailstorm and beats upon his face, or that when Cain tries to offer an offering, smoke blows back into his face and blackens his skin. So, somehow, that blackening of… which is associated with a curse of Cain is now married… we're talking about biblical conflation, is married with Genesis 9 and talking about the curse, the Noahic curse, and now somehow Ham is cursed because his son is cursed. 

So the blackening of Ham… Well, I mean we're talking about Africa, but establishing a curse of blackness in the Genesis 4, Genesis 5 now married with Genesis 9 and Ham. Those two texts are merged together. Now, we can go and begin to read the household codes and the slavery system within the first century, common era in Jesus' time, and attached blackness with slavery. So those will be the conflated kinds of texts taken outside, divested out their historical context, and married and merged together for the benefit of those that are purporting either slavery or white supremacy. 

So these are the kinds of dangerous, unfortunate traditions that now when persons say Christianity is the white man's religion, they're referring to those kinds of misrepresentations of the biblical text. So I think that's important, to understand how texts are married or divested within… from the historical context, married with others for the benefit of those who are purporting them. That's why I like the Mark Noll text because he talks about, "This was how the exegesis was used or eisegesis was used to purport slavery within the Antebellum period." I think those traditions unfortunately maybe continue to still be perpetuated, and the responses to that within certain traditions would be Christianity is the white man's religion. 

Darrell Bock: 

It's interesting. I did my theological education here in the 1970s where the Curse of Ham was sufficiently on the radar that the professor who taught the Book of Genesis to me in Bible Exposition, Dr. Campbell, who was our third president of the school, he was the academic dean at the time, went out of his way to walk through and explain how reading the Curse of Ham and the way you've just described to be utilized for the purposes as you've just described was an inappropriate reading of Scripture. 

I still remember sitting in that class when that was happening and he was giving that explanation and going, "Well, this is interesting." I was a relatively new believer, and so I had no idea that the Bible was even used this way. Just the whole conversation caught me, on the one hand, by surprise, but I also found myself appreciating the fact that he made the effort to take the time to say, "If you're reading the Bible this way, this is a really problematic way to view the text." He couldn't have made it any clearer in the class. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

I like the word you used, Dr. Hopkins, "tradition," because I think there is some undercurrents too, like you said, there's things… What you said too, Pastor Jerome. They're not making it up out of thin air. There's things that they can point to and that we want to affirm that there have been misuses of the Bible, biblical texts, such as the Curse of Ham, to, I guess, give some type of credibility to this false notion of Christianity being the white man's religion. So we kind of covered the historical aspect of it and a little bit about the theological, but Dr. Hopkins, I think you could speak to this. How is this idea or notion still being perpetuated today, especially in regards to media? 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. So I think when we… I think of the 1974, All in the Family sitcom where Archie Bunker is having this conversation around Christmas time with George Jefferson's brother. George Jefferson, we know George Jefferson from The Jeffersons, right? The 1970s sitcom. So he's having this conversation with George Jefferson's brother in his house, Archie Bunker's house, and they're talking about Santa Claus because Archie Bunk- I mean, George Jefferson's brother walks into Archie Bunker's house dressed as Santa Claus, and Archie Bunker says, "Who are you supposed to be?" He says, "I'm Santa Claus." He says, "You can't be Santa Claus. Santa Claus is white." Then, they have this conversation. 

During the course of that conversation in that All in the Family show, he happens to… not only is Santa Claus white, but Jesus is white. So I think you have the perpetuation of a lot of ideas, and of course, that was satire trying to make fun and trying to make a point of how ridiculous some of these ahistorical statements can be. But I think the perpetuation of media, not necessarily depicting history, but molding and reshaping a historical revisionism, if you will, and I guess that was even recently perpetuated even. I think it was in an episode or a segment when Megyn Kelly talked about Jesus as being a white man. 

So I think those depictions, but also, I think maybe subtle, but not so subtle depictions when you walk into most mainstream Christian churches and you see the stained-glass windows or you see the perpetuation of Jesus as a white man. I remember a film professor of mine talked about when she went to someplace in either Western or Central Africa, and there was a billboard by a Christian Missionary society of a white Jesus. 

