Has Christianity Been Whitewashed? | Jerome Gay

i'm i am not saying that the answer to whitewashing is blackwashing um so that that's not what this book is however i do think it's important that we color correct because fences we don't have these brown images of john calvin these brown images of martin luther uh but when we talk about tetulian who was african he's presented as a white man for petra and felicity two african female martyrs they're presented as so people are looking at all of this white imagery in our movies and our textbooks in our seminary books like everything is painted white and then rather than saying hey you know we should ignore this we're like well no why shouldn't we confront this revisionist history [Music] well thank you for watching another episode of the ju-3 project podcast as always i'm your host lisa fields the founder of the g3 project and today i'm joined with someone who's no stranger to the g3 project he's been on here several times back when we were uh just uh with the with the i uh i not my iphone what is the laptop camera and it was distorted on my end so good to have uh pastor jerome gay with us welcome thank you so much lisa i'm grateful to be on and and again i am encouraged by the upgrade and how god has just continued to expand your ministry so uh congratulations and kudos to you thank you thank you so much to you and vision church who've also been supporters of jude 3 both in prayer and financially so i appreciate appreciate y'all for for those who don't know who who you are just tell our audience a little bit about about yourself absolutely first and foremost i am a son of yeshua that's my most important title because this one i did not earn i am a husband to crystal gay uh soon to be 20 years of marriage i am a father to jamari and jordan my daughter my son and i'm the pastor of vision church and i am the founder and president of the urban perspective and uh by god's grace and author of two books uh renewal grace and redemption and the story and the story of ruth and then my second book uh the white washington of christianity a hidden past a hurtful present and a hopeful future so this is a little bit about me originally from southeast washington dc uh but i pastor in raleigh north carolina and it's a great honor to serve awesome thank you for having me have thank you for joining us uh i have the book here as well yeah yeah yeah people to to get this um we're going to talk about uh your book today the whitewashing of christianity which i think is a great title captivating title uh what is whitewashing yes um and thank you for asking that i am very intentional about defining terms uh if when someone reads the book so white washing refers to the affinity of white christian scholars to paint the bible uh christian literature art in history with white people at the expense of authentic diversity and authentic ethnicity to cater to white audiences that share their presuppositions and concerns and so what i want to do in the book is unpack the process of of whitewashing what it is which i just said and then how it has impacted christianity in the west and so that's why i put the subtitle i know some people are going to hear white washing and let me be clear whitewashing confronting whitewashing isn't white bashing uh it's not that type of book so that's why i had the subtitle which is a hidden past i want to unpack africans contribution to the christian faith which are ignored and said accentuated a hurtful present how some people have internalized white washing and went to the in the direction of self-hatred also some responses like liberation theology i explained that but then there's this hopeful future that despite centuries of whitewashing we still have hope uh in yeshua and our and our lord and savior uh christ who paid the price for our sins and so that i i walk people through that journey of what white watching is the process of it and then the effects it has on the christian faith now when you talk about whitewashing in your book you have some some different categories of whitewashing um historical whitewashing um class whitewashing why why was it important for you to make those those distinctions there for because i want i want people you know right now you know lisa there are tons of talks about crt critical race theory and and oftentimes just by mentioning race or if you say the term whiteness or white supremacy or if you say something like that people automatically throw you into this category without actually hearing your claims or even understanding your position and so what i want to do is say hey here's an historical perspective so there's historic whitewashing where essentially you paint uh middle eastern and african people white and then present them as historical figures but then there's this class whitewashing where and i walk people through just the history of how we went from class to race where we kind of went from economic oppression to a racialized oppression and so i want people to be able to chronicle how we got to this point so that they know you know where i'm coming from so i thought it was important to include those distinctions that's helpful um i meant to actually this is the first question but i think it's it's uh it's still relevant what what motivated you to to write this book what what was like man i need to write this what what were those kind of events that that took place that motivated you to do this yeah certainly um you know i uh so we got like a video promoting the book and one of the things i say is you know i've had countless conversations of people who think christianity is a religion that promotes shadow slavery it's a religion of oppression and that it's a white man's religion and so while as a as a christian which again is a title i did not earn um i'm saved by grace and through faith not by my own works i know that's not true but there are tons of people who believe that that's true and we have to ask why why do they think why do they associate