In the March edition, I discussed the idea of ‘race’ and how the idea was created and developed in the context of slavery and Enlightenment thinking. Now I’ll take a look at the stories we tell, and how these stories justify white supremacy. I’m particularly interested in the stories that the Christian church told providing the overwhelming moral justification for slavery and racism.
One of the things that first attracted me to Sea of Faith was its appreciation of what we all know – that stories are important. It is through stories that we get a basis for approaching our world, for making our sense of it. They are our most powerful cultural tool. And maybe religion is the most powerful story we have ever developed.
Addressing past wrongs
In January the Church of England published a report by the Church Commissioners into its historical financial benefits from slavery. The detailed 46 page report concentrates on the Queen Anne’s Bounty fund, established in 1704, which invested significant sums in the South Sea Company, profiting enormously from chattel slavery and the slave-based plantation economy. The archbishop of Canterbury said the report ‘lays bare the links of the Church Commissioners’ predecessor fund with transatlantic chattel slavery. I am deeply sorry for these links. It is now time to take action to address our shameful past.’ A £100 million fund has been set up to ‘address past wrongs’ in a programme of investment, research and engagement. The archbishop was keen to make it clear that the money is not ‘reparations’ – and indeed that word does not appear in the report. Two criticisms have been made – firstly questioning if the amount is sufficient, and secondly commenting on the fact that the church remains in control of how the money is to be spent, reflecting the old power relations.
Nevertheless, so far so good. But the church needs to go much, much further. The church has looked at its financial gain from slavery in the same way that any business should – the Guardian and the Trevelyan family have recently done the same. But the C of E is not just, or even primarily, a business. It claims to be the voice of the Christian gospel, the upholder of Christian morality. In this way the church provided the moral justification for slavery and racism – and that’s a responsibility beyond the totting up of the amount of profit. It is responsible for the stories it tells.
It is worth acknowledging up front the objection that not all members of the church were singing the same song. Brave dissenters and abolitionists did not cease from mental fight. But right now that’s not my story.
The Curse of Ham
Let’s look at a story that gets straight into racism and the justification for the enslavement of African people – the ‘Curse of Ham’. The biblical story is short – Genesis 9: 20-27. It’s all a bit confusing, with internal contradictions (like much of Genesis, which was assembled from different sources). It’s after the flood, and Noah has three sons – Shem, Ham (who has a son called Canaan), and Japheth. Noah plants a vineyard, drinks the wine and gets drunk. Ham ‘sees the nakedness of his father’ and tells his brothers. The brothers are careful not to look as they cover Noah up with a cloak. Noah comes round, knows (how?) what Ham has done, and says, ‘Cursed be Canaan: lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers’. It seems like he didn’t really mean his brothers, but his uncles. (Best not to curse when you’re hung over I guess).
What was Ham’s misdeed? What did the writer mean, ‘Ham saw the nakedness of his father’? Literally? Well that was hardly his fault. Maybe he mocked his drunkenness to others. Maybe this is a euphemism for having sex with him. Or maybe (and a verse from Leviticus, 20:11, might support this interpretation) he had sex with his father’s wife – his mother – and Canaan was the result. Anyway, the curse was not from God, but from Noah. And although Ham did whatever the misdeed was, it was his son Canaan who was cursed. And Ham had four sons – Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. Why pick on Canaan? Has it anything to do with the fact that Canaan was the ancestor of the Canaanites, the enemies of the Israelites, ‘utterly destroyed’ by Joshua in conquering the Promised Land (Joshua 11:21)?
So how does this story relate to race? To start with, it has been used to separate some humans from others. We are all the children of Adam, and in the image of God. But at this point, when humanity started to increase, we have immediate separation into three – the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth. In medieval times the descendants of Ham were said to be serfs – justifying the institution of serfdom. It was in the 18th century that the story of the curse came to be related to black people and to the justification of their enslavement. Nowhere in Genesis does it suggest that Ham was black, and the Canaanite people were Semites, like the Jews. Some commentators thought that ‘Ham’ sounds like a Semitic word for black/dark/hot, but scholars are convinced that there is no linguistic link.
The curse of Ham story was retold as biblical justification for slavery with particular enthusiasm in the southern US states before and during the civil war. Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer, first Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the US, was a great believer in the story; his infamous ‘Thanksgiving Sermon’ of 1860 became the popular rallying cry for secession. Some historians see this sermon as the critical turning-point in establishing moral authority for the Confederacy. The Mormons used the story as justification for excluding black people from their ministry – a ban only removed in 2013. The Southern Baptist Convention resolved to ‘maintain and renew our public renunciation of racism in all its forms, including our disavowal of the “curse of Ham” doctrine in 2018; just five years ago it was felt necessary to renounce the theory!
