Racism and the Holy Bible - Getting the Correct View

When presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama was embroiled in the controversy regarding his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, a great deal of attention was focused on racism in the church and in the United States. In an attempt to bring calm to the situation, Obama gave a speech about racism in the United States. In so doing, he simply brought new attention to an old problem.

Racism in America is not new, of course, nor is racism across the world. A careful reading of the Holy Bible will produce some helpful insights for dealing with this problem from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint.

A careless reader of the Bible may get the impression that the God of the Bible is in favor of racism. God chooses a certain race of people-the Jews-as the Chosen People. These people are freed, with God's powerful help, from centuries of slavery and are brought into a new land and told to destroy totally the inhabitants of that land. Once settled in the Promised Land of Canaan, the Jews are told to live in such a way as to be separate in religious and moral ways from their neighbors.

What are we to make of this apparent preference for one race above all others? The simple answer is that we are not to make too much of the apparent preference, but to read more deeply and see what the underlying reasons and principles are.

First, let's begin with the obvious fact that in the Bible, God did not create several races; God created one couple from whom all other people have descended. It has been pointed out by experts that there are not several different colors found in humans. There is only one basic pigment-melanin-that determines human skin color. The degree of concentration of melanin in a particular person will determine how dark or light a person's skin color will be. The phrase-a person of color-is, then, a little misleading. We're all persons of color. Genetics determines how much of a person of color we are. If we're using skin color as the basis for racism, we do not have a solid foundation on which to build our prejudice. Wikipedia has a helpful article about melanin.

Second, the reason for selecting the Jews was not so much to give them special benefits as to use them in an important mission to the world at large. The Jews were, first of all, to be a living example of God's grace (undeserved favor). They were, secondly, to preach to the world about God's grace to all people. Thirdly, they were to be the human family through whom God's special person or Messiah would come into the world. In short, racism was not the issue; being useful to God was.

Third, the destruction of the nations in the Promised Land, as terrible as it sounds to the modern mind and as difficult as it is to accept, was for the purpose of maintaining the spiritual purity of the Chosen People by removing the idolatrous peoples and practices that would have corrupted the Jews. They were not to be destroyed because of their race; they were to be destroyed because of their religious practices. In many instances, the inhabitants of the Promised Land were not eliminated and the Jews were corrupted. There are those, of course, who see God's command to destroy the inhabitants as simply a rationalization invented by the Jews to justify what they wanted to do: to conquer completely anyone who could interfere with the conquest of the land.

Fourth, there are passages in the Bible that show that racism in itself is not part of God's plan for the world. The book of Ruth is often described as an anti-prejudice tract. Ruth is a native of Moab. Moab originated with a son born to Lot (the nephew of Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation) through an act of incest with one of his daughters after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Fearing that all of the marriageable men in the area had been destroyed with the destruction of the two towns, Lot's two daughters got him drunk and had sexual relations with him. The result was two sons-Ammon (the ancestor of the Ammonites) and Moab (the ancestor of the Moabites). See Genesis 19 for the whole story. In the book of Ruth, Ruth marries a prominent Jewish man and becomes part of the family tree that leads through King David to the eventual birth of Jesus Christ. The inclusion of a hated foreign nation (and the Jews hated the Moabites) in the lineage of King David (and Christ) reveals a tolerant attitude on the part of God toward nations other than the Jews.

Two other brief examples will have to suffice to make the point that God is opposed to racism. First is the decision of God to use the Jews to bless the entire world (see Genesis 12:1-3). Abram (later his name is changed to Abraham) is told that he will become a great nation and that all the nations on earth will be blessed through him. Second is a statement in the New Testament book of Acts where the Apostle Peter says, "I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right." (Acts 12:34 and 35)

Fifth and finally, Jesus Christ came to die for the entire world. "For God so loved the world... (John 3:16) I think that says it all.

A recent article in our local newspaper noted the reluctance of African-American leaders to speak about the responsibility of African-Americans to deal with violence in their communities without blaming outside factors for the problem. Even though the Bible has been used in the past to justify racism, it is obvious to me that that is a wrong reading. The God who created us wants us all to live together in peace and unity.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin
http://www.startribune.com/