44. Christian Before Black? The Lie Inside a Holy Sentence

I felt like recently celebrating Juneteenth was as good a time as any to address something I see a lot on social media and something I’ve even said myself. 

I used to say "I'm a Christian before I'm Black," but only in one kind of room. Never around people who looked like me. Always in white-leaning spaces, where the disclaimer made everyone else relax and made him feel nonthreatening.

This episode takes apart that sentence. It honors the worship underneath it, the desire to make Jesus Lord over everything, then names the lie smuggled in alongside it: that your ethnicity is the thing your faith has to overcome. Through Revelation 7, Acts 17, and a careful reading of Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11, Justin makes the case that God did not erase the nations to save them. He gathered them. And "neither Jew nor Greek," the verse people use to flatten you, tears down the ladder, not the differences.

This one is for any believer, Black or not, who has either offered that disclaimer or quietly asked someone else to. It is a loving confrontation and a release at the same time.

In this episode:

• Why "Christian before Black" sounds holy but hides a false choice
• What Revelation 7 and Acts 17 actually say about ethnicity and eternity
• The most misread verse in the conversation: Galatians 3:28, explained
• How Colossians 3:11 seats the "Scythian" at the table without erasing him
• Why culture-free Christianity is usually just one culture in disguise

Scripture: Revelation 7:9 · Acts 17:26 · Galatians 3:28 · Colossians 3:11 · Matthew 10:37 Voices referenced: Esau McCaulley · Willie Jennings · Andrew Walls · Lesslie Newbigin · N.T. Wright

