(Editor’s Note: Racism is one of the most painful and misunderstood realities shaping both society and the church today. Many Christians want to engage these conversations faithfully but feel uncertain about where to begin, how to think biblically about race and justice, or how the church itself has contributed to racial harm throughout history. This four-part series from the Racial Justice Institute explores racism from theological, historical, and practical perspectives — helping readers understand what racism is, how Christian theology has been used both to uphold and confront it, what Scripture says about justice, and how churches can participate in meaningful repair and transformation today. Read Part 1 here.)
Without the church and its theology, modern racism as we know it today would not exist. In pre-modern times, the church was the heartbeat of society. It patronized some of history’s renowned artists, trained some of history’s most influential intellectuals, and crowned emperors. Theology shaped philosophy, law, and science.
Therefore, we can’t fully understand today’s society or its problems without understanding how the church contributed to it. History shows that Christians and Christian institutions played a significant role in shaping many of the racist ideas and structures that continue to influence society today.
Laying the Foundation: Christianity and Human Hierarchy
Early Christian intellectuals didn’t know the modern concept of race. But their writings reflect assumptions of human hierarchy and supremacist logic. In his book Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi notes that early supremacist ideas connected superiority to geography.
Origen, who wrote the first systematic theology, does this in some of his writings, when he connects spiritual development, geography, and human difference in ways that reflect early hierarchical assumptions about humanity.
He argues that people with the least divine revelation are condemned to harsh climates where “detestable practices” are the norm as punishment for poor behavior in a previous spiritual state. That suggests that human hierarchy is divinely ordained and that a people’s morality — or lack thereof — can be inferred from what region they live in.
However, Origen’s thesis wasn’t racial. He mentions that the people living in harsher climates are darker-skinned without making complexion the quintessential indicator of their inferiority. Nevertheless, complexion is part and parcel with his geographic morality thesis, and it would prove useful for the racist discourses of later Christians.
The development of early Christian identity helped open the door for later racialized and supremacist ways of thinking, including the eventual marriage of Christian identity with ideas of supremacy. The first followers of Jesus were Jews. The New Testament portrays them engaged in intense debates with Jewish leaders over Jewish issues like the role of the sacrificial system, circumcision, and Torah.
Over time, however, many Christians began to describe themselves as the “new Israel,” as if their divine revelation — that Jesus takes a central place in the Jewish religion — now entitled them to displace the larger Jewish community, who disagreed, as the sole heir to God’s promises. In this way, early Christian identity evolved as something separate from and superior to Jewish identity.
By the second century and beyond, Christian writers began to explicitly refer to Christians as a “third race” or a new people, thereby distinguishing Christianity from Greco-Roman society. This kind of language untethers Christian identity from any specific geography or ethnic group.
As the Christian community evolves in those centuries, it is defined by creed, ritual, and community, while retaining the logic of human hierarchy based on special revelation. God’s covenant people became increasingly abstracted from any particular ethnicity or geography, allowing later Christians to re-anchor “chosen” identity onto their own nations, cultures, and even bloodlines.
Centuries later, these theological moves would prove catastrophic.
Raising the Structure: Theology, Conquest, and Racial Power
Christians during the age of conquest expanded on the supremacist logic of the early church. “For the first time in human history, peoples (especially in the colonized worlds) were forced to think of themselves in disorienting ways,” writes theologian William James Jennings, “to think of themselves away from land and away from animals and into racial encasement.”
At first, they presumed a connection between religious superiority and geography. They assumed that as Christians, they possessed greater divine revelation than people in Africa or the Americas. But they went further than early theologians to claim that religious superiority served as justification to mistreat and oppress.
In 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued Romanus Pontifex, granting Portugal the right to conquer lands and enslave peoples in the so-called New World. This became part of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a set of teachings that framed the brutality of conquest in salvific terms. Colonizers often framed conquest and forced conversion as necessary for saving souls and spreading Christian civilization. From there, theological distortion hardened into policy, law, and culture.
In the Americas, theology justified chattel slavery. Slave owners created Bibles omitting anti-oppressive sentiment. Doctrines like the “Curse of Ham,” which argues that Ham’s descendants were condemned by God to perpetual servitude, justified hereditary bondage.
Theology also upheld U.S. apartheid during the Jim Crow era. Segregationists used the Tower of Babel to affirm segregation. The Ku Klux Klan was resurrected by a Methodist pastor. Theologies of racial hierarchy developed within Christian societies would later influence racial systems around the world, including South African apartheid and aspects of Nazi racial ideology.
Renovation: Reckoning with Complicity
It is important to recount this history in order to understand the work that must be done to repent of our complicity in constructing the unjust racial world order.
If the Christian church hopes to have any integrity or relevance in future generations, it must reckon with this history and abandon its trajectory. Churches can engage this work by auditing their practices: from who gets hired to what gets sung and prayed in our liturgies. The church must dismantle structures that remain in place from centuries of bad theology and complicity in discriminatory practices. There is hope for the church — but only on the other side of repentance.
Andre Henry is program manager of the Racial Justice Institute. He is a student of nonviolent struggle and social change, including studying leadership in nonviolent movements for social change through the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a BA in Practical Theology and an MA in Theology with an emphasis in Biblical Languages.
