Religion: The Roots of Today's Racism? ​

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LUCIENNE BACON ('22)

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Part I: The Past

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In the 1500s, centuries before the coining of the word “racism,” the term race was used to describe certain kinships or groups of people. Its denotation of physical characteristics is attributed to societal development in the latter part of the seventeenth century. There is an established notion that categorization among groups was prevalent in ancient societies—including those of Rome, Greece, and Egypt—before the establishment of the words that would describe this behavior. Existence of these terms is evidence that social division was not new to the world come the Enlightenment and the period of colonization. However, it was this time in history that brought together behavior and ideas about biological inferiority in such a way that a long-lasting justification for slavery and inequality was formed. What must be investigated further is what made society porous to racial policy capable of inciting results that threaten the very definition of our Constitution today. With that question in mind, one must look at the development of the modern world to understand that religion stood at the forefront of human perspective. 

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Research into the most ancient civilizations turns up little evidence that the concept of race during these eras was understood or acted upon. As a Greek, one was either civilized or barbaric, Roman slaves were a spectrum of pigmentations and nationalities, and Christians endorsed talk about Africans as a part of their faith to celebrate the equality of all human beings. However, prejudices were not entirely irrelevant, because there was a clear development of Christian hostility toward Jews that would, in later centuries, be classifiable as racism. The notion that the inability of Jews to accept Christ as the Messiah would prohibit the Gospel from triumphing led Christians to draw interconnections between Judaism and the Crucifixion. Though early on, Saint Augustine's Christian doctrine, which promoted Jewish conversion as a means to salvation, to some extent inhibited the evolution of prejudices, full-fledged massacres on the basis of religion began during the First Crusade in 1096. 

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To note, though modern-day society interprets racism as discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, in developing a conscious perspective on the subject, it is crucial that one understand the word race to be a human-invented, social construct. This word refers to demarcation by characteristics. Thus, it can be conferred upon the experiences of certain religious groups in medieval times as the superseding tendencies of Christians grew with their domination of Europe. The Crusades have come to represent a landmark in the global history of race issues, and they point to the existence of racial acts even before the vocabulary existed to classify them as such. Furthermore, Christian uses of iconography and mythology to demonize Jews and Muslims during the Middle Ages reflect hegemony gone racist within the idea that the dispositions of these faiths were inherently evil. 

The consolidation of monarchial states in Europe during the late Middle Ages as a reaction to grand political and economic changes planted seeds for ethnic tension. But religion remained at the forefront of categorization; the Black Death serves as a reminder of this. Perhaps in a way similar to what can be observed in the world today, people compensated for a lack of understanding with trust in those with power. In fourteenth-century Europe, power was held by the Roman Catholic Church. So, as the plague ravaged across the land, decimating populations, people turned to religion to give explanation to their misfortune. Allegations of Jews poisoning wells grew from centuries of violence against Jews and a well-established Christian hierarchy that would not allow for their societal gains. At the same time that this demonization was taking place, a strong sense of negrophilia spread across Europe. Central to this was the legend of Prester John, a Black man of non-European origins whose apparent purpose was to aid Christians in their fight against Islam during the Crusades. Though he was first identified with India, stories later wrote him into Africa, specifically Ethiopia. For several centuries, stories of John underwent mutations of many forms that addressed matters from Genghis Khan to European exploration of the African coast by the likes of Henry the Navigator. 

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This myth has long outlined a counter-argument to those who state that Europe was predisposed to prejudice against Africans. However, the argument was something of a cultural phenomenon and a superficial reaction that could not be used to dictate the realities of actual encounters. In fact, when such did occur in the mid-fifteenth century, Portuguese explorers were exposed to widespread slavery, especially in Iberia, that aided in shaping European association of dark skin with servitude. For reference, long before this, Muslim cosmology had linked sub-Saharan Africans to the Sons of Ham, a connection that fostered the imposition of slavery on the basis of heathenism. This connection legitimized exploitation, and Christian Iberians were quick to engage. This occurred at a juncture in which distinction by "race" came to fruition among Muslim and Christian populations on the Iberian Peninsula in the fourteenth century. When the Portuguese arrived in the latter part of the fifteenth century, they, having previously had a depleted supply of servile labor, quickly accustomed themselves to this racial dogma in part because it had been adopted by their religious equals, the Iberian Christians. 

