A few years ago, I became more bullish on evangelism and joined a church outreach group. I ministered in the two predominately Black neighborhoods where I lived. I had hundreds of conversations and heard many objections to the faith. But the most common pushback came from people who found it challenging to reconcile their Blackness with Christianity.
It is not an exaggeration to say that today, the legacy of colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow stands as one of the biggest hindrances to furthering the gospel in the US. Calling Christianity “the white man’s religion” isn’t necessarily new. But it has grown more legs in recent years amid national polarization about race and politics, including in the American church. At the same time, young Black people have become more skeptical of Christianity and I’ve personally walked some friends through their own questions.
In response to the growing need, Black Christian leaders, including Eric Mason, Sarita Lyons, and Jerome Gay, have written books in recent years that offer a robust, contextual defense of the Christian faith. JP Foster, pastor of a predominately Black church in Inglewood, California, just added his name to that list with The Gospel and My Black Skin: Confronting the Past, Reclaiming the Future.
The book is Foster’s personal, historical, political, and theological reflection on the legitimate racial wounds that keep Black people from the Christian faith, the stories of faithful Black witnesses, and the question of whether we can embrace Christianity in an era of evangelical-backed Trumpian politics.
Foster empathetically takes his intended audience (ranging from unbelievers and deconstructionists to committed Christians) through each topic and offers a robust defense of the faith. He addresses how scripture was manipulated to further racism through the slave Bible, the religious justifications used to promote white supremacy, and by the resistance of Southern evangelicals to the Civil Rights Movement. He also calls for churches and Christians to pursue racial justice today.
The book is unsparing in its criticism of white evangelical politics, yet hopeful about pursuing biblical unity. It is a valuable tool for anyone interested in the field of urban apologetics, even though some of its arguments about justice are too abstract.
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Throughout the book, Foster is rightly critical of the fusion between Christianity and nationalism and of a version of our faith that “sounds less like the teachings of Jesus … and more like a civil religion draped in red, white, and blue.” He writes that many American Christians need to abandon this distorted approach and affirm the image of God in each person by rooting out injustice wherever it resides. But aside from giving a few clues, such as citing issues like mass incarceration and redlining, he doesn’t spell out how exactly people can do that.
The lack of details was my biggest pain point with the book (on top of some repetitive sentence constructions), particularly because the most serious conversations about race ask not whether there are problems we need to fix but what justice should look like on the ground.
How do we solve racial disparities and repair what’s broken in our society? Should it include reparations? How can the church, in practice, be the hands and feet of Christ to predominantly Black communities that have suffered? And what does it look like for the church to encourage Christians to do it locally?
For a book that leaned heavily into racial justice and was written, at least partly, for Christians thinking about these issues, I would have loved to read more details.
That said, Foster’s primary aim is apologetics, which he tackles well. A large section of the book traces the long history of Christianity in Africa, a necessary pushback to the widespread belief that Black people first heard about the faith on slave ships and plantations. From my experience, I know that many people simply do not know the true history, and sharing it might move the needle in some conversations and relationships.
Foster notes there are also problems in this area. Western Christians and scholars, for example, need to stop sidelining the Africanness of prominent early theologians such as Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine (whose cultural origins in Roman Africa, as Catherine Conybeare wrote in a recent book, are important to truly understanding his life and career). Foster writes,
These leaders were shaped by African soil, African questions, and African communities—but Rome’s language became the medium of their message.
And that’s where the erasure began. Over time, as European scholars curated the story of the church, they centered Rome and sidelined Africa. They imagined the early church as a European story told in Latin rather than a global movement that included vibrant African voices from the very beginning. Figures such as Aurelius and Augustine were painted in European tones—literally and figuratively—until their African heritage faded from the page. And the African origins of their theology were all but forgotten.
The book then comes back to America to trace how Christianity inspired abolitionists and civil rights leaders to fight against slavery and segregation, and argues the true faith is liberatory. Foster cites notable names and makes good arguments throughout. However, I’m not sure how much this point will move people who have chosen to leave not just the church at large but also the Black church, which has always been intrinsically tied to civil rights.
Many Black congregations are also facing growing generational gaps. Congregants choose to disaffiliate for many reasons, and reaching people who have left the faith or are deconstructing—including young Black people—requires attending to the rampant moral relativism (“my truth”) in the culture, as well as other issues.
The book comes alive when Foster tells his own poignant personal stories, from his brother joining the Nation of Islam after having doubts about Christianity to a tense police stop in his wife’s new car.
In ministry, he watched his mentor (a Black bishop) connect with a predominately white church in Orange County for unity and reconciliation worship events. Hundreds of members from the predominately Black church worshiped in Orange County one night.
But when it was time for the predominately white church to drive to Inglewood, no one came. “That day, the truth hit hard: For some, reconciliation was fine as long as it didn’t require sacrifice,” Foster wrote. Still, that shouldn’t make us give up on the process of reconciliation or on Christ, he added.
“The danger of only seeing the bad news is this: If I let the distortion define my faith, I might miss the real Jesus,” he wrote. “I might miss the grace that’s been chasing me my whole life. And I refuse to give anybody that kind of power over my faith.” For those struggling to reconcile their Black skin with the Christian faith, Foster’s work is a reminder that God doesn’t call us to choose one over the other. We can be both Black and faithful Christians.
Haleluya Hadero is Black church editor at Christianity Today.
The post The Lies—and Truths—That Keep Some Black People Out of Church appeared first on Christianity Today.
