Christians in the United States are being tested on a daily basis by a culture that is openly hostile to our faith. From the shutdown of churches to the promotion of drag queens in schools, true believers are being separated from the Christians in name only (ChrINOs) who think Jesus was simply a good teacher with important moral truths.

The forces trying to attack the Christian faith are innumerable, but there is one group of Christians dealing with a different type of fight.

Black Christians are at a crossroads, because our faith is increasingly being challenged by old notions of racial solidarity, and given the current state of race in America, “black” and “Christian” identities cannot coexist. One has to reign supreme over the other.

This does not mean that a person of African descent cannot be a Christian. On the contrary, biblical anthropology is quite clear: all of mankind is descended from Adam, and every person from every ethnicity, nation, tribe, and people group is a sinner in desperate need of a savior.

Those who turn from their sin and believe that Jesus died for their salvation are saved by God’s grace. Since salvation comes from God, no person can take credit for his or her own righteousness. The Bible says that the people of God are drawn from different tribes and nations, speaking different languages and possessing different cultures. These various people groups are united in Christ, not by skin color or other superficial characteristics.

There is nothing contradictory about being a Christian who also acknowledges national or ethnic identity. We need not be ashamed of anything God created to display His glory. The trouble for believers starts when any other aspect of our identity is elevated above our identity in Christ. Doing so leads directly to the sin of idolatry.

Many black Christians in America are grappling with this tension as we speak, because blackness – to paraphrase Nikole Hannah-Jones – has largely become a political identity. This is why Joe Biden felt comfortable declaring that black voters who didn’t support him “ain’t black.”

What makes this even worse is that black political identity largely overlaps with one party and is defined in opposition to whatever is deemed “white” by that party. The National Museum of African American History and Culture published a list of beliefs, values, and behaviors it claimed represented “white culture” a few years ago. It included the nuclear family, rational thinking, hard work, and punctuality.

The people behind this project, like many progressives, have come to believe that “blackness” is a challenge to “white” social and cultural norms. This is why racial activists frame abortion, “body positivity,” prison abolition, homosexuality, transgenderism, and feminism as necessary tools in the fight against “white supremacy.”

This is one reason many black Christians, including several prominent black evangelical pastors, attempt to thread the needle of promoting Black Lives Matter as a slogan while rejecting the organization. That is extremely difficult given that the organization’s co-founders popularized both the phrase and the movement.

Trying to “redeem” BLM is also unnecessary. Christians, regardless of color, do not need a Marxist organization to affirm the value of black image-bearers. God already did that in Genesis 1:27 and does not need assistance from people who claim to value all black lives except ones developing in the womb.

In fact, 18 civil rights organizations released a statement today requesting a meeting with President Biden to discuss abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade. The announcement on the National Urban League’s website included this passage:

This letter explicitly highlights the disproportionate impact this decision will have on Black women, other women of color, and vulnerable women, and the undeniable connection between abortion access and other social justice issues, including voter disenfranchisement, policing abuse, criminal injustice, poverty, economic inequity, housing inequity, LGBTQ+ rights, the immigration crisis, food insecurity, medical bias, and environmental injustice.

It’s clear that authentic blackness, as defined by the left, requires complete support of abortion as well as every other policy priority of the Democratic National Committee. The NAACP should be renamed the “National Association for the Abortion of Colored People,” because it is as committed to reducing the black population as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. The nation’s largest abortion provider also receives support from the Congressional Black Caucus and BET.

Black Christians are at a crossroads. Some of the most prominent institutions that purport to advocate for black people are committed to our destruction, and “Christian nationalist” is used as a pejorative to describe believers who want biblical definitions of biological sex, marriage, and family reflected in law.

Black believers are going to have to choose. We can believe that man’s greatest source of bondage is sin, or we can argue that Jesus came to the earth to ensure equity in every area of life for “marginalized people of color.”

We can either argue for the inherent value of all life, or we can chant “black lives matter” in solidarity with people who think it is better for a child to be killed in the womb than be born to a poor black mother.

We can either affirm that sex is established at conception and remains unchanged throughout our lives, or we can join BET as it “stans” for Zaya Wade and agree with black professors who believe men can get pregnant.

We can accept God’s design for the family – one man and one woman dedicated to one another and any children who come from their union – or we can continue to go along with the black intellectuals who think marriage is obsolete and fathers are optional.

Enslaved Africans were deemed subhuman pieces of property by white slave owners who actually believed in the inherent supremacy of some “races.” The Civil Rights movement was characterized by the pursuit of equal citizenship, but it was driven by the recognition that every person – regardless of color – is created in the image of God.

The black leadership class of today has turned that imago Dei revolution on its head. The same people who think W.E.B DuBois was correct when he said that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” are now pushing the problem of the 21st century: the rejection of the sex binary.

The groups who claim to fight in the spirit of their ancestors now advocate for the destruction of their progeny and insist that “real” black people must agree with them. Some of the same black Christians who believe white evangelicals have made an idol out of national pride have made an idol out of racial identity.

This double-mindedness can’t continue. We can keep the Bible or our black cards. We can’t have both.