christianity with oppression well because of the mishandling of ephesians 6 the isages of white supremacists historically but even how even how evangelicals handle it now they don't handle the idea that there are different forms of slavery why do people think it's a white man's religion well because of whitewashing we present jesus the disciples uh african christian fathers philosophers and female christian martyrs we present them as white and so people see christianity as this monolithic faith again those of us on the inside know that's not true but why they're not just pulling us out of the air and so what i wanted to do is two things a number one i wanted to evangelize this as an evangelistic work while i'm praying that god will draw people to himself through this through this piece of literature but in the other side is i wanted to give legitimacy to their concerns because whitewashing is something that we have to admit we have to admit that this is a historical occurrence it's a current occurrence that must be addressed so i wanted to give legitimacy to their concerns but i wanted to confront their conclusion because the conclusion for the people that believe that it's a religion of oppression that it promotes shadow slavery that it's a white man's religion their conclusion is to reject christ and that that's an eternal decision obviously as a believer that they're making based off erroneous information that has been presented as fact for centuries so i wanted to say hey i understand your concerns but let's not blame christ for the actions of people who claim to be christians there's a huge difference and i wanted to just minister to that group and then educate those that on the inside that that are unaware of why this topic must be broached think that's that's so helpful and needed uh for our day um in your book you you uh talk about reform theology versus reform culture uh why was that important for you to include and kind of what was the the thesis of that chapter yeah so you know i i when i when i go there in chapter five uh i want to say hey i agree with most of the tenets of reformed theology um but i wanted to respond to something dr john frame wrote in his his humongous ethics books that's over a thousand pages that i read while i was a seminarian and let me just say this i don't believe that dr fraim is is a racist okay i don't believe that i think some of his comments were uh probably and they were insensitive and he maybe he wasn't aware of that but in his book he says he gives reasons for why african americans aren't engaged in to engage in reformed theology and the first reason he says is because the intellectual nature of the reformed tradition and so i'm like like i mean that comes across as if you're saying that we're unintellectual or that we're unintelligent and i'm like no the issue isn't the philosophical nature the theological of richness that's not the issue the issue is the culture where when we study the reformed uh reformed heroes we look at dabney who who made some heinous racist remarks uh when we look at some of these people and we look at even now how reformed theology is presented as if it's the gospel and one of my quotes is listen reform theology is great but the gospel doesn't need reform we do and so if we need reform we need to be careful of presenting our culture as a way of doing everything when it comes to hermeneutics and homiletics and and even singing and styles of preaching as if uh european reform those that embrace that have presented as if this is the only way to do things and so i wanted to confront that to say hey there's another way to look at this rather than assuming that ethnic minorities are unintelligent or have a have issue with the theology itself perhaps you need to look in the mirror and look at the culture and how things are presented to other people and that's what i wanted to address in that chapter yeah and that's helpful and i think necessary because there is this presupposition that that black people aren't intellectually savvy or astute and it's just like hey you realize there are a lot of things we invented that were stolen from us uh absolutely absolutely that were recreated that we we created first so it's not that we um are not intellectually savvy it's often that our our people don't get the shine that majority culture culture does and so i'm glad you you gave you shared that point um in addition um in your book you you talk about hidden figures and um that goes into obviously early african christianity but also i think it's cool that you have merch that highlights the uh and color corrects the whitewashing of early african christians um how has that the whitewashing of the hidden figures affected the faith and how have you seen uh making kind of the the the uh the characters in in the way they were in in in darker skin um how has that helped people see see it differently yeah and so so one of the things i do say in the book and and i want people to hear me say this as the author is um i'm i am not saying that the answer to whitewashing is blackwashing so that that's not what this book is however i do think it's important that we color correct because fences we don't have these brown images of john calvin these brown images of martin luther but when we talk about tetulian who was african he's presented as a white man perpetua and felicity two african female martyrs they're presented as white women athanasius an african man who stood for orthodoxy at the council of nazia he's presented as a a white man origin uh african philosopher he's presented as a white man shinudo of a tree we don't often don't even know who this man is lactantius cyprian these are all african african people and you know typically when we look at the just the markers of geography we tend to associate them with black and brown people but what historians have done is they've made northern africa southern europe and they've presented people in this way and so the effects of this is people look at it