She talked about how this gross representation is not… Although it's meant for the missionary societies as an evangelistic tactic, what it really is doing is it is de-evangelizing peoples of color because if Jesus is associated with the oppressor or the one who's oppressed or colonized, then there is a turning away from that image and that symbol or that Jesus who he represents. So there's this de-evangelizing campaigns or probably unbeknownst to these missionary societies, but that's actually what's taking place. 

So I think you have media, television, film perpetuating, and reshaping, and molding ideas as opposed to depicting historical realities, and that continues on even till today. Although it may be some subtle subtleties, but it's all pretty much spread across television, film, and literature, and in our churches, unfortunately, today. 

Jerome Gay: 

Can I add to that? 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yeah, go for it. 

Jerome Gay: 

I think we would be remiss if we did not mention seminaries. We have to mention seminaries. When I got my degree, literally, everyone that was representing Christian history, my books on Jesus had a white Jesus, books on God, even God was white reaching out to man on the cover of some of these books. All of the Church Fathers were presented as white. Moses in the books were presented as white. 

So when we talk about our mainstream, big, and these are reformed, reformed schools, and in a lot of the reformed… I don't want to say most. I haven't done statistical data, but from just my experience, the seminaries are perpetuating this with the books and the imagery. Then, when you say something, you're labeled with CRT or race baiting when it's… I'm not saying we should blackwash history either. 

The answer to whitewashing isn't blackwashing, but when you say race doesn't matter, but then essentially use race in your favor, that's a duplicitous statement and application, and so we have to also address that and begin to see… They say it doesn't matter, but I would love for a professor to just, just as a social experiment, put a brown image of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Let's make them Black, and let's see if the imagery doesn't matter. 

So I think we need to address these things as well and talk about the seminaries because the Black students that are at these seminaries, when they're going back to most of their neighborhoods, they're having to deal again with the white man's religion thing. It's being perpetuated even in the seminaries that are claiming Christianity to be a global faith, but functionally, through the imagery, are presenting it as a monolithic faith. 

Darrell Bock: 

So you're suggesting that one of the ways that we deal with this is to actually do a better job of being accurate about the history, showing the multifaceted nature of the church, that it is a diverse- 

Jerome Gay: 

Yes. 

Darrell Bock: 

… it is a reflection of a diverse community. Being clear that Jesus as a Jew is a Semite, okay? 

Jerome Gay: 

Yes. 

Darrell Bock: 

And comes out of a Middle Eastern background? 

Jerome Gay: 

Yes. 

Darrell Bock: 

And is, if I can use an image, more olive-colored skin than white, if I can just… If we're going to use color, we might as well, and in this way, correct the misperceptions that are present about Christianity in the hopes that Christianity would be accurately represented for what it is as opposed to caricatured for what it is not? 

Jerome Gay: 

Exactly, because what I think a lot of the white students may not know how the white imagery is impacting them, how it's also impacting how they see, what they think. When they think of history, they… a lot, and I've had conversations where they just confess it like, "Yeah, I just assumed all of these African people were white because that's how they were presented." 

Again, I'm not labeling races or I'm not casting, not stroking, not using a broad stroke. What I am saying is that imagery impacts. It does subconsciously impact us. So when you just have that, and I've been able to have conversations with people, and not just for people that are going to watch who've been able to read my book, just being able to see different imagery of these African people impacts them because there was an assumption because there, a lot of the white students' entire experience has been a whitewashed version of Christianity. So it's subconsciously embraced and then perpetuated. We need to see that. 

Darrell Bock: 

We did an event. This is years ago now. One of the first events I did when I came into my role at a major church in Houston. We were in the chapel area, not in the main sanctuary. As we walked in, there was a painting of heaven, and the people all dressed in white sheets, all with white faces. Me and my assistant looked at it and went, "Basically, what's wrong with this picture?" 

