At the Intersection of Faith, Certainty, and Pain

A street corner conversation with the Watchmen for Israel.

By Wen Gao

October 16, 2026

People & Places | Essays

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If you spend time at the Delmar Loop on a Saturday evening, chances are you have walked past a group of African American males in headbands with spaceship symbols. They stand behind boards covered in slavery photographs. And beside those, a stereotypical image of God as an old, bearded, White man with “666” scrawled across his forehead.

The first few times, I did not feel comfortable about these things and just walked faster. I thought my life would never cross with theirs and I preferred it that way.

Then one day, as I pass, someone shouts “Chinese!” in my direction. I do not think it was good opening line for making friends.

They show passersby what slavery and racism cost people; however, at the same time they make me feel uneasy with our nationality. These ideas do not fit together. These people were unhinged, I think.

I just want to know how a person holds both of those ideas in their head at once since one contradicts the other.

So, when I pass by again after dinner, I sneakily memorize the name on their group T-shirts—Watchmen for Israel (WFI). Back home, I google them, trying to understand what I had just experienced. WFI sits inside a specific theological lineage within the broader Black Hebrew Israelite movement. As far as I could tell, there are three things they  believe:

1. That the Trinity is false.
2. That salvation is not meant for all of humanity.
3. That Jesus is racially Black.

And then, buried a few links deeper: some adherents believe White people were literally created in a lab. I read that sentence three times, just to make sure I had not misread it.

I have spent years, on and off, looking for something to believe in, trying different churches, reading around, attending different culture festivals but I found no place solid enough to stop asking questions about it. I did not understand how this faith community could have such unshaken “certainty” about the world. Especially a certainty that does not make sense to me. I felt curious about it.

Last Saturday, my partner and I hit a bar at Delmar Loop, and a couple drinks in, I feel like I have the courage to chat with WFI. My husband says please do not. He can not stop me approaching WFI, so he runs away. I have never seen that man move so fast in his life.

I pause. I still am not that ready. So, I hang back behind a group of high school girls they are preaching to, listening and working up the nerve. I can not believe we wind up having a two-hour conversation.

“Never trust the enemy. Never trust your enemy. That do not mean you gotta hate him. That just mean you do not sit in no car with him in the back seat. You do not go on no boats with him. You do not go on no island with 1000s of them.

“Like iron rust. The moisture from the iron will make iron rust… he might be old. I [sic] love this and that, but just like iron rust, he is going to change. You are going to see the rust on him. You are going to see that he is your enemy…”

The girls walk off. I take a deep breath then step forward and ask if I could talk to them. No one looked at me. I ask again. Still nothing. I do not leave. I just stand there. After a while, the man in the middle finally looks up and waves me over. “What is your question?” he asks confidently but still does not look at me.

“What do you believe? For real.”

He does not answer directly. Instead, he asks if I am a Christian. I tell him I go to the church cross street.

“Oh, you are at one of those,” he says, and reaches for the Bible.

“First and foremost, we obey God rather than men,” he says.

“A lot of people in church, whatever church that may be, they listen to what the pastor says over what God says. We do not follow what men say. We yield to the Bible.”

Then he asks: do I believe in God? I say yes. “Do you yield to the Bible? Whatever it says do you accept it?” I say I do. I want to see where he is going with this.

“Okay, let us read.” He asks the man next to him to read from Acts 5:30–31. “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you put to death by hanging him on a cross. He is the One whom God exalted to His right hand as a Prince and a Savior . . .” Then he stops and asks me directly: “Who is he a savior for? Who is he coming to save?”

I say, all people with a little bit doubt. I am worried there is a trap in the question.

“Okay, all. Now let us see what the Bible says.”

 “‘He is a prince and a savior to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins’ Where is ‘all’ in that?”

“Israel! Israel! Israel!” the whole group repeats with a drumbeat.

They are trying to establish their viewpoint.

I say “Yes, Israel, but what do you believe?”

He turns the question back on me again

“Did your Church you go to teach you that God hates people?”