Whiteness
Let’s look at another concept, another story – ‘whiteness’. Whiteness, as it is used in the context of racist ideas, grew up with the concept of race, and as it did so the church adopted the association of whiteness with Christianity. It’s quite a long story.
Colour symbolism of black/white and light/dark is ancient and universal. Origen, the great third century scholar and theologian, characterised sinners as having darker faces than good people. But the association of blackness with sin was spiritual and theological, reflecting the character of a person; it was an idea, a symbol. There was no claim that physical blackness literally made a person inferior. SOF members will be familiar with the process whereby an idea, an attempt at picturing something, starts to be taken literally with horrible effects – and this is what happened to the idea of ‘white’ more than a millennium later.
In Britain, there is no evidence of ‘white’ being used as a label for Anglo-Saxon people before the colonial period. In the 1500s, indeed, ‘white’ was used to describe elite ladies whose skin was pale because they didn’t have to work outside in all weathers. But in colonial times the spiritual and theological connotations of whiteness and blackness dropped away, and the physical characteristics became paramount.
So how did this story of whiteness develop? Prof Willie Jennings of Yale Divinity School points to a ‘perfect storm’ of four elements coming together around the 17th century. First, the idea of the people of Europe (and the church of Europe) replacing the people of Israel as the ‘People of God’. As the people of Israel had (so the story goes) rejected the Son of God, so God had rejected Israel and placed the European church at the centre of God’s work in the world. Second, the ‘Age of Discovery’ placed Europeans in new worlds to offer the people the truth of Christianity, to ‘mature’ the people and the land in the name of God’s mission. Third, the Europeans could name what they found – and whiteness became the name of productivity, maturity and development, in contrast to blackness. And finally came the claim that white Christians can take command of the people and the land to bring it to productive use. Whiteness became a way of seeing and being in the world.
Initially, for Britain and the US, the racial identity of ‘white’ referred only to Anglo-Saxon people. As the concept of whiteness evolved, the number of people considered white would grow as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of colour, due to emancipation and immigration. Activist Paul Kivel says, ‘Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.’
A telling change in legal documents in Barbados illustrates how whiteness gets involved with slavery. In the 17th century, slave owners in legal documents described themselves as ‘Christians’ – and indentured servants are referred to as ‘Christian servants’. From about 1690 there was a switchover to refer to slave owners as ‘white’, and the word ‘white’ starts to appear in the colony’s legislation. White now has legal status.
Christian Slavery
Christianity had a problem with slavery – or, more accurately, slavery had a problem with Christianity. English Protestants identified themselves as a free people, and believed that Protestants should not be enslaved, even though it might be OK to enslave ‘heathens’. In the early days of the slave economy, slave owners resisted the missionaries as it challenged the status of the ‘heathens’ whom they had enslaved. They were worried that a baptised slave might announce their own freedom and rebel. Also Protestantism encouraged the reading of the bible, and that meant literacy, and who knows where that would lead.
The resolution to this was for the church to change its story such that Christianity and slavery were compatible, and that the free people of God were now the white people. The idea was that if the most horrific abuses were used sparingly, then enslaved people could be managed as Christians, to become more compliant and peaceful. The concept of ‘Christian slavery’ was born. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, visited Barbados in 1671. He was horrified by the conditions of enslaved people and urged improvement but was adamant that involving them in Christianity would not encourage them to rebel, and he did not advocate abolition. This is from his letter To the governor and assembly at Barbados, 1671:
Another slander and lie they have cast upon us is that we should teach the negroes to rebel, a thing that we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our hearts… this is a most egregious and abominable untruth. For that which we have declared to them is to exhort and admonish them to be sober and to fear God, and to love their masters and mistresses and to be faithful and diligent in their masters’ service, and then their masters and overseers will love them and deal kindly and gently with them.
The Anglican missionary Morgan Goodwin argued much the same in his 1680 treatise The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate suing for their Admission into the Church. ‘Christian slavery’ – the collusion of the church in the institution of slavery was becoming the norm. Slave owners were fearful of Obeah (cultural and religious practices brought from West Africa), and Christianity tried, with limited success, to suppress Obeah.
