How White Evangelicalism historically justified White Supremacy
...and how some people still teach this crap in church.
In Genesis, the 9th chapter, after the flood waters have receded and Noah has planted grapes, he makes wine. Of this wine he imbibes greatly and becomes drunk and passes out naked in his tent. Whom among us, amiright? One of his sons, Ham, spots his father in that condition and, probably snickering, goes to his other two brothers to tell them. Shocked at the dishonorable demonstration of their brother the two sons grab a cloak, walk into Noah’s tent backward so as not to gaze upon their Father’s shame and cover him. This story has been related to me often as an example of the kind of practice in line with the Ten Commandments admonition to “Honor your Father and Mother”, but in the 19th century, in the throws of debate over the ownership of people as property and whether “...all men are created equal...”, this was the foundational implicit Biblical legitimization for race based chattel slavery.
How could people possibly have derived justification for owning people? This is revealed in Genesis 9:24-27 where it says…
24 So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him.
25 Then he said:
“Cursed be Cannan,
a servant of servants
he shall be to his brethren”
26 And he said:
“Blessed be the Lord,
the God of Shem,
and may Cannan be his servant.
27 May God enlarge Japheth,
and may he dwell in the tents of Shem,
and may Cannan be his servant.”
So Noah declares blessings on his two sons Shem and Japheth but calls for curses, not on Ham himself, but on his son Cannan and all his descendants. This is alternately called “The Curse of Ham” and “The Curse of Cannan”, and in the Confederate South this was held up as the reason why it wasn’t an immoral human rights violation to own African Americans and force them to perform all the work which future generations would attribute with how white people in the 1800s “Made America Great”.
This would go on to be intermixed with the story of Cain and Abel with the addition of three great assumptions for which there is no Biblical evidence. The first irrational assumption is that when God curses Cain and places upon him a “mark” it is something which his children would inherit. Nowhere in the Genesis account does it state that Enoch had this mark, but that’s what’s assumed. The second assumption is that this mark is dark skin. Again, no Biblical evidence backs this up. The third assumption is that Ham married a descendant of Cain, which would be an “interracial marriage”, and that’s why God cursed Ham.
By that twisted, assumption fueled interpretation of Genesis was created the justification for making interracial marriage illegal, and support for keeping segregation a legal practice. These weren’t fringe ideas in Southern churches, and some in the North as well. Popular Evangelical preacher John MacArthur teaches this to this day.
I’ve spoken previously about how James Fiefeld’s proto-prosperity gospel message preached that Prosperity and Poverty were opportunities presented by God, and how that morphed into the idea in modern prosperity preaching that Poverty is evidence that a person is not in God’s will because God wills that all believers would prosper.
Bearing this in mind, consider that the median White American family has $160,000 greater wealth than the median African American family. By using the same scriptures that prosperity gospel preachers use to legitimize the claim that people who are poor are outside of God’s will, this inherently implies that Black people are inferior to White people by virtue of the evidence of their comparative poverty. And who could argue when this is preached in a church which claims scripture is sovereign?
Just as New Apostolic Reformation prophets can speak claiming direct messages from God are proceeding from their mouths there are those who utilize, among other tactics, an uncannily selective interpretation of what parts of the Bible are Literal and which are Metaphorical and in doing so create justifications to heap scorn and hatred on all manner of groups of people. Wild assumptions are inserted, leaps to conclusions employed, all in the service of turning the Bible into a tool for instructing congregants as to who to hate, what privileges are deserved and by whom.
I couldn’t tell a Jot from a Tittle if my life depended on it, but it’s awfully hard for me not to believe that extracting extra-Biblical messages through a hermeneutics of hate isn’t adding to the message contained within that which is not there.