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In this episode, Jimmy tackles the evil of racism head-on, debunking its false ideologies through a Christian lens. He explores biblical stories—from Adam and Eve to Moses’ Ethiopian wife—showing God’s universal love for all people, regardless of skin color. Jimmy dismantles racist misinterpretations of scripture, celebrates Christianity’s diversity, and shares a heartfelt story about a special gift. Join him for an inspiring journey promoting peace, harmony, and love among all God’s children! Support the podcast at Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast for early access!
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Howdy, folks!
Today, we’re going to be talking about racism.
Let’s get into it.
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We’re in our second year now, and if you like this content, you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
The Concept of Racism
Racism is a very real evil in the world today, and to understand it, we need to understand the concept of race.
In English, the word race began to be used to refer to a group of people of common descent around the 1560s.
But it didn’t mean what people today have in mind when they think of races. Instead, it referred to any ethnic group, such as people who were from the same country.
Even if you read some works written in the 20th century, you’ll still find references to things like the French race, the German race, and the English race—even though all three of these ethnic groups are white, and the English race shares the same group of islands with the Scottish race and the Irish race.
However, another meaning for the term race developed, and by the 1800s, some authors were trying to divide all of mankind up into just a small number of races—between three and five races—based on skin color.
This made race not primarily a matter of culture—which is the principal thing separating Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Scotsmen, and Irishmen—but a matter of heredity or—as we would say today—genetics, though they didn’t know about genes back in the 1800s.
Unfortunately, this new, hereditary concept of race got tangled up with colonialism and slavery and led to the idea that some races are biologically superior to others.
That’s the concept of racism that we’re going to be talking about in this episode—the idea that some people are biologically superior to others based on things like their skin color.
This idea is really problematic from a scientific perspective. In fact, many scientists question or reject the idea of race based on skin color.
But here, I’m going to approach this subject from a theological rather than a scientific perspective, and the fundamental conclusion I’m going to come to is that racism is a false idea and an evil ideology.
It is fundamentally opposed to and thus contradictory to the Christian faith.
God is love, and God loves all of his children.
Jesus told us that we are called to love others just like God does, and so we need to love all of his children, too. Skin color doesn’t matter.
Ancient Religion and Race
Now that we know where we’re going, let’s take a look at where we’ve come from.
Anyone familiar with Genesis knows the story of Adam and Eve, and they are portrayed as the couple from which all humans come.
In Hebrew, Adam’s name means = Mankind, and Eve’s name is interpreted as coming from the word for ≈ Living, so they’re the parents of every living human.
The ancient Israelite religion thus portrays all of mankind as one big family, but that’s not the way everyone in the ancient world thought about matters.
In many religions, mankind is not one big family. Instead, the gods made different groups of people—often in different places.
And if you have that idea, it’s easy to turn it into an idea like the kind of racism that developed in the 1800s.
Because you can start proposing that those different groups of people the gods made have different levels of quality and that one group—namely, your own, of course—is superior to the others.
But that’s not the way the Israelite religion looked at things.
From the Israelite perspective, we’re all part of one big family, so we’re all equal as human beings.
Obviously, there are differences between individual humans—some are taller and some are shorter, some are stronger and some are weaker, some are smarter and some are not as smart, and some are saints and some are sinners.
But we’re all equally human.
This made the ancient Israelite religion—as well as later Judaism and Christianity—resistant to developing the kind of racist ideology that developed in recent centuries.
Thus, at the dawn of Christianity, we find St. Paul declaring:
Colossians 3:11, ESV
Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
Racism Develops
In the age of exploration between the 1400s and the 1700s, European powers discovered a bunch of new places, and they started establishing colonies in the places they’d found.
Colonies were nothing new. Lots of ancient peoples established colonies in different places—the Greeks, the Romans, the Polynesians. Everybody with a seafaring civilization, basically.
Colonies were part of how trade got established, for example.
But by the time of this new wave of colonization, the European powers had a decisive technological advantage over the people they found, and this led them to start—well—taking over these lands.
And when you want to justify taking over a place, you need a way to justify what you’re doing to the people who are already there.
It thus became easy for Europeans to interpret their technological advantage as a moral one.
It also didn’t hurt that the people they were encountering looked different from them, because anytime someone looks different than you do, you can seize on how their appearance is different to make them seem even more different from you.
Coupled with the new colonialism was a new slavery.
Slavery itself was nothing new. It’s an ancient evil.
All ancient societies—on every continent—had slavery, but in the past—before people were crossing oceans to get slaves—the slaves tended to look the same as the people who enslaved them.
European slaves looked like other Europeans. Asian slaves looked like other Asians. Native American slaves looked like other Native Americans. And African slaves looked like other Africans.
But now slaves were being taken across oceans, so they looked different.
And—once again—there needed to be a justification for why it was okay to have these people as slaves.
This was what gave rise to the ideology of racism—the idea that some groups of people were intrinsically superior to others based on their heredity.
