Is the Bible Racially Neutral?

Colin Kidd is Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, and The Forging of Races is his consideration of the relationship between biblical exegesis and developing paradigms of race in Protestant Northern Europe and North America. Knowing that he must enter some deeply unpleasant territory in the views of those past and present who espouse racist and racialist views, Kidd is careful to introduce his work through the modern scientific understanding of race as an entirely socially constructed phenomenon, and he is careful to ensure that nothing in his work should give succour to racists, or to those who attempt to claim divine validation for their own skin colour and culture at the expense of others.

Starting with the hypothesis that Christianity might be expected to constrain the development of racial theory because it is predicated on the belief that all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, and that Christ's redemptive sacrifice was made for all, Kidd shows how the 'racially neutral Bible' (p. 3) became a source for justifying the exploitation of groups identified as inferior races, and how new interpretations of the Bible were produced to circumvent its essential message of the unity of humanity. Kidd's particular concern is with the development of new ideas about race during the Enlightenment, as a scientific challenge to the received ideas of religion began to map out humanity into separate races sharing specific physical and mental characteristics and indeed specific religious and spiritual attributes. He goes on to show how the accommodations made between eighteenth and nineteenth century science and religion still inform the thinking of racist fundamentalists today.

Exploring the ways in which forms of pseudo-scientific racism came to be combined with scripture to justify beliefs in white supremacy, slavery and anti-Semitism, Kidd traces the often contradictory approaches to biblical exegesis, considering the various attempts made to reconcile the biblical history set out in Genesis with the apparently observable 'races' of humanity. The range of interpretation studied is extraordinarily wide, and, whilst many of the differences amongst groups such as the pre-Adamites that Kidd explores seem minor at first sight they do go to show how individuals and groups have constantly set out to support their own racism through scripture. Whether he is considering the work of the founder of modern Pentecostalism, Charles Fox Parham, (p. 214) who believed that the flood was God's punishment for inter-racial marriage, or the even more pernicious doctrines of the modern Christian Identity movement, with its notions that the Jews are the literal descendents of Satan and that they are the true Israelites (p. 219), Kidd is meticulous in drawing out the different strands that have gone to make up their ideas. Kidd also goes on to explore the development of black counter-movements such as the Nation of Islam, which he sees not as an inherently Islamic religion at all, but rather a development from the same Christian Protestant traditions that produced Christian Identity. Islam is used as a title to denote difference from 'white Christianity' and as a way of establishing a 'black religion' (p. 267).

Ultimately, Kidd sees the social construction of racism as having come not only as he had expected from misguided scientific enlightenment, but also from the Protestant tradition of scriptural analysis, where it remains on the 'eccentric fringe' (p. 276).

Whilst Kidd's work is both readable and thorough, it does suffer from certain limitations. As Kidd's discussion moves into the twentieth century it becomes increasingly focused on the United States, and there would certainly seem to be the potential to explore the, albeit short-lived, impact of Anglo-Israelism in Britain itself, or its longer term impact in Canada. Kidd also acknowledges his debt to Michael Barkun's 1997 work, Religion and the Racist Right,⁷ and it is fair to say that he adds little that is new to our understanding of the Christian Identity...