Racism and the Bible

Racism wounds people made in the image of God, and many readers come to this question carrying those wounds. Some have been told, even in church, that the Bible ranks one people above another. Others are asking, with a searching heart, whether their own attitudes please God. The Bible does not use the modern idea of race. It speaks of nations, tribes, peoples, and languages, and what it says about those divisions applies directly to the way people are divided by race today. Its message is that every person bears God’s image and that God is gathering one family from every people.

What does the Bible say about where all peoples come from?

The first chapter of the Bible says that every human being bears the image of God:

So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27, NRSVUE

When Paul preached in Athens, he told the Greeks that the God who made the world “gives to all life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:25), and that “From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). Whether one reads Adam as a historical man or as a figure for all humanity (see Adam and Eve), the teaching is the same. Every people belongs to one human family, and every person you meet is a relative.

Jewish teachers drew the same lesson. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, says that God created the first human being alone so that no one could say to another, “My father … is greater than your father” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5).

Does the Bible show prejudice between peoples?

The Bible does not hide the hostility between peoples, and it repeatedly shows God overturning it. When Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses “because of the Cushite woman whom he had married,” God rebuked them (Numbers 12:1–9). Cush was the ancient kingdom south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan. Through the prophet Amos God asked Israel, “Are you not like the children of the Ethiopians to me, children of Israel?” (Amos 9:7). The Hebrew word translated “Ethiopians” there is Kushim, Cushites. The beloved in the Song of Songs says, “I am black and beautiful” (translated from the Hebrew¹, Song of Solomon 1:5).

Africans appear among the faithful throughout Scripture. Ebed-melech the Cushite rescued the prophet Jeremiah from a cistern (Jeremiah 38:7–10). An Ethiopian official, treasurer to the queen of the Ethiopians, was among the first converts in Acts (Acts 8:26–27). Among the prophets and teachers who led the church at Antioch were “Simeon who was called Niger” (Latin for “black”) and “Lucius of Cyrene,” a city in North Africa (Acts 13:1).

Jesus himself crossed the deepest ethnic division of his own world, between Jews and Samaritans. He spoke with a Samaritan woman at a well, though, as John notes, “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans” (John 4:9). He rebuked his disciples when they wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village (Luke 9:54–55), and he made a Samaritan the hero of his best-known parable (see the greatest commandment).

What does the New Testament teach about unity across peoples?

The early church learned slowly that the gospel was for every people. After God sent Peter to the house of a Roman centurion, Peter said, “Truly I perceive that God doesn’t show favoritism; but in every nation he who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34–35). Paul wrote to the churches of Galatia:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:27–28, NRSVUE

The Letter to the Ephesians says that Christ “broke down the middle wall of separation” (Ephesians 2:14). James calls favoritism by name: “if you show partiality, you commit sin” (James 2:9).

The Bible’s final picture of the people of God keeps their differences and ends their divisions:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.

Revelation 7:9, NRSVUE

What is the curse of Ham, and why is it wrong?

The “curse of Ham” is the false teaching that Noah condemned Africans to slavery. It rests on a story in Genesis 9. Noah became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent; his son Ham, “the father of Canaan,” saw him and told his brothers, who covered their father without looking (Genesis 9:20–23). When Noah awoke, he cursed Canaan and said that Canaan would be “a servant of servants to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25).

The idea that the curse fell on Africans appeared only sporadically in the Middle Ages and became common during the Atlantic slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when defenders of slavery in the American South used it to justify their system. A careful reading of Genesis shows that the teaching cannot stand.

Noah’s curse falls on Canaan, Ham’s son, and Ham himself is never cursed. Canaan’s descendants lived in the land of Canaan, “from Sidon—as you go toward Gerar—to Gaza” (Genesis 10:19), on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Many scholars think the story was told to explain why Israel later ruled the Canaanites. The words are spoken by Noah, a man waking from drunkenness, and Genesis never presents them as a command of God. The passage says nothing about skin color. And the Bible teaches that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). For the wider history, see whether the Bible supports slavery.

What do the mainline churches teach about racism?

The mainline churches have all condemned racism. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s 1993 social statement Freed in Christ: Race, Ethnicity, and Culture says, “Racism—a mix of power, privilege, and prejudice—is sin, a violation of God’s intention for humanity.” The United Methodist Social Principles say, “We condemn racism, ethnocentrism, tribalism,” and any belief that one group of human beings is superior to others. In 2016 the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) added to its Book of Confessions the Belhar Confession, written in South Africa in 1986, during apartheid, which confesses the unity of the church across every racial line and rejects any teaching that would divide it by race. In 1991 the Episcopal Church’s General Convention declared “that the practice of racism is sin and is plainly contrary to the norms of Holy Scripture” (Resolution 1991-B051).

The Eastern Orthodox churches reached a similar judgment about the church itself. A council of Orthodox bishops in Constantinople in 1872 condemned “phyletism,” the organizing of the church by ethnic group, as a heresy, because the church is one body in Christ in which no nation ranks above another.

For a Christian, the work against racism belongs to the ordinary life of repentance and love. It begins with examining your own heart and telling the truth about the past, and it grows into the habit of seeing every neighbor as a bearer of God’s image. For related questions, see whether Jesus was Jewish and what Jesus looked like.

Jesus taught his disciples to begin their prayer with the words “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). The word “our” takes in every nation, tribe, people, and language. Each time you pray it, you are praying as one child in a very large family, beside brothers and sisters you have not yet met.

Notes

1. Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex): שְׁחוֹרָ֤ה אֲנִי֙ וְֽנָאוָ֔ה. Shechorah means “black”; ve- means “and,” though some translations render it “but”; navah means “lovely” or “beautiful.” ↩︎