But this caused a problem for Europeans and their descendants, because their culture was Christian, and so how could you square the idea that some people are superior to others based on their ancestry with the biblical teaching that humanity is just one big family?
Pre-Adamites and Co-Adamites
One of the strategies they tried was proposing that Adam and Eve are not depicted as the first parents of the human race in Genesis.
Instead, it was argued that there were what have been called Pre-Adamites or Co-Adamites.
Pre-Adamites were people who were created before Adam and Eve.
So if you were a racist, you could propose that all the races you didn’t like were descended from earlier, inferior creations of people that God had made before he made the superior, perfect humans—Adam and Eve.
Co-Adamites were people who were created alongside Adam and Eve.
And if you were a racist, you could do the same thing. You could propose that all the people you don’t like were created alongside Adam and Eve.
Pre-Adamites and co-Adamites were thus a big subject of discussion in the 1800s, when colonialism and slavery were going full force.
Biblically, the problem with both of these theories is that this is not the way Genesis presents Adam and Eve.
As we mentioned, their names mean Mankind and Life, and that makes it clear that Genesis presents Adam and Eve as the progenitors of the entire human race.
Now, later theologians have pointed out that there’s a question of how literally figures whose names mean Mankind and Life should be interpreted.
But the text depicts them as the origin of all humanity.
Cain’s Mark
In American Protestant circles in the 1800s, another attempt to square the two ideas was based on the account in Genesis where Adam and Eve’s son Cain kills his brother Abel.
As a result, God punishes Cain and tells him:
Genesis 4:11-15, ESV
“Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”
Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”
And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.
American racists took this passage and proposed that the mark God set on Cain was dark skin, and so they regarded the skin color of people of African descent as the mark of Cain.
There are multiple problems with this view.
The first is that there is simply no mention of skin color in this passage, so it’s sheer speculation to propose that as the mark. The people who said this were just making it up.
The second problem is that dark skin is not the kind of mark the ancient audience would have understood the text to be referring to.
In the ancient world, people were sometimes physically marked to indicate who owned them or whose protection they were under.
For example, they might have a word or letter put on their forehead. We see this in Ezekiel 9, where God is going to judge Jerusalem, but first he has the angels go through the city and mark all the righteous people to protect them by putting the Hebrew letter Tau on their foreheads.
The fact that—in the writing system of the day—a Tau looked like a cross or an X was not lost on early Christian interpreters, who recognized it as a symbol of the protection offered by the Cross of Christ.
This leads to the third problem, which is that the whole point of the mark God puts on Cain is to protect him, to keep other people from attacking him.
So even if the mark had been dark skin, the message would be, “Don’t mess with black people!”
However, then there’s the fourth problem, which is that the mark was given only to Cain.
Only he had murdered Abel, and so only he was protected from being attacked in retribution for the murder.
The mark did not apply to Cain’s descendants, and there is no indication whatsoever in the text that the mark was passed down from Cain to his offspring.
So the ancient audience would not have understood the mark to be a hereditary thing—especially if the mark was a word or letter God put on Cain’s forehead.
A fifth and final problem is that the line of Cain does not survive as a distinct entity, because the Great Flood is coming up, and in the Genesis narrative, only Noah’s family survives that, so the line of Cain can’t survive this population bottleneck as a separate entity.
If descendants of Cain survive at all, they have to merge with the rest of the human family. So maybe some people after the flood would have some Cainite blood in them, but the line of Cain itself went extinct.
Ham and Canaan
However, when we come to the Flood, racists had another text in Genesis that they appealed to.
After the Flood, Noah plants a vineyard and gets drunk on the wine he makes, and while he’s drunk, he’s lying around his tent naked.
One of his sons—Ham—comes in and sees his father’s nakedness. He then goes out and gossips about it to his two brothers, Shem and Japeth.
Shem and Japeth then go into the tent and, walking backwards so they don’t see their father naked, they cover him up with a blanket.
When Noah wakes up, he’s mad, and he issues a curse on Ham and Ham’s son Canaan. He said:
Genesis 9:25-27, ESV
“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.”
He also said, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.”
In the 1800s in American Protestant circles, some people seized on this passage and used it to argue that the descendants of Ham were cursed and that this included black people.
However, that twists the passage into saying something it doesn’t.
Ham was Noah’s son, so he should have the same skin color as Noah.
And although Ham committed the offense in this passage, there is no curse on his descendants in general.
Instead, the curse falls only on his son Canaan, which reflects the later conflict between the Israelites and the Canaanites whose land they would move into.
Also, the Canaanites weren’t black. They had the same skin color as the Israelites.
It’s thus a mistake to use this passage as a racist attempt to slur black people.
Moses’ Second Wife
And then there are passages that indicate God has no problem at all with black people.
One of these occurs during the Exodus.
We learn from Exodus chapter 2 that Moses initially married a Midianite woman named Zipporah.