It was a reflection of the fact that even a church would be so unaware of what was going on that they would post such a painting in the entrance to a chapel when the whole point of Christianity is to bring together the variety of peoples that God has made, and to make them one in Christ, and to have them be connected to one another, and appreciate one another, and share the shared benefits they all have because we need the forgiveness that God offers to each of us. All of that's, I think, pretty important in thinking about the kind of faith that should be nurtured in the church and the kind of appreciation we should have for one another as Jesus has brought us to himself. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

That's great. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

So I think of media representations, not depictions, but molding. I think of film criticism, religion film criticism, this idea of suturing. So there's Christopher Deese. He does religion and film criticism, but he talks about this idea of suturing, this psychoanalytical interpretation and how when one watches an image on screen, one, essentially psychoanalytical, this is a theory, sutures themselves onto that character because they can identify with them now, they can wish they were them, they can identify with maybe a member of their family or history, or some nostalgia. 

But film criticism and particularly when we're talking about images or religious images, there's this sophisticated and this subtle notion that when you have white depictions or white moldings of Jesus, that this goes back into a subtle historical period in America where you had this anti-Semitism by white Americans in a sense. They were bombing Jewish churches or synagogues and things like that, and so there's this anti-Semitic kind of nuance when there's these white depictions because a white depiction is saying that we need to re-color or re-envision a Jesus that cannot look like what a Middle Eastern or what someone of that particular era. So there's this white molding or historical re-visioning as an attempt to a white supremist, anti-Semitic depiction. 

I want to go back to a text, a historical text by Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, where he talks about Black people that lived in this antiquity period, Greco-Roman period, early Judaism period. Blackness and race didn't exist. People of color existed. Different ethnos, ethnic groups existed, and Blackness or varied colors was not an issue. Blackness may have been viewed as exotic or whatnot, but there definitely wasn't this idea of racism or race, which is more of a modern notion. 

So that… understood, and I think if we dig back into history and what I think is really important digging into history because you can really begin to learn how connected or how divorced we are from historical representation or historical depictions, that's important. But Blackness was never considered anything racialized or any kind of racial categories, which is more of a modern notion. So I think that's an important text and studies like that where it looks at ethnic groups and ethnic representations. People of color, dark-skinned people were part of the biblical story from Genesis all the way into Revelation. 

So when Jesus goes into Northern Africa, there's a Jewish community in Southern Africa and even Northern Africa as far down as the 6th century before Christ, and these are Jewish communities. If there's a Jewish community, there's a temple. We see that there's archeological evidence of a temple in Leontopolis, Egypt, which means that when Jesus goes back, likely there's a Jewish community, people of color, dark-skinned people of color, which even has this play on words, this idea when you go back to Genesis, and you look at "Adam," and you vowel point this certain ways, right? Aleph Dalet Lamed. "Adom." You have red, reddish, a rustic color that is the source that's used to create humanity, which is a brownish, reddish color. 

Even if you talk to an artist, you talk about what's the most universal color that you can get all colors from, it's this reddish, rustic, brownish, dirt type color that seems to be a play on thought and idea theologically and words that you have the first human beings coming from the dust of the ground, the "Adom," the "Adam" from the "Adom." Here, you have that hue, that color to them from which all people come. So when Jesus goes back to Northern Africa, here's a man of color that resonates, and blends in, and doesn't stick out because that's part of the nomenclature of the time historically. 

So I think if we dig into history, look at some of these key texts, I think we really begin to see, and I love the way Cain Hope Felder talks about the politics of differences, multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is not about, I love the way you say it, Pastor Jerome, not blackwashing, and it's not necessarily a response to whitewashing, but it's looking at the beauty of diversity within the biblical text, and the biblical worlds, and the biblical times. That's a way, I think, an early way that he described understanding Afro-centricity and the politics of difference. 

Darrell Bock: 

So the issue that you raised about the difference between ethnicity and race, the difference between the presence of color and race is an important conversation, and it strikes me. Just to be clear to people, when people say that race is socially constructed, what they're saying is that we attribute race to a group that has a certain color, and then to that, we add certain attributes which we have imported into the understanding of who that person is that may or may not actually be a reflection of who they are at all. 

