Rev. Olaleye has challenged the popular argument that Christianity should simply be dismissed as “the white man’s religion.”
Responding to claims that Europeans took away African traditional religion and replaced it with Christianity, he pointed out that pre-Christian Europeans also had their own traditional religions and deities.
“We had Sango, they had Thor,” he said, using the Yoruba and Norse traditions as an example.
His broader point is that Jesus Christ and Christianity did not originate in Europe.
Christianity began in the Middle East, and Christian communities were already established in parts of Africa centuries before modern European colonialism.
That does not erase the historical reality that colonial powers and missionaries later spread European expressions of Christianity across Africa, sometimes alongside coercive colonial systems.
But reducing Jesus Christ himself to a “white man’s religion” leaves out a much longer and more complicated history.
For Christians, the Gospel is not supposed to belong to one race, continent or culture.
Jesus is not European property. The Gospel is for every nation, tribe and people.