and say well well wow it looks like functionally that only white people contributed to philosophy and theology whereas no tetunian gave us the concept of the trinity and this is an african man you know you know we have the nicene creed where we say he's begotten and not made because of because athanasius and african men stood up stood up to aries and his uh his his heresy um the the aryan heresy and so so it's so important that we understand this and so people are looking at all of this white imagery in our movies and our textbooks in our seminary books in uh children's curriculum in children's church curriculum like everything is painted white and then rather than saying hey you know we should ignore this we're like well no why why shouldn't we confront this revisionist history why shouldn't we confront that you're presenting christianity in a monolithic way culturally this needs to be confronted because people are on the outside we should care about lostness we should care we don't cater to non-believers but we engage them we deconstruct the things that are eclipsing the gospel in their minds and in their hearts so that we can present the unadulterated gospel to them and so whitewashing gets in the way of that and so we wanted to do that so i had original artwork done uh by a wonderful sister named melissa campbell who who created original artwork uh for me in the book and uh we also you mentioned the merch and so my wife has a clothing company i am apparel where we just we're celebrating just the african heritage heritage within christianity that doesn't mean we demean what our european brothers who stood for orthodoxy have done we're just saying that there isn't much attention given to the african contribution and they've been presented as white men and women and we need to color correct that because we should care about truth we should care about accurate history and we should celebrate the rich diversity that christ has used all people because we based on acts we all share one common ancestry but we are presented in different hues and that should be reflected accurately yeah that's definitely helpful and definitely need it um we we think about some of the responses to whitewashing one of those is the liberation what have you seen that have been helpful from that and what have you seen that have been challenging from from that yeah so yeah i uh so i have you know three responses so one is uh liberation so i walk through the history of liberation theology and so you know i start with some people before we get to cone we need to kind of look at nat turner we need to look at albert cleach we we need to look at howard thurman we need to look at dr king we need to look at medica efforts we need to need to look at this train of thought of liberation as a response not simply to whitewash them but also to white supremacy and so when we get to cone i want people to understand that the context in which he wrote what he did doesn't mean i embrace all of it there's a section where i say correct and cone i think what we can appreciate about liberation theology is that they it was a response wanting to affirm the imago day in people of color that we're made in god's image we're worthy of dignity and respect and while cohen didn't say it this way uh an essence of most of his writing is that value and dignity starts at creation not salvation and so he wanted to restore that dignity because he's in a context where during his time again not painting all white people this way but during his time white people would have a lynching after a church service after a church service they would celebrate the killing of a black person and there would be children you know applauding this and so this is the context that he's in and he's writing a lot of stuff so he writes black theology and black power but because of the lynchings that he witnessed and he would hear about he would see the tears of people he wrote the cross and the lynching tree and he sold this merger of how you know they wanted to associate christianity with whiteness i also addressed the history of that and how just the the missionary groups were intentional about only using white imagery because they they even say they wanted to associate christianity with whiteness and white with purity and so he's in that context uh the the only the pushback i give you know dr cohn who again i appreciate certain aspects of his contribution is that every a lot of it is relying on blackness within itself and so there's a section that i have called uh correcting cone and saying that you know we got to be careful biblically speaking philippians 3 20. our citizenship is in heaven so we live from that kingdom perspective so while again there's a lot i affirm but there there are some aspects of orthodoxy that i have to push back on because we can't make a feature of who we are the foundation of who we are the foundation of our identity is our creator not our race or our ethnicity so i think that's that's why i say listen i appreciate him bringing bringing clarity confronting white supremacy bringing right in some rich theological positions but from the foundation it must be the gospel and that's that's what i wanted to come back to yeah i love that you say is don't confuse the feature and the foundation uh yeah that's a great way to alliterate that um for our audience who listening and run across people that are constantly saying christianity is white men's religion and they get frustrated in the conversation um what tools would you give them and what what ways have you found helpful just to have a conversation with someone um that helps kind of break through yeah so oftentimes um and hopefully this equips people apologetically apologetics being a defense of the faith is you know asking questions so so oftentimes they say you know if they say it's a white man's religion then they say if it wasn't for slavery we wouldn't have known jesus and so when they say that usually i'm asking some questions i say so let me ask