When we do that in a group way, we distort or at least risk distorting who people are both as individuals and as groups, and that that's what happened with race in the period, really, from, I guess, the late 17th and 18th centuries on as race was becoming a more important category and being… We've used the phrase "racialized." I think all these terms need definition, "racialized," which means we were importing into the understanding of given races' certain attributes. In many cases it might be… I'm going to use this terminology because it's how it works, is superior attributes to one group and less than superior attributes to another group, and in that way, create the difference between them and say, "This has been created into the way things are." 

Well, everything about that is a distortion and is a reflection of then forming a pre-understanding. I don't know what other term to use. It's a big word, but a pre-understanding about how we approach a space where people are located, and it perpetuated the establishment and the division that were represented in what was taking place. Then, on top of that was where we started, which is you give theological import to some of those differences, and you bake it in, if I can say it that way. 

So that's how we got to where we are, and reversing that, it becomes the challenge because you've got to unwind what's been put in people's minds about the way things work, and we still work with those stereotypes today. I mean, some of those stereotypes are still perpetuated by some. It's the generalization in some ways that's the biggest danger. 

Sorry to go along, but this is important. It's the generalization that's the danger. I cease to individualize the person, I cease to respect them in their individuality and the way they've been made in the image of God, and I import to them things that may or may not have anything to do with who they are. If they don't have anything to do with who they are, the distortion is also a slander. So it's, really, a problematic way of seeing the world. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah, this distortion of the Imago Dei, but I love the way Pastor Jerome's text really talks about it. How I read this text, I read… There's this psychology or this psychology that's actually dealt with. I don't know if he wants to touch on that. 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah, what was called the degenerative hypothesis where it essentially just said that the creator intentionally gave certain strengths based on race, and to white, he gave intelligence and managerial skills. The closer you went down the line when you got to Black, then we were just good for manual labor, and that was it. So these, again, were just nothing biblical about this, but "Christians" bought into the pseudoscience and the pseudopsychology of these hypotheses and applied it. 

So that's the issue, and so now, the way that plays out now is there's another N-word that Christians are afraid of, and that N-word is "nuance." We're not applying nuance to the different situations, people, experiences. So that's why they can say, "Well, Whitfield was a product of his culture, but James Cone is a straight-up heretic." So they give Whitfield a pass for his slave-owning, but then they ignore the context in which… Again, I don't affirm all of Cone's theology. I get that. But then, they ignore the context in which James Cone is talking about the duplicity of white Christians during his day. So, again, the nuance is removed, and so just a general pass is given to one, and then a rebuke is given to the other. We got to learn nuance without compromise when we're talking about conversations like this. 

Darrell Bock: 

So you walk into a situation where someone has reacted to the distortions of the past. There's a combination of pain, and anger, and frustration that comes with it that needs to be appreciated for why it's there. If you're aware of that in the conversation, you have a better conversation than if you just react defensively, "Oh, I'm being attacked." So creating the right environment for, really, mutual understanding in a conversation like this, which is difficult and challenging, is an important part of how to respond to what's going on around us and in some cases, the distortions that exist in those conversations. 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yeah. Dr. Bock, I want to give this to Dr. Bock, and then I want Pastor Jerome and Dr. Hopkins to jump in on this. But one of the things we're talking about is a lot of it's the historical and the ongoing, but one of the things that I've noticed in my conversations that adds fuel to… It's not like the sole cause, but that adds fuel to the fire is this conversation around social activism or how we take part in the culture and engage, especially around this idea of justice. So how does justice play a role in this understanding of… or adds fuel to the fire of this notion that Christianity is a white man's religion or is not in favor? 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, what I like to say to people is, is that just think through the Bible for a second, and I like to stress the Bible can talk about this theologically without talking about it through the lens of political ideology. The way I try and set that up is to ask this question, which I don't think is a hard question, "Did Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Jesus predate Karl Marx?" Okay? People would go, "Yeah." "Does the Bible talk about justice and oppression?" They answer, "Yeah." "Okay. So let's talk," 

By setting it up that way, what you're showing is that God has a concern for how people live in his world because we're supposed to be stewards of the entire creation. If we do that, then this idea that the conversations that we have about public space and social space isn't a secularized discussion, which is what we end up doing with it when we separate it out too much, it actually is a part of the sanctification process of what it means to love your neighbor and what it means to engage with people with the care about the life experience that we give them in the structures that exist in our world. 

