June 18, 2025
How have African Americans experienced traditionally white evangelicalism?
What does being a black Christian learning and worshiping in traditionally white Christian spaces mean? How do you stay true to yourself and your faith when people don’t understand your experiences or are inclined to dismiss them? And how does that affect your ability to grow and share your faith?
The Wheaton College Center for Applied Christian Ethics and Christianity Today seek to provide answers to these questions with the online video release of Black + Evangelical, a full-length documentary exploring the black experience in the sphere of American evangelical faith. People can now view the 2025 feature-length documentary that profiles the history, struggles, and contributions of African American evangelicals. Taking us to the crossroads of faith and racial identity, Black + Evangelical is filled with candid interviews and portraits of the resilient men and women who have straddled the often-confusing worlds of Black and white evangelicalism in America from the mid-20th century through the present day. Interested viewers can also visit blackevangelicals.com for more information about an official July launch with a Zoom seminar.
What started as an oral history project quickly evolved into something more for Dr. Vincent Bacote, the documentary’s host and one of its creators. A professor of theology at Wheaton College, Bacote serves as the Director of the Wheaton College Center for Applied Christian Ethics. At a meeting of black leaders in the evangelical church at Fuller Seminary in 2008, Bacote realized, along with others, that there was an opportunity to capture not just individual accounts of black experiences in the evangelical church but what those experiences mean for African American participation as a whole. He worked with longtime Christianity Today executive and editor Ed Gilbreath and filmmaker Daniel Long to bring the documentary to life.
Among black Christians in the United States, 41% identify as evangelical or born-again and 59% do not, according to research conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. Bacote said the documentary attempts to capture the liminal space many black Christians occupy after growing up in a black protestant church and then entering the evangelical movement, which has historically been predominantly white. “Part of the complexity is that they come up in those churches and then come into contact with Young Life or Campus Crusade,” Bacote said. “It was the story of my own life. I grew up in the Baptist church. I went to college, where I met the Navigators Bible Study. That was my doorway to the evangelical movement. I live in this space.”
Black + Evangelical challenges its audience to hear anew the voices of people whose unique theological and social journeys have much to say about the challenges faced by today's church. Viewers will see interviews with prominent voices of the black evangelical church, such as the late theologian Dr. William E. Pannell, a founder of the National Black Evangelical Association and former Wheaton College Trustee Dr. Ruth Bentley, theologian and historian Ronald C. Potter, and theological anthropologist Carl F. Ellis Jr.
Former Vice President for Strategic Partnerships at Christianity Today Ed Gilbreath had similar experiences to Bacote’s that made him want to tell the uniquely Black evangelical story. When he came to CT in the early 1990s, he was one of the only persons of color working at the organization. He worked his way from an internship to serving as the first black editor at CT, where he was quickly drawn to telling stories that related to questions about diversity in the church. He met other people who, like himself, were one of the first or one of a few people of color in their organizations. “As I began meeting more and more people who were in those positions, I realized I was not the first or unique. There were a lot of folks who came before.”
Black + Evangelical viewers are treated to a wide variety of original footage and imagery of more than a half-century of black evangelical history, including the riveting moment that black preacher, author, and former gang member Tom Skinner electrified more than 12,000 college students at Urbana ’70, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Skinner’s message is often considered one of the pivotal moments in the black evangelical experience.
“When Tom Skinner speaks on Wednesday night, he’s met with beyond rapturous applause,” Bacote said. “All these white kids are standing up and cheering. For some people, it’s almost like a conversion experience in that mission isn’t about going outside the United States. It’s about also tending to things in your own country.”
Cinematographer Daniel Long said, “There are documentaries that knock us on the head with history and ones that invite us into the history. The truth is, we need both. I think Vince and Ed did a great job of both. There is eye-opening history here, which people have viscerally responded to during screenings—either because it’s revealing of their own experiences or because they learned something new. There’s also the invitation to participate in this history as our collective church. We worked hard to make both happen.”
Media inquiries can be directed to Joe Moore at joseph.moore@wheaton.edu.