The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 (review)

This wide-ranging intellectual history explores how Protestant theologians and scholars explained race distinctions over a four-hundred-year period. The Forging of Races convincingly demonstrates that Protestant theology was central to definitions of race and to the policies and practices organizing the cultural meaning of racial distinctions.

The first chapter, "Race in the Eye of the Beholder," lucidly discusses what the word "race" has meant to theologians, anthropologists, politicians, and phrenologists in different eras. While this chapter's claims will not surprise many historians of race, it necessarily emphasizes that race is a cultural category, and it demonstrates that our understanding of racial thinking should be attentive to Protestant theology because it was such a powerful part of the culture. It would be a very useful introduction to the history of race for undergraduate students.

The subsequent chapters deal with the early modern period, the Enlightenment, the crisis of slavery in the nineteenth century, the Aryan moment, other forms of racialized religion, and black counter-theologies. Each chapter explores how theologians and religious scholars defined race as a problem. Many of the theologians examined are British and American, but Colin Kidd also quotes some Dutch, German, and French writers. In the early modern period the question of racial origins preoccupied many thinkers who wondered why, if there were but one creation followed by the flood, was humanity so diverse? The unity of humanity was essential, for without it, Adam's sin and Christ's redemption would not include all humanity. On the other hand, if all descended from Adam, when did racial distinctions occur and for what reason? Others puzzled about how North America was peopled after the flood and the relationship between these people and others.

With the expansion of europeans beyond the historical boundaries of Christendom, the question of race became both more puzzling and more pressing to theologians. slavery posed a particular problem for some white Christians in the american south. Kidd notes that race slavery would have been much easier to defend "had they not been so troubled by the heretical implications of polygenesis. Was it worth sacrificing the truths of Christianity to maintain the South's 'peculiar institution'?" (120) Kidd argues that by the nineteenth century race seemed to offer some an authentic, natural basis for history. But, as he notes, the "now apparent contradictions within scripture and between scripture and science were being resolved at the cost of injecting a novel racialist hermeneutic into readings of Genesis. The Bible had been conserved but as a saga of racial superiority" (163).

In chapter 6, "The aryan moment," Kidd discusses nineteenth- and twentieth-century biological theories of race and the intense interest in studying the ancient Holy Land and the racial origins of Biblical figures. Kidd's careful unpacking of these debates reveals how the wider culture reshaped theological concerns and how theologians in turn answered certain questions about racial origins that contributed to wider racial ideologies. The devastating outcome of anti-Semitism will make this chapter particularly significant to a wide audience of scholars.

Chapter 7 examines a range of what Kidd calls "racialised religions," religious movements that were concerned with racial distinctions at their core—even to the point of obsession with physiology and craniology. He includes in this group the British Israelites, who claimed that Britons were one of the lost tribes of Israel and the inheritors of particular Biblical promises and blessings. Kidd's discussion of this movement puts what might otherwise seem an eccentric and enigmatic theology into theological currents of the time. Also in this chapter is a discussion of the Mormon church, Christian identity, and theosophy. It is puzzling to find theosophy here as it was not a Protestant faith and drew upon very different traditions to build its theology.

The final chapter, "Black Counter-Theologies," is the most...