All of that is appropriate conversation for a Christian, and it can be done theologically and not necessarily through political ideology in a way that allows charges to come, "Well, you're not really thinking biblically. You're thinking politically or something like that." That's not to say that there aren't some things that are said in that space coming from the political space that we don't need to reflect on, but it is to say that there's a way for Christians to have this discussion almost uniquely because they're Christians and because they have a certain regard for everybody that should drive a desire to have the best conversations possible about how we engage with each other. 

Jerome Gay: 

Yeah, I agree. I would just add, if we… in addition to what you said about Isaiah, Amos, Micah, obviously, Christ predating them. We have biblical examples of how to do both without submitting to political idolatry, and I'll go to Acts 16. So, Act 16. What happens, right? Paul is beat by the magistrates. Well, that Greek word for magistrate can be translated as police, to use modern vernacular, and he was beat. 

So if we put that together, again, modern vernacular, Paul was a victim of police brutality, and his response wasn't just to ignore it because he was suffering for the gospel, but he actually demanded a public acknowledgement because they tried to privately let him go once they found out he had dual citizenship. 

So the idea of speaking against police brutality doesn't somehow make you full-blown Black Lives Matter, the organization, and then everything that comes with that. But again, that goes there N-word again, "nuance." When we don't allow nuance, we're able to just dismiss people. Again, in process, you're actually ignoring Scripture because Paul spoke up about the injustice he encountered, and so it is okay for us. If we can talk about lives in the womb, we should also talk about lives outside the womb. 

Darrell Bock: 

So let me add to your direction here because I think it's important. When John the Baptist is asked what he means by repentance in Luke chapter 3 and soldiers ask, ""Okay. So what should we do?" I love this text because when you think about repentance, you think, "Well, I'm talking about my relationship with God." But in all three cases, and this is in Luke 3:10-14, in all three cases, the response has to do with how I treat other people, and soldiers ask, "What should we do?" Basically, the answer is, "Don't abuse your power. Don't abuse the authority that you have and be content with your wage." 

So that's looking at it from the other side. The Acts 16 passage looks at it from the standpoint of Paul who was abused, but Luke 3 looks at it from the standpoint of the one who holds the governmental and structural authority and says, "Don't abuse the stewardship that you've been given to try and manage justice in the world." So it works both ways and is being reinforced, and it shows, again, this theological commitment that says that every space matters to God. That's part of a Christian worldview is to know that every space matters to God. When we say some spaces don't matter to God or even some spaces don't matter to God as much, we risk creating secular space out of sacred relationships that we have with one another because we're made in the image of God. 

Jerome Gay: 

That's what happens. 

Yeah, and then you end up viewing scripture through the lens of politics as opposed to- 

Darrell Bock: 

Right. 

Jerome Gay: 

That's why we have the false notion that, "Hey, if you're conservative, you're Christian." There shouldn't be a conflation with any political party. Christ is who makes us Christian, the gospel, and putting faith in him, not any political affiliation. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Yeah. I like the political theology of Jesus. It set in context in Matthew chapter 2 where you have Jesus going to Northern Africa because the authority, the power that be Herod is seeking to destroy this young Jewish-born male, and so they had this contextual correlation, young males of color who are being sought out by the authorities. So I call this it's this kind of… It's filled with some anachronisms, but this racial profiling in the days of King Herod which sets the backdrop for Jesus now. When he comes back after the death of King Herod, he engages in this, I'd say, this social, theological justice movement. So I like the term, the Greek term justice, "Dikaiosune," is also righteous, righteousness. 