Christianity also became critical in the move to ‘creolisation’. Slave revolts were frequent and brutally suppressed, but the 1760 revolt in Jamaica (known as Tacky’s war) shook the empire. It triggered a move to change the model for slave plantations, advocated particularly by Edward Long, who witnessed the events in Jamaica. Before, the straightforward model was to buy slaves, work them to death for eight years or so, then buy some more. The ‘creolisation’ approach was to create a self-sustaining slave community, exemplified by the later plantations in the southern states of the US. It became a necessity after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1808. The approach was to import fewer slaves, avoid working them to death too soon and create conditions for child rearing. Now, instead of resisting Christianity as they had in the early days, the slave owners often enforced Christianity. The official church was completely embedded within slavery.
What now?
In this article I have chosen to look at some stories and concepts (a concept is a sort of story, I think) that in part explain how the church got involved in a discourse justifying slavery and racism. I concentrated on the church because of its unique position of moral authority, and its use of that moral authority in promoting racism means that it has incurred an enormous moral debt. I am aware that I have used the word ‘church’ rather loosely, sometimes meaning the Church of England specifically, sometimes western Christianity more broadly.
I have looked at the past, and have not gone into the question of what is to be done now. A brilliant example of looking to the future is The Diocese of Southwark Anti-Racism Charter, adopted in 2021. It contains a vision and commitments on how the diocese will address racism. The conclusion of that document clearly acknowledges the past role of the church:
Racism is an affront to God. It is a sin, born out of the denial that all human beings were created equal in God’s image and that all are one in Christ. Racism, racial injustice and racialised exploitation, through structures such as historic or modern day slavery, have no place in society or church institutions. Acknowledgement of the anti-slavery campaigns of Wilberforce, Clarkson and Equiano does not obviate the fact that for hundreds of years, racialised theology and biblical interpretation were used to justify Church collusion with the enslavement and racial denigration of people of African heritage. Racialised attitudes of white Christian superiority also undergirded the post-slavery movement of Asians from the Indian subcontinent to Africa and the Caribbean through indentured servitude in the 19th century.
Racism: A Response
Dominic Kirkham
I appreciated the informative and carefully written article by David Rhodes on the idea of race and its origins in slavery, even that ‘Race is the child of racism not the father’. Though this is a complex issue I think this view is fundamentally mistaken. My own view, for what its worth, is that racism, like anti-semitism, is the product of a distinctive Christian European culture (Christendom) that in its later phases in the Enlightenment also gave rise to attempted ‘scientific’ categorisations of race (cf ‘The Christian Roots of Racism’, in Horror and Hope).
Though he acknowledges that his focus is on the Atlantic slave trade, with its uniquely iniquitous features, and gives passing mention to pre-existing forms of slavery, one thing that has always concerned me is that the current discussion of slavery – and, by implication, the attribution or accusation of ‘racism’ – rarely seems to expand further to include the far more extensive East African slave trade in the Indian Ocean and the Sahara that was a distinctive feature of the Muslim world. Whilst the Atlantic slave trade lasted some three centuries the East African slave trade lasted over a thousand years (and in some ways, such as in the kafala system still continues); if nothing else it must qualify the modern conceptual equation between slavery and racism.
The slave trade in this area dates back to the third millennium BCE, indeed it is concomitant with the rise of civilization itself and made it possible, but escalated considerably in Islamic times. Though numbers are speculative, estimates indicate Muslim merchants traded an estimated 1000 African slaves annually between 800 and 1700, a number that grew to c. 4000 during the 18th century, and 3700 during the period 1800–1870. In all, numbers exceed 17 million. Even in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries over one million white Europeans were enslaved by Muslim Barbary pirates from North Africa with people from Cornwall and Ireland being particularly vulnerable, yet little note seems to be taken of any of this – for example, David Olusoga’s authoritative study of slavery and racism Black and British, A Forgotten History makes not the slightest mention of this other ‘forgotten history’.
One reason for this common historical elision is that slavery took a very different form in the Muslim world and left few recognisable descendants (as on the American slave plantations) as the males were generally castrated, to be regularly replaced from the great slave markets such as Zanzibar, and females used for concubinage (harem slavery), their offspring being assimilated into society – our former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, being the product of such a lineage.
Another feature of this story is that slavery is still thriving in some form or under some description: in some Saharan countries like Morocco almost 50% of the population is vulnerable to enslavement. This is true for much of the sahel. Globally, 50 million people are in situations of slavery on any given day, often in clandestine occupations of which authorities are wilfully ignorant.
I mention all this by way of giving some perspective not only on the extent of this iniquitous practice but of the willingness of humans to engage in the exploitation of their fellow humans that has always characterised their societies, regardless of any particular theory or ideology. One may add, that while it is right to be aware of and address our own historical legacy, instead of just beating ourselves up about the past it would be better to focus on addressing the reality of the present.