Introduction: Race as Scripture Problem

Abstract

Given that race is a cultural construct, it should occasion little surprise that the dominant feature of western cultural life – Christianity – should have exerted an enormous influence on its articulation. The book of Genesis has played a very large role in the cultural construction of race. Nevertheless, scholarly discussion of racial constructs has tended, on the whole – though there are important exceptions – to drift into the territorial waters of sociology. Race is contextualised alongside issues of status and class, and the social relations of power are, reasonably enough, accorded pride of place in interpretations of the rise of racism. That race is also a theological construct has hitherto attracted much less attention, though it has occasionally intruded at the margins of the more scrupulous studies of race – albeit as a somewhat anomalous factor. It is one of the central arguments of this book that, although many social and cultural factors have contributed significantly to western constructions of race, scripture has been for much of the early modern and modern eras the primary cultural influence on the forging of races. ‘Race-as-theology’ should be an important constituent of the humanistic study of racial constructs alongside accounts of ‘race-as-biology’, ‘race-as-ethnicity’ and ‘race-as-class or -caste’. On the other hand, this study also investigates the extent to which the dethronement of scripture from its dominant position in western intellectual life in the centuries following the Enlightenment has contributed to a reconfiguration of racial attitudes.