So the justice of God is the righteousness of God, the righteousness of God is the justice of God. So set against the backdrop of this profiling in Matthew chapter 2, Jesus now goes on this political, theological campaign of justice, righteousness for the redemption of humanity, and not just for those who are being oppressed, but even for the oppressor. "Father, forgive them for they know not of what they do." I think that's the mantra, that's the gospel, and that's the ministry that we all have, the ministry of justice, which is righteousness, the justice of God, the righteousness of God. 

Darrell Bock: 

Underneath the justice of God is the whole idea that in the creation, we've all been created in the image of God. We're all responsible to be stewards for how we manage our relationships, and we're all subject to the standards that God asks of us as people who are made in his image, who were called. I like to say we're made in the image of God to image God and his character. So if we image God in his character right, and God is justice, and he's righteous, and he's sensitive to injustice, et cetera, then that certainly should be a part of how we see the world. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Amen. 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

The Imago Dei. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly right. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Yeah, that's right. Part of us doing that is having these kinds of conversations talking about is Christianity the white man's religion, understanding… Like you guys have all pointed out, this is historical, this is theological. It's still a present issue based on the traditions and things that a lot of this stuff was baked into our systems and society. I just want to thank you guys for joining us today for this conversation. If you all could… We talked a lot about the history, but what are some resources that you would recommend for people who want to know more about this, and how they can they be prepared to answer this objection of Christianity being a white man's religion, knowing this topic is so expansive and still ongoing? 

Jamal-Dominique Hopkins: 

Well, I think a great resource to start with is Pastor Jerome Gay's Whitewashing of Christianity, which I'm just going to get too. I would say definitely digging into some of the historical writings, Frederick Douglass, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. He tells his own story. So Frederick Douglass, his words. Mark Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis. It's great text, and I love the way it sets these social cultural kinds of realities in crisis within a theological framework and how we can look at this out of a biblical theological worldview. 

So those are just a few sources. I talk about the Genesis 9 in an article, The Noahic Curse: Ethnocentric Exegesis or Racialized Hermeneutic. So that's an article out there and also a recent article that I published in Cascade Press looking at this, Matthew chapter 2, and looking at this social death of Black lives. This is centered around the death and the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Black police officers talking about authority figures misusing and abusing authority, and for Black lives, and how life matters, all life matters. So those are just some resources I have. Yeah, but definitely, Jerome Gay's Whitewashing of Christianity. 

Jerome Gay: 

Well, yeah, shameless plug. So, yeah. Obviously, I have to recommend my own book. Otherwise, what did I write it for? So, yeah, The Whitewashing of Christianity, jeromegayjr.com or Amazon. But then, I would say Urban Apologetics by Dr. Eric Mason. One and Two addresses it. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind by Thomas Oden, Christian Slavery by Katherine… I think her last name is Goebel. I apologize, sister, if I got that wrong. 

I think those are just a few additional resources. From Every Nation and Tribe would be a good book as well, but these are books that are engaging that conversation. An old book, not in print, by Tom Skinner, I quote him several times in my book, How Black is the Gospel? Don't let the title throw you off. I mean, he's a gospel-centered guy, but again, he was dealing with this in 1970, and we're still dealing with this today. So he was addressing some of the objections and then responses. So these are a few more books that I would add to your arsenal to be able to engage, and these are for all people. Let's not frame this as only Blacks need to apologetically defend the mischaracterization of Christianity. This should be something that we all take personally as children of God. 

Darrell Bock: 

So we're going to retitle this podcast instead of "Is Christianity a White Man's Religion?" We're going to make a statement in "Christianity is Every Person's Religion." It's available to anyone and everyone who embraces the God who made them in his image, and we're made to be responsive to the Creator, God, who made us in his image. 

Jerome Gay: 

Dr. Bock, that's one of them long titles, like one of them long church name titles. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Exactly right. Well, in the 18th and 19th century, you could not put a church title on the spine of a book. It was too long. 

Jerome Gay: 

It was so long. Yeah. 

Jeremiah Chandler: 

Well, thank you, Dr. Hopkins, and thank you, Pastor Jerome. Thank you, our listener, for being with us today. If you like our show, leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app so that others can discover us, and we hope that you join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture.