Theopedia

Racism

“From one man he made every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth.”

— Acts 17:26

Definition

Racism is the sin of treating another human being as inferior, or according them less dignity and honor, because of their race or ethnicity.1 Scripture grounds human worth not in ancestry or appearance but in creation: God made every nation of mankind from one man, so that all human beings share a single origin and together bear his image (Gen. 1:26-27; 9:6; Acts 17:26). Racism denies that shared origin and likeness. Scripture treats it as an offense against God himself, not only against the person wronged (James 3:9).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession does not use the word racism, a term that postdates the confession by centuries, and has no chapter devoted to the topic. It does supply the two dogmatic categories the wider Reformed ethical tradition draws on to address it. Its chapter on creation states that God made humanity “after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness,” with no distinction of nation or descent built into that constitution.2 Its chapter on the moral law summarizes what human beings owe one another, not only God, in the Decalogue’s second table, “written in two tables, the four first containing our duty towards God, and the other six, our duty to man.”3 Reformed ethicists draw directly on these categories, rather than any dedicated confessional statement, to name racial prejudice as sin: because every human being bears God’s image, God “prohibits murderous violence on the basis that human beings are made in his image” (Gen. 9:5-6), and James “condemns verbal violence for the same reason” (James 3:9).1

Biblical Basis

Genesis roots all human beings in a single origin: God made mankind, male and female, in his own image (Gen. 1:26-27), and every nation descends from that one common stock (Acts 17:26; cf. Gen. 3:20). Bavinck writes that humanity “is not an aggregate of individuals but an organic unity, one race, one family,” all “blood relatives of one another,” not “a heap of souls piled on a piece of ground.”4 The creation account draws no distinction of superiority or inferiority among human beings, and Genesis draws no attention to Adam and Eve’s own ethnicity.1

That common image grounds the protection owed to every human being regardless of ancestry. After the flood, God tells Noah that whoever sheds another’s blood forfeits his own, “for God made man in his own image” (Gen. 9:6); James applies the same reasoning to speech, forbidding believers from cursing “people who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9). Jesus extends the sixth commandment to the unrighteous anger and contempt behind an act of violence, not only the act itself (Matt. 5:21-22). To hold another person in contempt, or treat them as inferior, because of race is on this reasoning an offense against the God whose image that person bears.1

Scripture traces racial prejudice to the same universal corruption that produced humanity’s first murder: not long after the Fall, Cain kills his brother Abel out of envy (Gen. 4:1-8), and James locates the same root in the “passions” that “wage war” within fallen people generally (James 4:1-2). Magnuson applies this diagnosis directly to racism: it is “pervasive because sin is pervasive,” rooted “deep in the heart and not merely in overt acts,” and expressed as often in favoritism toward one’s own group as in open hostility.1

The New Testament states the positive counterpart to that diagnosis in the reconciling work of Christ. Paul tells the Galatians that in Christ “there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female,” since all who believe are one in him (Gal. 3:28; cf. Col. 3:11), and describes the cross as having broken down “the dividing wall of hostility” separating Jew from Gentile, creating “one new man” from the two and reconciling both to God “in one body” (Eph. 2:14-16). Stott extends the same reasoning to ethnic difference generally: Paul grounds his case against idolatry in one Creator over “every nationality” (Acts 17:26), and “he could equally well have deduced from it the folly and evil of racism, for if he is the God of all human beings, this will affect our attitude to them as well as to him.”5

Historical Development

The emergence of race-based slavery

Slavery in the ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds, including the slavery Scripture itself regulates, was not organized around race: it followed capture in war, debt, birth, or self-sale, and “racial factors played no role” in first-century Roman slavery, where freed slaves of any background could gain citizenship and “easily blended into the general population within one generation.”1 Dividing humanity into races distinguished by skin color, and ranking those races by supposed differences in temperament and intelligence, is a comparatively recent development, emerging in the late fifteenth century to justify a new, race-based slave trade.1 In the nineteenth century, that racial hierarchy was given further, pseudo-scientific support through appeals to Darwinian evolution, reinforcing both slavery and, later, segregation.1

American slavery, segregation, and the churches

American Christians were not exempt from this history; some constructed theological defenses of slavery and, later, segregation. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 as a missionary-sending body after other American missionary societies refused to commission slaveholders. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes that the convention “was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument.”6 The pattern recurred after the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education: Southern Baptist ethicist Henlee H. Barnette catalogued the biblical arguments made for and against segregation in the years that followed, noting that of more than thirty thousand Southern Baptist churches in 1958, only fourteen had black members.7

The Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney is a documented example of the same pattern within Reformed theology itself. Before the Civil War he defended Southern slavery as part of a patriarchal social order he called “Bible Republicanism,” and continued defending it in print after the war;8 the historian Sean Lucas describes Dabney’s broader legacy as an “ideological fusion” that defended “sanctified social distinctions” of class, sex, and race.9

Modern reckoning

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, whose own founders held slaves, commissioned and published a report on slavery and racism in its founding and history in December 2018, the year after Mohler’s own essay on the seminary’s origins appeared in print.6

Objections and Responses

Critical race theory offers a more adequate account of racism than a theology of individual sin does. Magnuson grants that critical race theorists are right to call attention to race as a social construct historically used to defend white supremacy, and right that racism is not confined to overt acts of prejudice. His disagreement is with where the diagnosis ends, not with the observation: Scripture’s category of sin already accounts for the same pattern critical race theory calls structural: “like individuals, groups are often self-centered and self-protective,” resisting “giving up power, opportunity, and benefits to others” and developing rationales to maintain the status quo “even when it is not valid.”1 On Magnuson’s account the deeper cause is universal human sinfulness rather than the theory’s own categories, and the remedy is correspondingly the gospel rather than education or policy alone: “You cannot educate people out of racism, racial hatred, and animosity.”10

If people are unaware of their own prejudice, can it fairly be called sin? Magnuson answers that unawareness does not make prejudice innocent: “blind spots are difficult to uncover, and we are often unaware of our own prejudices,” much as someone can be guilty of lust well before committing adultery.1 Jesus makes the same point about anger and murder: the commandment reaches the unrighteous contempt behind an act, not only the act itself (Matt. 5:21-22), so an unexamined prejudice is not exempt from being sin merely because it has not yet been examined.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 16, “Race Relations.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 2. ↩

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩

  5. John Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 287, quoted in Magnuson, chap. 16. ↩

  6. R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Conceived in Sin, Called by the Gospel: The Root Cause of the Stain of Racism in the Southern Baptist Convention,” in Removing the Stain of Racism from the Southern Baptist Convention: Diverse African American and White Perspectives, eds. Jarvis J. Williams and Kevin M. Jones (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2017), 3, quoted in Magnuson, chap. 16. ↩ ↩2

  7. Henlee H. Barnette, Introducing Christian Ethics (Nashville: Broadman, 1961), 135-39, 141, quoted in Magnuson, chap. 16. ↩

  8. Isaac Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres: Robert Dabney and Charles Hodge on the Submission of Wives and Enslaved People,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 117-18. ↩

  9. Tuttle, “Slavery, Submission, and Separate Spheres,” 118-19. ↩

  10. Thabiti Anyabwile, “What Does the Gospel Say?,” in The Gospel and Racial Reconciliation, eds. Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker, The Gospel for Life Series (Nashville: B&H, 2016), 28, quoted in Magnuson, chap. 16. ↩