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Resulting from these expeditions, the first Black slaves arrived on Portuguese soil in 1444. Though forced to cite justification for their pagan captives, they associated it with a just war against Catholic heathens, and very few challengers stood in their way. In fact, the Catholic Church came to embrace colored inferiority when they recognized that their Muslim counterparts did so as well. Thus, Iberian slavery was a catalyst to Spanish and, eventually, European subordination by color. However, this was a postcondition of aversion drafted by incompatible religious beliefs. 

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A similar incompatibility was represented interreligiously in Spain during the Inquisitions. However, the consequences of the relationship among Jews, Jewish converts, and Christians is considered by many historians to be the foundation of discrimination based on biological race. In 1449, following a tax revolt, Jewish converts were targeted by Pero Sarmiento, an official who issued the Sentencia-Estatuto. These were the first recognized racial exclusion laws in modern history. The issuing barred Jews, even those claiming acceptance of Catholic faith, from holding public office or receiving Church property unless they could prove four generations of Christian affiliation. The fact that the biblical allegation of Jews killing Christ was an inherited sin incapable of being disposed of by baptism is representative of a racial, physical definition of Judaism. These events gave rise to the requirement of documentation proving blood purity, such that stigmatization by ethnicity represented the transfer from a religious context to a biological one. Though the same idea of “purity of blood”—limpieza de sangre—was enforced upon Moors, their overall resistance of assimilation limited the extent to which it could evolve into racism. Nevertheless, the overall societal development in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses the establishment of purity as a form of superiority. The consequences of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish hierarchal inscription brought forth a racial ideal that evolved into a logical practice. 

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With expansion to the New World, this idea of limpieza entwined itself with the colonial mindset and the African slave trade. In Spain, there had been a noticeable development of a quasi-racial religious nationalism, such that those who could prove their ancestors were free of Jewish or Moorish blood thought themselves to be nobility. In the Americas, this was translated to the association of white skin with majesty. This mutation must be examined because, while religion had long served as an initiative for slavery, it could not, however, explain segregation based on pigmentation. This is seen within the apprehension of “Christian freedom” such that faith came to determine liberty. Also, in Florida in the seventeenth century, the Spanish crown granted freedom in exchange for conversion. But this held true only in the early years of settlement as many slaveholders began to fear baptism would rid them of their workforce. So, as it had during Portuguese arrival to Africa in the fifteenth century, the invocation of the Curse of Ham ushered in the connection between Africans and perpetual slavery. This became a justification for slave traders from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. On the grounds of religion, it rationalized the act of holding Black Christian men in bondage. And it allowed the normalization of stigma to be digested by the policies that would shape nations for centuries to come. For example, in 1677, Virginia issued a law that stated conversion was not a ticket to freedom, giving way to the idea of hereditary heathenism. This marks the emancipation of racism from the Christian ideal of universalism. Slavery could become a social ideology based on the notion of race, unprotected by the declaration of equality for all in the eyes of God. 

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It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the term race took on a definition similar to the way in which it is understood today, a description of biological phenotype. In America, this shift resulted from the introduction of pseudoscience to counteract resistance to slavery. Internationally, it also grew from the Enlightenment ideal of using reason to categorize the natural world. This evolved into hierarchical systems of similarities and differences in which race, an established social norm, could be used to "prove" the logic of a drafted natural order. 

