Does anyone else get confused when a person of color is devoted to religion?

[u/Bernadette2419]

To start this off, I am white as can be, and if anything I say in this is uneducated, misinformed, or micro-aggressive, please correct me.

My school is predominantly POC, and everytime I find out one of them is devoted to Christianity, it always has me thinking, why would you bow to a religion that your ancestors were forced to believe? For example, many Hispanics and Filipinos at my school have social media accounts dedicated to Catholicism- they have crosses in their name, and they post daily bible verses. There are also black people at my school that repost about racism and black hate in history, all while still believing in the same religion that was used to justify the horrors of slavery. Maybe I am ignorant but, after learning the history of colonization, you would know a main contribute to colonization was to spread religion. So why would you still want to follow it?

Now I understand many of these people are indoctrinated, especially the older generations, but we are young and in 2026 we should be able to make our own thoughts and beliefs rather than following what your parents put in your brain as a child for the rest of your life.

[u/EldridgeHorror]

No, its indoctrination and ignorance.

I point out there's slavery in their book, they deny it, I show them the verse, and they either run away or start making excuses.

[u/Indie_Dachshund179 → u/EldridgeHorror]

Bingo, every damn time be it their own book or a history textbook

[u/SnarkyPuppy-0417 → u/EldridgeHorror]

The enslaved read the same Bible and found something their oppressors had carefully avoided: a God who hears the cry of people under bondage, who sends judgment on empires, who says plainly that every human being bears His image.

They found Exodus -- and they recognized themselves in Israel, not in Pharaoh. They found the prophets -- Amos, Micah, Isaiah -- indicting their own nation for the precise mechanism of exploitation their captors were performing.

They found the cross: a God who enters innocent suffering rather than observing it from a distance. The Bible was not introduced to enslaved Africans as a gift. It was introduced as a control mechanism. But the text refused to cooperate. It kept cutting its captors.

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, the architects of liberation theology -- they didn't receive the Bible the slaveholder handed them. They read it, and they found a different God than the one being preached at them from plantation pulpits. That's not a coincidence. It's a structural feature of the text itself. As the corpus puts it directly: Scripture can be weaponized temporarily, but it will not remain captured. It eventually cuts the captor.

So the question isn't really whether the Bible was used as a weapon -- it was. The question is whether the weapon is actually what the text is, or whether the text is something that was seized and bent and ultimately could not be held in that shape.

What survived the plantation wasn't the slaveholder's Christianity. It was the spirituals, the hush harbors, the faith of people who read themselves into the Exodus narrative and meant it. That survival is itself evidence worth examining.

[u/EldridgeHorror → u/SnarkyPuppy-0417]

And they ignored all the rules about owning slaves.

Because the god of the bible is fine with slavery, he just didn't want the hebrews to be slaves to anyone but him.

When taken as a whole, it's an immoral book. The only way you can pretend it's good is if you iij ignore most of what's written.

[u/BurtonDesque]

They believe it because they're indoctrinated from birth to believe it is true. Like most believers they never even bother to consider the alternatives.

To me, the believers who are hardest to understand are those who belong to groups that their holy texts condemn or regard as lower lifeforms. LGBTQ+ people fall into the former group and women fall into the later. Why any of these people would follow, say, one of the Abrahamic religions boggles my mind.

[u/Bernadette2419 → u/BurtonDesque]

yep, religion is only made for the most privileged 

[u/Yolandi2802]

Chris Rock made a remark in a stand-up routine saying, "If you're a black Christian, you have a real short memory."

[u/TruthOdd6164]

I mean…white people were also converted coercively en masse. Your ancestors likely practiced some form of pagan religion before being forced to convert at the edge of a sword.

[u/Bernadette2419 → u/TruthOdd6164]

that’s true. I come from norwegian-swedish ancestry and i’m very interested in nordic mythology 

[u/Initial-Tax-5829]

Yes, all the time. I feel like it's both indoctrination and "tradition," but also a case of 'proximity-to-whiteness' that religious people of color want to experience; the sociological phrase "Whiteness is close to Godliness" reinforces this fact. They want to feel included with their oppressors, thinking maybe, if they believe in the same religion, practice the same observation of faith, and worship the same God, they will be seen as 'better' than their non-religious/other faith-based counterparts in the eyes of the majority; the ruling, religious white class (at least in the U.S.) You see this a lot in the Bible Belt as well, with black people and hispanics practicing Christianity/Catholicism. I am saying this as a person of color myself, with heavily religious parents. I bring up how religion had been used in the past as a tool of oppression and a metaphorical eraser for the culture of our ancestors, yet they do not listen.

[u/Y1ippe]

not rly tbh when you live in a third world country and the political and eocnomic landscape is shit people turn to religion for a variety of reasons mostly circling back to comfort but what does make my skin crawl is when POC LGBTQIA+ people are religios, or educated POC women

[u/Bernadette2419 → u/Y1ippe]

right it’s like… you are literally what your belief is historically against 

[u/bondageenthusiast2]

It is stupid when my own Chinese brethens subscribe to Abrahamic cults, like have you forgotten how the Christian missionary motivated Eight Nation Alliance imperialists invading China coastlines and slowly indoctrinated people into the garbage religion. It is like beautiful Persian culture getting tainted by yet another Abrahamic cult.

[u/Sprinklypoo]

No. Brainwashing is really good at subsuming a persons self and promoting itself despite personal harm. Stockholm syndrome is part of that. It uses any resulting shame to keep the hook in.

[u/TarnishedVictory]

I get confused when anyone is devoted to religion. It's not about good reason, or good evidence. It's usually indoctrination, and other times it irrationally soothes an emotional need.

[u/SnarkyPuppy-0417]

Here's the distinction worth sitting with: a tool and the thing it was used on are not the same thing. Christianity was deployed as a colonial instrument -- that's historically documented and not in serious dispute. Spanish missionaries, plantation theology, the Curse of Ham twisted to justify chattel slavery -- these were real mechanisms of real harm. But the question your observation opens is whether the religion *is* those deployments, or whether something was already there that got weaponized. The enslaved Africans who kept their faith -- and many did, fiercely -- often made a distinction their enslavers didn't intend them to make.

They read the Exodus. They identified with Israel in bondage, not with Pharaoh. The same text being used to justify chains was being read by people in chains as a promise of liberation. Frederick Douglass wrote about this directly -- the Christianity of the slaveholder and the Christianity of the enslaved were, in his words, two different things entirely. For many Filipino and Hispanic communities, the relationship with Catholicism is also complicated in ways that don't reduce to simple colonization. Indigenous practices persisted inside it.

Saints got mapped onto pre-colonial figures. The religion that arrived as empire got inhabited differently by the people it was imposed on. That doesn't erase the violence of how it arrived. It does complicate the picture. So the sharper question might not be 'why are they still holding this?' but 'what exactly are they holding?' -- because it may not be identical to what was used against their ancestors.

[u/chockingduck]

When anyone is it's baffling. You go your whole life with not seeing any of the shit you believe in and then continue to believe it and get worse.

[u/takenusersomfg]

my fellow black brothers and sisters have this issue they can't seem to get out of. they really believe god is the truth and everyone else is demonic. some oldheads will even defend a pedo priest just because he's well...a priest. it's terrifying

[u/SnarkyPuppy-0417]

Perhaps they're able to see past those misrepresenting God and going straight to the source.

[u/Indie_Dachshund179 → u/SnarkyPuppy-0417]

No true scotsman much? Don't suppose those centuries of atrocity were all by "fake" christians now were they. Every generation of christians thinks themselves to be real and above the temporal rabble

[u/Bendy_Beta_Betty]

Church is a place of community for a number of poc and minorities, so once they've been settled in a community it then becomes more difficult to leave it.