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've said it more than once, and I always said it in the same kind of room. I'm a Christian before I'm black. Now I never said it in a room full of people who looked like me, at least not in person. I've said it online a couple times uh early on, but I mostly said it in white leaning spaces. Ministry rooms, leadership rooms, uh the kind of place where I was one of the few or the only black person in the room. And I want to be honest about why, because it's taken me years to be honest with myself about it and break it down personally. And this is the part that I couldn't see for a long time. I told myself that it was a statement of faith, um, a way of saying that Jesus comes first. And there was real faith in there, and I don't want to take that away from the younger me, but underneath the faith I think was a calculation. If I lead with this, they won't have to wonder about me. If I put my blackness second out loud, they can relax. I can be received, I can belong here without anybody feeling like they have to brace for me. It's like I was handing over a disclaimer before anyone asked for one. And I didn't have language for the quiet thing that it cost me until much later, honestly. It felt like I'd apologized for something. I could not have told you what. Like, because who told me that those two things were fighting? I'm Justin Belton. This is Faith Formed, episode 44, a podcast for people who don't have it all together. A podcast for people who are building faith that actually holds up in the middle. And today we're gonna handle a sentence, a small one. Six words that a lot of us have said, especially if you're black and Christian, that a lot of us have met well by and that have quietly done more damage than we know. And I want you to stay with me, especially if you're not black, because this is not a vilifying podcast. I'm all about community, I'm all about unity. Um and I but I think that this episode is important because I don't think the problem is the love for Jesus underneath the sentence. I think the problem is the lie that is hiding inside of it. And if you've been rocking with Faith Forum for a while, uh go ahead and drop us a five-star review wherever you listen to the podcast. I appreciate it, and I thank you in advance. So let me be fair to the sentence first, because it doesn't start as a weapon. Most of the time, I believe, honestly, it starts off as worship. Because when somebody says I'm Christian before I'm anything else, they're usually reaching for something true. They're trying to say that Jesus is Lord over every other allegiance, that if it came down to it, Christ wins. That no tribe, no flag, no party, no paycheck gets to sit on the throne that belongs to him, right? And that is the true instinct. The instinct is the whole gospel, right? Jesus said if you love mother, mother or father more than me, then you're not worthy of me. But Jesus was not anti-family, he was anti-rival or anti-throne, other throne. And so I want to honor the worship underneath those words. But here's where it goes sideways. We take a true thing about priority and we turn it into a false thing about subtraction. Priority says Jesus is first. Subtraction says that everything else has to get smaller for Christ to be bigger. And I don't think that those are the same move. One is about the order of your loves, the other is about the erasure of yourself. And somewhere along the way, for a lot of black believers, especially, the sentence stopped meaning Jesus is Lord, and it started meaning my blackness is a problem, my faith has to manage. And I think this conversation is interesting, especially as we've just celebrated Juneteenth, um, where you know the the truth about the the slavery being abolished finally reached Texas, um, like two and a half years later. Um but I think that this this is important because I see this all over Threads. Uh, I see this on TikTok, and I've never actually spoken out out loud about it. And so I really wanted to use this space that God has given me as one where I do hit on some of these uncomfortable topics. And I want you to watch what actually happens in the room, right? Nobody walks up to one of our white brothers or sisters and says, glad to hear you're a Christian before you're white. Or to one of our Asian brothers and sisters and says, I'm glad to know that you're a Christian before you're Asian. That that would sound really strange. It would sound like it was solving a problem that nobody thought that this man or this woman had. But a black believer learns early on that his particular flavor of humanity is the thing on trial. So he offers up the disclaimer before anyone asks. I'm a Christian first, meaning, meaning, please do not be afraid of the rest of me. I know that move because I've repeatedly made it in rooms where I was the only one, leading with the disclaimer so nobody would have to wonder about my faith or about my allegiance. And I want to say something to the person who has made that same move. You weren't being faithless, you were being tired. Because there's a difference between submitting your identity to Christ and surrendering your identity to other people's comfort. One is discipleship, but the other, where you are surrendering your identity to other people's comfort, is really a quieter kind of fear. And I lived in that quieter kind of fear for a long time, and I called it mistakenly so humility. So let's go to the text because that sentence, I'm Christian before I'm black, assumes that when grace gets a hold of you, your ethnicity becomes spiritual deadweight, something that has to be tolerated, but not redeemed, not gathered, not glory. And I think if we we need to turn that assumption against Revelation chapter 7. All right. So here's we're setting the scene here. John gets a vision at the end, not at the beginning, but he gets one at the end of his life. The destination of this whole redemption project. And he says, After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb. So sit on that word. Every nation, every tribe, every people, every language. The Greek word there, you can probably guess it, is ethnos. It's where we get the word ethnicity. And John could have said one undifferentiated mass of saved humanity, scrubbed of all distinction, all the same. And this is what the sentence Christian before black secretly imagines heaven to be, a place where the particulars about us finally dissolves. But that that's not what John saw. He saw distinction. He saw tribes still recognizable as tribes, languages still sounding like themselves. The nations were not erased in glory, they were gathered in glory, standing there, visible, themselves worshiping as themselves. And here's the thing I think that I missed for years because I've read that. He saves you and your people gets to bring its particular praise to a throne that wanted it there. Esau Macaulay, who teaches New Testament and writes squarely from inside of the black church tradition, makes a point with a cutting precision. So in his work on reading scripture as a black Christian, he argues that the Bible doesn't ask black believers to abandon their experience to come to the text, it speaks to that experience. The black Christian doesn't have to leave their blackness in the parking lot to meet Jesus in the sanctuary. The text was never asking for that trade. We were the ones who invented the toll booth. And listen back to how far this goes. In Acts 17, Paul is standing on Mars