you this you know do have you heard of are you familiar with african christianity prior to the transatlantic slave trade and so i want to tell them about the catholic church i want to tell them about christianity and ethiopia i want to tell them about the cushites in the bible since because now they're they're critiquing christianity now i can bring out the word i can defend my faith without the bible but ultimately i want to get them to the scriptures um so i want them to know about the cushites i want to know about christianity and nubia and then the hidden heroes chapter will help you because you can basically you can use this like a reference book you want to know about liberation there's a chapter on that you want to know about urban apologetics there's a chapel in it you want to know about some african christianity there's a chapter called whitewash in africa you want to know about some some key african figures there's a chapter on that and so then i want to take them to you know to tulian athanasius perpetua and felicity origin now we don't embrace everything origen did but he did he gave us some you know some huge contributions to the christian faith and then i want to ask him like these men and women are our african ancestors why do you want to ignore them how come you only want to give credence to the ancestors that fit your ideology and so now they have to they have to wrestle with something like so so essentially you're saying that our ancestors were stupid that they couldn't tell the difference between biblical christianity and white supremacy why are you ignoring these african theologians and martyrs and then lastly i want to ask you know you're talking about that's again athanasia is well known 325 he stood at the council narcia well that's over a thousand years before the transatlantic slave trade of 1619. so now they got to wrestle with timelines like i'm just i'm just giving you history we we don't even have to go to the bible yet your timeline doesn't add up and then i want to bring them here ultimately to get to the gospel and i want to say this what white supremacy did during chattel slavery they did not try to beat christianity into us and our ancestors they unsuccessfully attempted to beat inferiority and they and they i suggested the bible to do so they looked at genesis 6 and they tried to genesis 6 29 and they wanted to take the curse of ham and they want to say that that applied to black and other ethnic minorities and they wanted to say based on their eyes of jesus of scripture that you're devalued that you don't have any value they wanted to use that to justify degrading us and then i asked them why would they create a slave bible that took out the book of exodus because they knew they see freedom they see god coming to save his oppressed people and so when they see that i say there's a difference when you read the slave narratives they knew the difference when they were able to read frederick douglass knew the difference he writes between the christianity of this land and authentic christianity why why why would you ignore them and so i say there's a difference they wanted to beat inferiority they wanted to tell us that we didn't have value but they were unsuccessful because we had a grandma moses by the name of harriet tubman we had a frederick douglass we we had a marcus garvey who writes about the resurrection we we have a francis grimke we have again the early african christian fathers and mothers and so i want them to go there like they wanted to devalue us but you know who always valued us yeshua because our value begins at creation and then that's an opportunity to present the reason for the hope that lies within me and i'm able to share the gospel and so i'm hoping this book is a tool ultimately for those that disagree with our faith it allows opportunities for us to present the gospel to them that's that's helpful um one of the things that can become challenging is because when you're engaging in hebrew israelites when you're engaging some people in the conscious community their hostility um creates this hostility sometimes in us to go tit-for-tat and so they hurl insults and then we hurl insults back or they use catchy shady things and they're in their tag lines on youtube we do that back um how do we how do we strike that balance between having a conviction um sharing our faith with conviction but not being pulled into the gutter uh with with some of the folks that that try to take us there yeah great question lisa i i say two things we can disagree without being disrespectful we can also disagree and we don't have to disengage and so uh i tell my true i'm a pastor so i tell my church this i say the time to be christ-like is when you don't want to be let me say that one more time the time to be christ-like is when you don't want to be and when someone is disrespecting you like i i you know i know i've already got a little bit of it you know um you know people calling me a critical race theory without even reading the book literally judging a book by its cover and uh one of the things i want to do is i put discussion questions because i'm hoping for dissent groups people who disagree to have discussion so i i think there's a way you know jesus tells you know when they hate you remember that they hated me first so i think we we have to learn that you know people are going to be hostile but the fruit of the spirit is love joy peace patience gentleness goodness kindness uh you know self-control the ninth one actually self-control and so i we gotta pray that we exhibit that self-control and how we engage and what we say and we need to be willing to apologize if even if the content of what we saying is true but how we said it how we may say things may not be loving and that that applies to me as well so that's that's just a constant prayer as the book gets out i i i you know i engage criticism and that sort of thing and so i think that's what we got to come back to is you mentioned it first peter 3 15.

