Racism, slavery and the Bible

You'll find, as you wander around the digital mountains and valleys of cyberspace, that a lot of Christian apologists trying to claim that racism isn't supported by the Bible.

Now, the tricky part that none of them wants to mention is the fact that, back in the Bad Old Days known as Biblical Times, the Middle East was not what you'd call a "racially diverse" area. There weren't a whole lot of world travellers in those days, and so people, being the small-minded bigots they are, separated themselves mostly on a tribal basis rather than the color of a man's skin.

The Romans marched way down into Africa, but the Old Testament had already been written by that time. By that same token, of course, the Egyptian had some dealings with the Nubians and other African people, but for the average tribesman running across the desert, there was really only one major race that they ever saw - the medium-brown, dark-haired folk known as the Semitic people.

Which leads me to wonder, who the hell is this guy?



However, within those limits, racism is found in the Bible, and more especially in how the Bible has been interpreted throughout history.

First, consider that the Jews are continually referred to as God's favored people (admittedly, this enhanced status hasn't seemed to help them much through history).

Deuteronomy 24:7 "If a man is caught kidnapping one of his brother Israelites and treats him as a slave or sells him, the kidnapper must die. You must purge the evil from among you." This verse quite clearly states that the Israelite is better than any other human being in the eyes of God. If an Israeli is treated as a slave, then that is bad. However, it's ok to treat other races as slaves and all but kill them (Exodus 21:20).

This attitude that the Jews are better than all other races is echoed in the New Testament, where Jesus doesn't want to help a darker-skinned Canaanite woman, saying "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel" (Matthew 15:24). Yeah, that's what the son of God would say, right?

All through the Bible, God tells the Israelites that they are His "chosen people," His "inheritance." The whole point of the Old Testament is to establish a precedent for Israelites to be God's favored people, after all.

Going back to the Canaanites, though, the "curse of Ham" (Genesis 9:20-27) is less often referred to as the "curse of Canaan." Noah got drunk and passed out naked. Ham saw him lying there, and because of that, Noah cursed Ham's son, Canaan, and all his descendent's with being enslaved to the descendants of his other sons.

Let's not get into why Noah didn't curse the one that did him wrong, the curse seems a little extreme, considering the nature of the "crime." This curse has most often been represented by those amazingly understanding ancestors of ours to be... well, let's just say "darker skin."

Which is why slaves are brown people.

This same logic has also been used in reference to the "mark of Cain" in Genesis 4:15, which was considered to be, again, the darker skin. Of course, since everybody on earth drowned except Noah and his family, anything that affects man would, logically, have to take place after the flood. So that theory seems harder to accept, right? It's just logic.

(If logic can be said to have anything to do with this story; for example, that's a mightily small gene pool for all of humanity to have sprung from. On the other hand, I suppose that inbreeding could explain a lot about humanity, wouldn't it? And then there's the whole question of the size of the ark, and the size of all the animals that were supposed to go into it. Plus, with only two of each animal, that's an even worse inbreeding problem than humanity faced.)

In the Song of Solomon, the woman is dark but comely; even though her skin is darker, she can still be pretty, right? (In the King James translation, it actually comes right out and calls her black. Nice of them. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.)

The belief that dark-skinned people are somehow cursed, and thus less important than their white brethren, has been abused by people throughout history. The Mormons even refer to white skin as "delightsome" (no, really, Joseph Smith thought that was a word) in 2 Nephi 30:6.

But don't stop there. Read something about Rev. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, the father of Southern Presbyterian University (now Rhodes College). Streets and parks are named after him throughout the South. He was also a virulent bigot, who thought the Civil War was a "holy" conflict between a righteous South and an ungodly North; he spent a lot of time and energy ensuring that Godly racial separation and Anglo-Saxon domination were reflected in both church and society.

Without slavery, he argued that blacks would suffer "rapid extermination before they had time to waste away through listlessness, filth and vice."

He also viewed the "practical extinction" of Native Americans as part of a divine plan revealed in Scripture.

So go ahead and explain. Why is a non-racist interpretation of the Bible the correct one, and all the others have been wrong for the last two thousand years?