Someone's in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall

America’s so-called “Negro problem” has always been, at the same time, a theological problem. W. E. B. Du Bois put this clearly when, in 1913, he called the church “the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice.” ¹ “The Negro problem is the test of the church,” he wrote, and since American Christianity “was the bulwark of American slavery,” it is hard to imagine that Du Bois was very optimistic about the outcome of this test. ² He does allow himself a touch of optimism, however, when, in the same essay, he muses upon the historical interrelation between religious racism and American science. “Even the rock of ‘Science,’” he writes, “on which the white church rested with such beautiful faith, hoping to prove the majority of humanity inhuman, . . . even this Rock of Ages is falling before honest investigation.” ³

While this rock of science may have been crumbling in 1913, sixty years earlier it was just beginning to form. In “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” (1854), Frederick Douglass launched a sustained attack against the mid-century vogue of American ethnology, the scientific school of so-called racial difference. Armed with a theory of multiple creations—polygenesis—the ethnologists offered a new weapon to the arsenal of pro-slavery discourse, one that attempted, in Douglass’s words, to “read the Negro out of the human family.” ⁴ The theory of polygenesis proved tremendously attractive to pro-slavery theologians, for it sketched a world in which some “human families” were better descended than others. Some could trace themselves back to Adam and Eve, and those who could not were then Biblically constituted as appropriate material for slavery. The ethnologists offered scientific sanction for a Biblical theory of slavery at a time when the tension between science and religion was on the rise. Scientific “discoveries” often contradicted Biblical “truth,” creating a double bind for so-called Christian slaveholders and their apologists. The ethnologists offered one way out of this double bind by giving theological racism a Biblically acceptable narrative of polygenesis. ⁵

In the years following Douglass’s essay, scores of American scientists and theologians returned to the Biblical scene of the Garden of Eden as the setting for their racist imaginings of “the Negro’s” place (or more accurately, lack of place) in the human family. In so doing, they found a black presence at the scene of the temptation, a black man where the snake should have been. Concerned as they were with the question of so-called racial purity, this black man’s proximity to Eve was cause for alarm.

Recently collected in Anti-Black Thought, 1863–1925: “The Negro Problem,” edited by John David Smith, these Eden revisionists offer a window into the process by which science and religion came to mediate and shape white America’s attempt, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, to rid itself once and for all of “the Negro.” The theo-science that resulted from this attempt has a great deal to tell us about the shaky and often surreal infrastructure of whiteness as a form of racial, sexual, and intellectual anxiety.

Douglass was quick to recognize the dubious entanglement of anti-black science with conventional Christian theology. In “The Claims of the Negro” Douglass foregrounds the fundamental biases at the heart of so-called scientific objectivity. “It is the province of prejudice to blind,” Douglass writes,

and scientific writers, not less than others, write to please, as well as to instruct, and even unconsciously to themselves, (sometimes,) sacrifice what is true to what is popular. Fashion is not confined to dress; but extends to philosophy as well. ⁶

With characteristic sarcasm, Douglass dismisses “all the scientific moonshine that would connect men with monkeys,” and calls for the nation’s moral growth to keep up with its alleged “increase of knowledge.” ⁷

Douglass recognizes, however, that it is not simply “prejudice” that produces faulty science, but prejudice mixed with a misappropriation of Biblical authority. The power of the Bible in the war over the racial past...