it says give a reason for the hope that lies within you but then it tells you how to do it gentleness and respect and so we need to ask ourselves before we hit sin and you you uh you lovingly or unlevelly engage someone typing in the comments or whatever you know is this is this gentle is disrespectful and i think the bible has given us the filter that we need to watch what we say and how we say it but we also have that holy spirit when we mess up so that we can apologize for not apologizing for truth with the scriptures but maybe how we we can present uh things the wrong way the way i said is this way i tell my church this we can confront sin sinfully and and so we got to be we have to realize that we can still in confronting sin we can handle it sinfully and so we got to just constantly ask that prayer of david like search me and just know my anxious thoughts lord and and let me be quick to apologize when i blow it because we need grace as well so i think that's that's something i i want to remind myself of especially as this gets out and i i encounter criticism which i'm sure i will i'm not above it uh but just making sure we have that disposition yeah and i think that's helpful in and i love that you said like you could you could be gracious and not disengage because oftentimes you know when i make comments about gentleness and respect people think i'm calling for for disengagement it's just like no i'm just calling for us to to be empathetic in how we engage people so we don't contin further harm them so i'm not saying don't engage them but just right you do exactly i'm glad you you you highlighted that as well is there anything else about the book that you think our audience should know that we haven't discussed um before we before we leave here yeah so uh you know i talk about three responses to white washing so there's liberation and then i address hey here's where we have to kind of part ways with liberation theology there's self-hatred and that's gonna be a controversial chapter because it's called the making of a but but i'm i'm dealing with but kuhn is an acrostic uh contributing to ongoing oppression through negligence and i'm not calling people like hey this guy's a this woman that's not my heart i'm i'm letting people see and i use a historical figure leo africanus who was taken from his native land and then told everything wrong with him in people of color and then he writes one of the most scathing pieces of literature against uh people of color as a person of color and so i want people to know just the danger of internalizing racism and how that causes self-hatred but then i end with uh the third response which is urban apologetics in this chapter um i'm engaging some common objections so if you want to know how to approach the whole you know horus jesus the common carbon copy of horus you have that in this book one of the things i say is christians and this is in the book we must stop giving faith-based answers to fact-based questions and so when someone asks about the letter j that is a fact-based question that's not the time to say i know what he did for me now you need to engage their question you need to know about john georgio trusino the the father of the letter j and the j sound that's a that's a legitimate question that we can engage and we can help people uh learn uh and so i'm i'm engaging uh jerome i think we haven't talked about that on the podcast i would love for you just to break down that whole controversy if you don't mind um for our audience the letter j thing yeah so so in there i talk about uh giorgio tracino kind of the father of the letter j and so what you'll find is when you begin to study the history of that uh while we the j was invented later you still had the j sound and you would see j words that we spelled with the j you would see themselves with an i and so it's called the table alphabetical and so i have that in the book um there are over 200 reference citations in the book so you'll be able to go behind me and see you know where i'm referencing to get this from so essentially we we may not have had the the j letter uh but we still had the sound and so letters also had different sounds like cat and circle spell starts with the letter c but they have different sounds then also just because you don't have a particular letter it doesn't remove the veracity or the existence of a person or place like we wouldn't say jerusalem never existed right and so it's important that when people come with those objections that we're able to give answers i also talk about just the archaeology the archaeological evidence we have for the historicity of the christian faith and then how many extra biblical uh people how many um bible references they they uh refer to scripture with the numbers there and so again i wanted to really equip the body of christ again because this is an evangelistic work because people are leaving the faith or not even interested in hearing about it because they have legitimate concerns about whitewashing we need to address those concerns and then present the gospel but we need to deconstruct some of the things that are barriers and these are unnecessary barriers because we keep presenting that christianity in a monolithic way because i hope that answers your question um lisa but yeah i engage stuff like that in the book to help people be able to refute some of those false claims that's helpful for for those who don't understand can you explain to them what the why people bring up the j argument yeah they'll say the the letter j was invented around the 15th century uh 16th century so how could his name be jesus right now we know uh now if you go to the old testament there's something known as the tetragrammaton yhwh and we we refer i frequently refer them in the book as yeshua right and so what people would do they they they're basically looking for reasons to dismiss christianity and so i wanted to kind of hit that head on and say well hold up before you make an eternal decision based on a letter let's begin to understand a little bit about etymology sounds phonics and the father of this letter and then how how things were said and spelled back then and so you'll you'll frequently hear that objection about the the letter j thank you i think that's that's helpful for for our audience to know um how can they get the book the white washing of christians yes yes yes yes so uh by by god's grace wherever books are sold online uh so you can get it from amazon barnes and nobles you can even get this from target and walmart so wherever books are sold hard copy paperback uh we are uh in a couple weeks we'll have the kindle as well as the uh audio version of the book but this is ready now this this book is ready now and i'm really excited about it and excited to see what the lord is gonna do with it awesome we want everybody to go get this book yeah today all sales matter [Laughter] let me say this at least yeah proceeds of this book goes to feed hungry children mine we want to get to get it on the chart so make sure y'all buy it the first yes yes please to get it up there uh thank you so much for joining us how can people find you on social media oh yes yeah you can follow me on instagram and twitter at jeromegay at j-e-r-o-m-e-g-a-y also go to my website jeromegatejunior. com j-e-r-o-n-e-g-a-y-j-r dot com and you can subscribe to my youtube channel youtube. com backslash the urban perspective so i would love to connect with you please follow me on those channels and i i continue to hopefully uh provide content that equips the body of christ awesome thank you so much it's been a pleasure having you and i hope many people will go go get your book thank you all for watching another episode of the g3 project podcast you can get all our past episodes at g3project.

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