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By the late seventeen hundreds, the slave trade was coming to an end, and racism and slavery had been institutionalized. So, it is under this curtain that a nation was built around a narrow definition of freedom and liberty for all. This is because, from the agrarian South to the markets of the North, slavery had become the optimization of the American experiment. It was the soul of production. The separation of religion and race in this period allowed for freedom in the former while maintaining capture in the latter. The Fundamental Constitutions of North Carolina, drafted by John Locke and implemented in 1669, granted slaves a choice of church while firmly underscoring the point that this would not alter their inferior status. The document notes “religion...shall be lawful for slaves, as well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them shall think best...yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from the civil dominion his master hath on him” (Wenger).  It was this notation of religious interpretation that inspired a regarding of slavery as a matter of conscience. In the years leading to the Civil War, this analogy served to counteract calls for abolition and, as such, religion was a proponent of inaction and a silencer of critique. Following Southern defeat in 1865, certain church leaders sought out the religion of the Lost Cause, a testament to white victimization that idealized the antebellum South as the home of Christian piety. This joining of social culture with religion gave rise to a climate of continued segregation. The denouncement of this plague would not come until 1995 when the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, formally apologized for its role in promoting the continuation of slavery and segregation. “Therefore, be it resolved, That we, the messengers to the Sesquicentennial meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, assembled in Atlanta, Georgia, June 20-22, 1995, unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin...we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty.” Though the speech was credited for its historical accuracy, it was criticized for looking at the past without drawing interconnections to the present and future. It stopped short of acknowledging the continued division of race and civics, such that it impeded a modern-day address to racial inequality.

 

Part II: The Future

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Now I hope that as you read this, the section on the present, you do so with an open-minded recognition, that, for all who live in the United States, this is our world today, one in which injustice prevails and unity is interpreted as a far-left attack on our government. But I ask that whether you agree or disagree with my commentary, whether you feel angry or depressed, inspired or offended, please, keep reading. Keep reading because to feel something is to feel more than nothing. And it is from something that change can arise, but with nothing, we get lost in darkness and end up befriending the worst of humanity.

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Now, racism under the domain of Christianity continues to be a proponent of white supremacy even today. In part, this has to do with America's ecosystem of Christian nationalism that preaches the maintenance of social order. As such, it threatens those of color, Muslims, immigrants, and the like. A study conducted in 2019 by Barna, an evangelical polling firm, found that 38 percent of White Christians believe the United States shelters a race problem while 78 percent of Black Christians made this same claim. This perspective has also been seen to create a chasm between Black Lives Matter activists and Christian identities. There is an unsubstantiated claim by onlookers that Black Lives Matter is anti-religious and incompatible with Christianity. However, it must be recognized that religion is perception, and in a large way, these assumptions are the core of attitudes of supremacy.

 

Association with a White Christian denomination accounts for a 10 percent increase in racist outlook. So it is from the historical condemnation of Blacks to servitude to modern-day attempts to inauthenticate their beliefs that one notes the persistence of religious division by categorization. Those who try to condone the movement on a religious basis must realize that the movement considers itself spiritually empowering, it aids the development of religious inclusivity, and it has inspired the likes of Buddhist leaders. But what is most important, many of its members believe in a God and their right to do so is as just as anyone else's. It should be noted, however, that there has been a substantial decline in the number of religiously affiliated individuals within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This has worked to disempower churches at the forefront of segregated faith, but it has also offered them a unique opportunity to stand on the right side of history. They can use their platform to support activists and speak out on issues such as police brutality. If engaged with, churches and White Christians will be offering far more than easily misunderstood reconciliations for historic behavior. They will be actively seeking justice and, as such, confronting the long-standing discriminatory attitudes of their faith. 

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As always, it seems necessary to remind readers that the whole of White Christendom does not align itself with supremacy. Broad wording, such as used above, could seem to imply this, which is a form of racism in itself. But I have not done this to inaccurately affiliate; I have done this because White Christians, no matter their stance on race issues, are all interconnected to a faith grappling with demons from the past. It is counterproductive for those claiming their personal morals do not align with their religious ties to racism to stand down, especially considering that our country and the world around it are functioning in an atmosphere of revolutionary feeling. Instead, it is the duty of all right-minded White Christians to introduce action to a nation surging with racial violence while (currently) controlled by an administration that promotes it. In an anti-racism protest in June in New York, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other denominations joined together and were supported by clergy members from churches including the Southern Baptist Convention.

 

In events such as these, when people from all religious, political, and economic backgrounds come together, we can see American transformation—we can see the American dream. And in some instances, we can almost reach out and touch it. But to get farther, we must unite. If we stand together, if we call out together, if we cry together, if we love together, righteous change will come.