“No.” I never thought about God hating people.

He tells the man next to him, “Let us read Malachi 1:3, ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated…’

“The Lord hates this nation. Did you know about that? Did your church teach you that? They just taught you love, love, love, right? Just love, love, no matter what you do, Jesus’ gonna love you,” He mocks.

“It is a language barrier,” he says. I thought he meant my English.

“No, I can understand you fine.”

“See, you do not understand.” He taps the Bible. “Spiritual language. They are of the flesh, we are of the spirit. These things were revealed unto us.”

And he gives me the word: Balance.

“But love’s opposite is not hated, it is indifference,” I reply.

He says “No, no, it is hate.” But he does  not offer an explanation.

I keep turning it over. He just keeps saying “No, it is hate.”  This seems like non-arguable truth for him.

I guess it is a dead end for us. He does not know it yet, but I think he is about to prove me right.

I try to build a bridge instead of an argument. I  tell him about Chinese railroad workers, how they  crossed an ocean, were paid less than White laborers for the same labor, died in great numbers. I tell him once in the history in China women lost their names to husbands, to fathers before that; they were property changing hands with a marriage certificate.

“While Chinese, we made the railroad…” I try to explain.

“No comparison,” he interrupts. “She is going there.” He turns around and tells his comrade. It sounds like he knows the shape of my argument.

I want to be careful here, because I have no intention to enter a pain competition. Sufferings should not be measured against other sufferings. That is not my real question. What I try to question is did other people’s pain matter to his God at all, or only Israel’s?

He never allows me go that far. I want to hear if he thinks I am wrong If so, I want to know why he thinks that way. Then I can try my best to understand his logic.

There is no room left to argue with what he has just said. That was the strange part. If he had been angry, I would have had something to push against, I guess. Anger is at least an opening where we can meet it, where we could keep talking equally. Just indifference as what I said before. Indifference, nothing on this side to knock on. You cannot build a following around not caring. You cannot stand on a sidewalk for two hours defending a shrug; no crowd can gather because of indifference.

Hate is usable. Hate can be staged. It does not even need to have the right target. Westboro Baptist Church, for years, picketed American soldiers’ funerals, believing God was punishing America’s tolerance of homosexuality by killing its soldiers. But in fact, soldiers had nothing to do with homosexuality or the tolerance of it.  I guess soldiers just happened to be public enough to scapegoat.

You cannot run a belief system on indifference. Without an enemy , suffering means nothing. It could be just bad luck. There is no justice to wait for or demand.

The pain of  African Americans is real; slavery is a long story, and racial  discrimination is ongoing. Maybe, when a person is carrying that much weight, logic simply is not the point. Maybe asking “does this argument hold together” is the wrong question to bring to someone who just wants to find where he belongs. I do not think I will ever be able to understand that the way he does. I am not sure I have the right to say I understand it at all.

I still do not agree with them, theoretically, but I did think I was so wrong thinking  them unhinged because it made me feel safe. It let me stand outside whatever was happening and feel morally good about myself.

I felt respected after I talked to them. They had tried to ignore me, but I had not let them do that to me. That was where the conversation opened and gave me more to think about. Also, if he had not been that honest about what he believed, this conversation never would have happened at all. I would rather talk to someone who says the ugly thing out loud than someone who smiles and hides it. At least I know what I was standing in front of when we had this conversation.

About 9 pm I ask for a flyer, and am ready to go home.

“Can I get one?” I ask, pointing at the stack in his hand.

“You can find us online,” he says.

“Why not just give me one?” I ask. “You literally just said racism was wrong. What is the harm in one flyer?”

He does not answer that. He looks past me instead.

“You gave one to that guy who walked by two minutes ago,” I say. “A Black guy. I saw you did it.”

He finally gives me a reason. “You are not an Israelite,” he says finally. “That is not for you.”

I thank them for their patience. 

Why God with 666 on his forehead was on their poster, I still do not know. But what I knew is they were not crazy.

I wonder how a person can carry that much hate and think it is good for himself.

Where is all of it supposed to go?