Hill preaching to a crowd of Greek philosophers, and he says, God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotment periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. Get this. God determined it. That's past tense. On purpose. Your people, your place, the times you were set down in history, none of it was an accident that God is now trying to work around. God drew the boundaries. God set the times. The diversity of the nations is not the wreckage of babel that grace tolerates. It's the design of God that grace will one day perfect. So when somebody hands you the sentence, when somebody implies your blackness is the thing your faith has to overcome, you can hand that sentence back to them gently, right? And say, you have the order wrong. My faith isn't overcoming my blackness. My faith is the thing that finally told me that my blackness was never the problem. And so now I need to go somewhere harder since we're on this journey anyway. Because that sentence didn't just fall out of the sky. Somebody built the room where that sentence was made necessary. He teaches uh theology at Yale, but he wrote a book called The Christian Imagination. And his argument really changed how I see this whole thing. Jennings says that somewhere in the history of the Western Church, Christianity got tangled up with whiteness so tightly that whiteness started to feel like the neutral, default, real version of being a Christian. And everybody else became a variation, an ethnic version, a hyphenated believer. So the white Christian gets to just be a Christian, and the black Christian becomes a black Christian. The label gets attached to us and not to them. And after a while, we start to believe the label is a liability. We start to believe the most spiritual thing we can do, we can do is shrink the part of us that got labeled. Be a Christian, they tell us, not a black Christian, as if those were ever two different things. And that's a wound. And we started to call that wound holiness. And I need to say this carefully because white brothers and sisters, Hispanic, Asian, Southeast Asian, whoever, I need you to hear me. Because I'm not trying to make anybody a villain. But what I'm trying to do is name a water that we've all been swimming in. The demand that black believers prove their faith by minimizing their culture is not the Bible. It's in the history. It got smuggled into the church and baptized and handed down until it felt like scripture. It shows up in slave Bibles where uh where passages of the holy text are left out so that slave masters don't have a need to feel convicted or guilty about chattel slavery. Huh? But it's not scripture. It is it's basically akin to sociology wearing a choir robe. And here is my prophetic word. And I'm I'm gonna say it into the whole room because the whole room, we're all in this, yeah? To my brothers and sisters who have used this sentence as a quiet request for assimilation, even without meaning to, stop asking people to disappear in order to belong with you. The gospel doesn't require it, and neither should you. When you signal a black believer that they would be easier to love if they were less culturally themselves, you are not calling them up to Christ, you're calling them over to you, and those are not the same throne. And to my brothers and sisters who have said the sentence about yourselves the way I did, with coffee, with the nod, you don't owe anybody that disclaimer. You never did. You can love Jesus with your whole black self, and the love is not diluted, it's fuller. The praise that comes out of your particular life, your particular history, your particular grief and joy, that is not a lesser offering. Revelation says it's exactly the offering that the throne is waiting for. Now, somebody has been waiting this whole time to stop me. And I want to let them. That's right. I want to let you stop me. Because there is a verse, and if you grew up in church, you already know where I'm going. And it gets pulled out exactly here like a trump card. Galatians 3, verse 28. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ. And the way that sentence gets used, the way I've heard it used, and the way that I once have believed it goes like this. See, Justin. Paul already settled it. In Christ, the categories all disappear. So stop making so much of being black. Quit idolizing your blackness, right? Because there's neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither black nor white nor Asian nor Hispanic. We are all just one now. All right. So let me handle this carefully as 45, almost 46-year-old Justin. Because I think that this is one of the single most misread verses in the entire conversation of the Bible. Because once you see what Paul is actually doing, it doesn't weaken what I've been saying. I think it's the strongest thing that I've said yet. Here's the question that breaks the misreading wide open. Did Jew or Greek stop existing the next morning after Paul wrote this? No. Paul kept calling himself a Jew for the rest of his life. Romans 11, verse 1, he says, I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. That's years after Galatians. The man who wrote, neither Jew nor Greek, is still telling you his tribe. So whatever Paul meant, he didn't mean that ethnicity evaporates when you get baptized. He was living proof that it doesn't. So what died in Galatians chapter 3? The categories didn't. The hierarchy did. Paul is standing against a group of teachers who were saying that you have to become culturally Jewish, get circumcised, take on the markers before you're fully in. These Judaizers had built a ranking. Jew at the top, Greek down a rung, and your access to God ran through that ranking. And Paul detonates the ranking. He says the markers are not the door. Christ is the door. There's no top rung anymore. Jew and Greek walk to the throne on the same ground, which is grace, which is the fullness of Jesus, and nothing else. N.T. Wright, who's a trusted reader of Paul, as the English teaching, uh I'm sorry, he's as trusted a reader of Paul as any English-speaking church, puts it plainly. He says, Galatians 3.28 is not an abolition of difference. It is the abolition of difference as a barrier. The dividing wall comes down, the status ladder comes down, but Jews remain Jews and Greeks remain Greeks, now sitting at one table as equals instead of one ranked above the other. So you see what it does to our sentence? Yeah? Do you see it? Galatians 3.28 does not support I'm a Christian before I'm black. It dismantles it. Because the sentence sneaks the old ladder back in through the side door. That sentence quietly treats one identity as the spiritual liability that is yet to yield. The rung that has to get lower so that the believer can climb. And Paul says, no, the rung is higher. No identity is the toll you pay to get up the ladder, because there is no ladder. The cross laid the ladder flat. Your blackness is not the lower rung you have to apologize for on your way up. Because there is no up. There's only the level ground at the foot of the cross. And we all get to stand on it as all of who we are. Now there's a cousin verse to Galatians. It's Colossians 3, verse 11. Because Paul stretches the list even wider. Here, there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free, but Christ is in all and is all. Watch him add barbarian and Scythian. Those weren't polite words, to be honest. Barbarian was a slur the Greeks used for anybody whose language sounded like babel to them. Scythian