What does the Bible say about racism?

Question 60030.

Racism is one of the oldest and most persistent evils in human history, and Scripture gives us the tools to name it for what it is. Before we get to any modern argument about terminology or policy, there is a straightforward biblical account of why treating people as lesser on the basis of ancestry or skin is not simply distasteful but wicked.

I want to set that out first, because Christians who begin with the current political vocabulary usually end up arguing about the vocabulary. Start where the Bible starts and the ground is much firmer.

One family, from one man

Genesis knows nothing of separate origins for different peoples. There is one couple, one line, one flood, one family from which every nation descends. Paul states it directly in Athens, saying that God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth. On the Bible’s own account, every human being alive is a distant cousin.

That single fact dismantles the foundation on which racism has always been built. The idea of separate races as distinct kinds of humanity, some closer to the animal and some closer to the divine, is a modern invention dressed up as science, and Genesis rules it out before it starts. There is one race, and it is the human one, descended from one couple and standing together before one God.

The image of God is not distributed unevenly

Every person, of every people, bears the image of God. The Hebrew word tselem in Genesis 1 is applied to humanity without qualification, and no group has more of it than another. That is why James can say that with the same tongue we bless the Lord and curse people who are made in the likeness of God, and treat it as a monstrous contradiction.

Racism is therefore not a social awkwardness or a failure of manners. It is a lie told about God, because it says that a person He made in His own likeness is worth less than another. Contempt aimed at an image bearer travels back to the one whose image it is, which is why Scripture treats this so severely.

Scripture is not quiet on the subject

When Miriam and Aaron criticised Moses because of his Cushite wife, God’s response was immediate and severe. The genealogy of Jesus in Matthew names Rahab the Canaanite and Ruth the Moabite, from a people Israel had every historical reason to despise. The first named convert in Acts after Pentecost’s crowd is an Ethiopian official, and the church at Antioch that sent out Paul had among its leaders a man called Simeon who was called Niger and Lucius of Cyrene.

Jesus deliberately walked through Samaria, spoke publicly with a Samaritan woman when His own disciples were shocked at it, and made a Samaritan the hero of His most famous story about who counts as a neighbour. Racism was a live and vicious reality in the first century, and none of this is accidental.

Where the church has to be honest

We cannot preach on this subject while pretending our own history is clean. Christians defended the transatlantic slave trade. Preachers misused the curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 to justify the enslavement of African peoples, which is a reading the text will not carry and which was invented to serve an interest. Churches in South Africa gave apartheid theological cover. Congregations in Britain turned away Caribbean believers who had come here expecting a welcome from their fellow Christians.

That history is real, and admitting it costs us nothing we should want to keep. The same faith also produced Wilberforce and the abolition movement, and the black churches whose worship has enriched this country enormously. Telling the whole truth about both is the only honest way to speak about racism from a pulpit.

What kind of sin this is

At root it is pride, which is the parent of most other sins, and it is a form of idolatry, because it takes something incidental such as ancestry and turns it into a measure of worth that only God is entitled to assign. It usually travels with fear as well, since we despise most reliably what we do not know.

Because it is sin, it belongs in the same conversation as any other sin: it must be named, confessed, repented of, and put to death rather than managed. That is a more demanding remedy than mere disapproval. Racism is not cured by knowing better; plenty of well informed people harbour it privately. It is cured where all sin is cured, at the cross and then in the daily work of mortification.

What the gospel actually does about it

Ephesians 2 is the passage to sit with. The deepest ethnic division in the ancient world was between Jew and Gentile, guarded by law, temple architecture and centuries of hostility, and Paul says Jesus has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, making one new man in place of the two. He did not do this by telling everyone to be nicer. He did it by the cross.

So a church is meant to be the visible answer to racism rather than an institution issuing statements about it. When people who would never otherwise have shared a meal are found praying for one another and burying one another’s parents, an argument is being made that no policy can make. That is why John’s vision of the end has a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language before the throne, still distinguishable and entirely united.

What to do about it

Examine yourself honestly, because racism is rarely a matter of slogans and usually a matter of assumptions: who you expect to be competent, whose grief moves you, whose child you would be pleased for your daughter to marry. Then look at your church. Does it look anything like the community around it, and if not, is that geography or is it a welcome that only works for some people?

Speak up when a remark is made in your hearing, which is where most of us fail, because it is easier to let it pass and call that peaceableness. And be careful not to import wholesale a framework that Scripture has not given you; I have set out the questions around that in what the Bible says about systemic racism and in what the Bible says about intersectionality. Naming racism as sin against an image bearer is stronger ground than any borrowed theory.

Where racism hides in ordinary life

Most racism in Britain today does not announce itself. It works through assumptions rather than slogans: who gets the benefit of the doubt, whose accent is heard as competence, which name gets the interview, whose grief makes the news. That quieter form is harder to confront precisely because nobody involved thinks of himself as the sort of person this word applies to.

Scripture has a category ready for it. James spends a whole passage on what happens when the well dressed visitor is given the good seat and the poor man is told to sit on the floor, and he calls it becoming judges with evil thoughts. Partiality is treated as sin whether or not there is any hatred in it, because the damage is done to a person made in God’s image regardless of the motive behind it.

That is a more searching test than asking whether I hate anybody. Almost nobody will admit to that. The question is whether I treat people differently on grounds God does not recognise, and it is answered by looking at what I actually do rather than at what I believe about myself.

There is a further test worth applying, and it is about company rather than opinion. Look at who has actually been in your home over the last year. Most of us are shaped less by our convictions here than by the narrowness of the world we have arranged for ourselves, and that narrowness is where quiet racism survives longest, undisturbed by anything as inconvenient as friendship.

So, now what?

If you have been sinned against in this way, and especially if it happened inside a church, I am sorry. It was wrong, and no amount of explanation makes it less wrong. God has not overlooked it, and the day is coming when every such thing is dealt with fully and publicly.

And if reading this has turned a light on something in your own heart, do the ordinary Christian thing. Confess it, ask God to change it, and then go and make an actual friend rather than resolving to be broadminded in the abstract. Racism dies in relationships far more reliably than it dies in arguments.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

Revelation 7:9 (ESV)