Why is Christianity considered a white man's religion when it began with Middle Eastern people? Paul, a Middle Eastern Jew, wrote in the New Testament about the Gospels being preached to the Japhetic/European/Caucasian peoples such as those in Rome and Tarsus. By the way, were those in Subsaharan Africa familiar with Christians or Christianity and did some of them became Christians before the Renaissance period, when black Africans were beginning to be uprooted in large numbers to the New World and the Middle East?
If you are a descendent of slaves in North America, your African ancestors were unlikely to have been Christian, most slaves having been kidnapped to the Americas from coastal West African areas from The Gambia to Congo. Islam had made significant inroads into these areas a hundred or so years before the European Atlantic slave trade began, and would have been the dominant single religion slaves brought with them.
Therefore, the Christianity taught to those slaves, was a "white man's religion" to the extent that they were taught only the theology that evolved in Europe. As others have mentioned, there was and is thriving Christianity outside of Europe--outside of the Catholic/Protestant hash, outside of the Calvinism/Arminianism hash--that has some distinctively different concepts. These are not heretic--although proponents of "the white man's religion" will think them so.
European Christians, as they colonized areas by force that were already Christian, did not respect those local Christian religions, however.
Even in the modern day, American Christians disrespect the Churches that exist(ed) in the Middle East all the way to India. These are some of the oldest continuous churches in the world, but Western (and particularly American) Christians pretend these churches don't exist at all, and seek to replace them rather than to support them.
Talk to the average American Christian about the plight of the Church in Iraq or of Palestinian Christians, and you'll either get a blank stare or a strong disagreement that such even exist.
Islamic evangelism to black Americans has been running for about a century now, touting the actual truth that Islam was the most common single religion of the slaves kidnapped to the Americas. Unfortunately, that fact combined with the decidedly unChristian practice of slavery and Jim Crow gives them further fuel, especially to the extent that American Christians in the south used New Testament scripture to bolster slavery and racism.
And let's not be fooled--the northern Christians were not abolitionists because of a love of black fellow Christians, but to save the souls of white people.
Many of these people--who are probably proselytes to Islam themselves--simply didn't have real understanding of Christianity themselves and were easy prey.
It's really a miracle wrought by the Holy Spirit that black Americans were able to see the truth beyond the lies of how they were treated by "Christians" in America.
But it is the truth, and the truth is never manifest so greatly as to go to other countries and meet fellow Christians in places where Christianity is the "default," and where the faith is not nationalized because to be Christian is automatically to be alien (1 Peter 1).
It was so amazing to me to go to Japan or Thailand or Korea and spend hours talking in fellowship with Christians who were of totally different native cultures--but we saw perfectly eye-to-eye on the deep, important subjects of good, evil, love, hate, honor, and righteousness.
Then, I experienced a genuine epiphany when I returned to the States, got into conversations with Americans who should have had the same worldview as mine--but finding their thoughts utterly alien to me.
I had to reflect: What is really my nation? Who is really my countryman? Hence my signature below.
And that is really the response. Not that Africans were historically Christians--that's simply not relevant. The gospel is just as true for Native Americans as for anyone, just as true for Chinese and Japanese as it is for anyone.
I remember talking to an elderly Japanese woman back in the 80s who had been a young girl during WWII. Her father had actually been a Japanese Christian missionary in Manchuria, China, when the Japanese invaded that area in 1931. They had put her father in a prison camp for precisely for teaching the "white man's religion," and her family was not re-united with her father until after WWII. She and her mother had also suffered in their community for believing in the "white man's religion" during the war.
But hearing those testimonies are what make you realize that Christianity really is a truth that is supranational, transcending boundaries made by men.
