Scripture, Enlightenment, and the Invention of Race: Colin Kidd’s The Forging of Races

Colin Kidd’s The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006) offers an insightful—indeed invaluable—account of the interaction of race and religion in the Anglophone Atlantic world of the last 400 years. Most useful is Kidd’s thoughtful—if inconsistent—refusal to overhype that connection at the heart of his book. He generally resists the temptation to proclaim “the invention of race” as essentially theological, which allows him to illuminate the complex interactions between theology and racial thinking. His work is especially valuable for showing the importance of now unfamiliar philological concepts of race and religion to the origins of modern literary and historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. Kidd is not entirely successful at avoiding hype; inflated claims in the introduction—“scripture has been for much of the early modern and modern eras the primary cultural influence on the forging of races” (19)—do a disservice to the intelligence and scrupulousness of the book’s larger argument. The jacket copy is more accurate: “Kidd shows that, while the Bible itself is colour-blind, its interpreters have imported racial significance into the scriptures.” Indeed, unlike other scholars interested in the place of the “Noachids” (the sons and descendents of Noah) in the development of racial thought, Kidd gets the importance of such theologically-based racial thinking in clear perspective: crucially, despite the overstatement I have quoted from his introduction, he insists that racial thinking did not become culturally central until after the early modern period.

This historical understanding distances Kidd from followers of Winthrop Jordan’s epoch-making 1968 book on the origins of race White Over Black¹ (whose ranks include a surprising number of literary critics, especially among early modernists) and thus aligns Kidd with the social-constructionist side of the debate on the relation of race to modernity known as the “origins debate.”² Still, Kidd, like Jordan, employs an intellectual history approach. He looks to published texts to establish a genealogy of racial thinking in British theological work from the early modern period to the present. While he organizes his study by moving from text to text, or thinker to thinker, he is keenly aware of the broader cultural context of those texts, and he therefore argues that early modern texts are marked by the absence of racial thinking rather than anticipating it.

Indeed, Kidd insists that through the eighteenth century, theological concerns did much more to inhibit than to promote investigation into, and theorization of, human difference as “racial.” This observation—which accords with recent work on the evasiveness and difficulty of racial conceptions of humanity in the eighteenth century and earlier in the work of scholars including Roxann Wheeler, Dror Wahrman, and Christopher L. Brown—raises immediate problems for larger claims for theology as a motor of changing conceptions of racial difference in the modern world.³ Indeed, as Kidd notes, in the early modern era and the eighteenth century, theology was a drag on the conceptualization and expression of ideas of racial difference.

Although Kidd clearly shows in his “Prologue” that he sees race as a pernicious, scientifically unjustifiable fiction, he nonetheless offers some peculiar expressions that seem to decry the failure of white Europeans to move away from Christian theology toward racial thinking more quickly, suggesting that he is, for brief moments, caught up in a strange teleology—familiar from works like Jordan’s—that sees early racial thinking as motivated by a scientific spirit, and therefore as, to some degree, both progressive and realistic: “The deepest impact made by theology on the construction of race was thus, arguably, of a negative kind; quietly, subtly, and indirectly, theological needs drew white Europeans into a benign state of denial, a refusal to accept that human differences were literally, anything other than skin deep” (26). On the one hand, this failure is “benign”; on the other, Kidd suggests that the refusal to see race as more than “skin deep” is a form of “denial.” Denial of what exactly? Earlier, Kidd has argued that...