was the bottom of the cultural ladder. The people everybody looked down on. They were the punchline. And Paul reaches all the way down to the most despised cultural identity his readers could imagine. And he plants them at the same table. Christ is in all and is all. The Scythian doesn't have to stop being a Scythian to belong. The contempt has to stop. There is a difference, and the whole gospel lives comfortably in that distance. And this is where Andrew Walls becomes the voice that I most want in the room. Because Andrew Walls spent his life studying how the gospel actually moves through the world. And what he found is the opposite of erasure. Walls argued that Christianity has no single cultural home. It is, in his words, infinitely translatable. Unlike other faiths that bind you to a holy language and a holy land and a holy dress, the gospel is meant to be carried into every culture and to take root there as itself. He called it the indigenizing principle. God does not pull you out of your people to save you. He plants the gospel inside of your people so that your people can worship him in a way no other people can. The black church is not a deviation from real Christianity. It is the gospel doing exactly what Walls said it always does, taking root in a people and producing a praise that the whole body needs and could not get anywhere else. Introduce Leslie Nubigan, who spent decades as a missionary in India before he ever wrote a word about the West. He said something that I cannot get out of my head, and it fits in this conversation. He said the gospel never comes to anyone as a disembodied message. It always comes clothed in a culture. There's no such thing as a pure, culture free Christianity floating above the nations. And the attempt to produce one, to strip a believer of their culture and call what is left the real faith, is not neutrality. It's usually just one culture, which is the dominant one, pretending to be the default one. Nubigan saw it from the outside, on the mission field, and named it. When we ask a black believer to shed their culture to be a real Christian, we're not handing them a pure Christianity. We are handing them someone else's culture, wearing the costume of pure Christianity. So the verse you thought would stop me is the verse that finishes the argument. Neither Jew nor Greek does not mean disappear. It means the separating wall is down, the ladder is gone, the contempt is over, and you walk in as your whole self. I'm not bending scripture toward my experience. If you have an issue, take it up with Paul. If you have an issue, take it up with Christ. Okay? Now, I want to tell you how it broke for me. And it wasn't a dramatic moment. It was quieter than that. Um and slower, which is really how real change actually comes, yeah? So I think it broke the day that I started hearing myself being in one of these rooms and feel the old pull to lead with the disclaimer, um, to put my blackness second out loud so that everybody could relax. And for the first time, I noticed the calculation under it. I noticed that I was about to apologize for something that God never asked me to apologize for. And I asked myself the question that I'd been avoiding for years. Who told you that these two things, your blackness and your Christianity, were at odds? Nobody, it turns out. Nobody in heavens, anyway. The fight was a rumor I'd been handed, and I'd agreed to keep myself alive by making myself smaller every time I walked into a room. And I stopped, I just stopped agreeing with that. I quit making the announcement. Um, yeah, I just I quit. I quit offering the manifesto. I I didn't write a manifesto, I quit offering the disclaimer. I just let myself walk in as the whole person God made and trusted that if a room could only receive a part of me, the problem was not the part that I'd been hiding. The problem was not the part I'd been hiding. I'm not a Christian before I'm black. I'm not a Christian instead of being black. I am a black man fully, I'm a Christian fully. And the second one is what finally let me stop apologizing for the first. The cross didn't come to make me less of who God made. It came to redeem all of it and to hand it back to me cleansed. So that's the trade that I've stopped making. The trade where I gave up pieces of myself to buy a seat at a table that Jesus had already set with me in mind the whole time. So here's what I want you to carry out the door. Okay. If you have made it this far, if you are, you know, a white brother or sister in Christ, Asian, whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. If you made it this far, God bless you. Thank you for being open to the conversation. Okay? And here's what I want you to carry out of the door, no matter who you are or what you are. The sentence, I'm Christian before I'm black, feels humble. It feels humble. But underneath it hides a lie that says your ethnicity is the thing your faith has to overcome. But but scripture says something different. It does. Revelation shows the nations gathered, not erased. Acts says God drew the boundaries of your people on purpose. And even Galatians 3, the verse that people use to flatten you, only tears down the ladder, not the differences. There is no higher rung for your faith to climb by making your blackness lower. The ground at the cross is level. Your blackness is not a dead weight that your discipleship has to drag along. It's the Imago Dei glory that the throne is waiting to receive. So stop subtracting. You don't have to leave any true part of yourself in the parking lot to truly encounter Christ and to be called by his name. He made the whole you. And the whole you is exactly what he came for. So let's pray. Father, you made the nations and you called them good before sin ever touched them. And you're gathering them to you again, every tribe, every tongue, into one room, and you will never ask anyone called by your name to be smaller. So for the one who spent years apologizing for the way you made them, who learned to hand over a disclaimer before they handed over their hand, would you loosen that grip tonight, today, this morning, whenever they're listening? Tell them what you told me, that the fight that they were managing was never a real fight. That you do not love them in spite of how you made them. You love them, including it. And for the one that has even quietly asked others to disappear in order to belong, would you soften us? Show us where we mistook our comfort for your holiness. Teach us to make room the way your throne makes room. And for all of us, would you give us a worship that is fully surrendered and fully ourselves at the same time? Because we're finally believing that those were never two different things. In the name of the one, every tongue will confess and every knee shall bow to. Amen. So if something in this one loosened the grip you've been holding, do me a favor and send it to someone who's been carrying that same disclaimer around. This is the kind of episode that travels person to person, I think, not algorithm to algorithm. So your share, it actually matters. Also, make sure you subscribe so that the next one finds you. And if you've got 45 seconds, a review on Apple genuinely helps other people stumble onto this show. Alright. I love, I love you. Nation, culture, creed, ethnicity. I think it's all a beautiful expression of the creativity and the love of our Jesus Christ. So go be yourself all the way yourself. Go live it. Alright? I'll see you next week. Be blessed.