Then, he goes back to Egypt and leads the Israelites out in the Exodus.
Only it isn’t only the Israelites. A bunch of non-Israelites also took the opportunity to come along and get out of Egypt. Exodus 12:38 tells us:
Exodus 12:38, ESV
A mixed multitude also went up with them and very much livestock, both flocks and herds.
Well, later on Moses apparently took another wife from among this mixed multitude, and she was a Cushite.
Cush was the Hebrew name for Ethiopia, and so Moses’ second wife was Ethiopian and thus black.
Well, this new wife caused some friction with Moses’ siblings—primarily his sister Miriam but also his brother Aaron.
In Numbers 12, we read:
Numbers 12:1, ESV
Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman.
But it seems that there was another issue lurking behind the criticism of Moses’ Ethiopian wife, because Miriam and Aaron then pivot to whether Moses is getting too much credit as a prophet since they have also prophesied.
Numbers 12:2-10, ESV
And they said, “Has the LORD indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?”
And the LORD heard it.
Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth.
And suddenly the LORD said to Moses and to Aaron and Miriam, “Come out, you three, to the tent of meeting.”
And the three of them came out.
And the LORD came down in a pillar of cloud and stood at the entrance of the tent and called Aaron and Miriam, and they both came forward.
And he said, “Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the LORD make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the LORD. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?” And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them, and he departed.
When the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, like snow. And Aaron turned toward Miriam, and behold, she was leprous.
Moses then prays to God to heal Miriam, and he does so, but she still has to remain outside of the Israelite camp for a week.
So Miriam has been speaking against Moses regarding two things:
1) He married an Ethiopian woman and
2) He’s not God’s only prophet
And—as the ringleader in this criticism of Moses—Miriam is punished with leprosy.
Now, the term English Bibles translate leprosy is not the same thing as the disease that modern medicine refers to, which is known as Hansen’s disease.
Instead, the biblical form of “leprosy” may be a term referring to a variety of different skin diseases based on their symptoms.
However, one of the things biblical leprosy is frequently compared to is snow, like in this passage, which says Miriam was leprous, like snow.
The question then becomes, “Well, what was it about leprosy that reminded people of snow?”
Well, snow is cold, but biblical leprosy doesn’t seem to involve people’s skin becoming cold.
Instead, it’s the visual appearance of snow that seems to be the point of comparison with biblical leprosy.
One possibility that some scholars have proposed is that snow can be scaly or flaky, so maybe biblical leprosy made your skin scaly, and it would flake off.
However, snow is normally seen when it’s clumped together, and when you see it like that, it’s dominant characteristic is that it’s white.
And that’s what many scholars have proposed—that biblical leprosy could make your skin turn white, I mean, really white—like the modern condition vitiligo.
In fact, that’s the way many English translations render this passage. For example, the Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition translates it:
Numbers 12:10, RSV:CE2
And when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow.
And that would connect back to the beginning of this account. Remember, Miriam had been criticizing Moses because he had taken a black wife, so as punishment, she is turned as white as snow.
It’s like God is saying, “You want white? You want white? I got your white! I got your white right here!”
Which would be a delicious irony.
Even if the point of comparison is something like snow’s flakiness, though, the passage still indicates that God has no problem with Moses marrying a black woman.
And that shows that God has no problem with interracial marriages.
None whatsoever.
The Ethiopian Eunuch
Another passage that shows God’s love for people regardless of their skin color is found in the New Testament.
People often think that the first Gentiles to convert to Christ were the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household, which is a story found in Acts chapter 10.
And this was an important moment in the history of Gentile conversion—both because it involved a group of gentiles and because it was overseen by the apostle Peter, the leader of the Church.
However, Gentiles actually became Christians before this.
Two chapters earlier—in Acts 8—we have an account of the ministry of Philip the Evangelist, who is not the same guy as Philip the Apostle.
And one of the people he converts is the Ethiopian Eunuch.
The Ethiopian Eunuch was a minister of the Ethiopian Queen, and he is the first Gentile we have a record of becoming a Christian.
So the first Gentile we know of who converted to Christ was actually a black man.
And that’s because God loves all of us, regardless of what skin tone we happen to have.
God Loves Us All!
The fact that God loves all of us is stressed repeatedly in the New Testament.
In fact, 1 John 4 tells us that:
1 John 4:7-8, ESV
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
So God is love, and if you don’t love others, you don’t know God.
But Jesus makes an important point about just how far our love is to extend. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:
Matthew 5:44-48, ESV
I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. . . .
For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
So Jesus tells us that we should be perfect in the way God is perfect by loving everybody.
He thus tells us to love even our enemies and to pray for them.
Christianity thus teaches an ethic of universal love. We are to love all people, and that means all of them.
It doesn’t mean that we always have rosy feelings toward them, because you can get mad at people you love, but it does mean that we want their good and we want them to get to heaven.
And since not everybody looks the same, that means loving everybody whether they look like you or not.
Skin color, hair color, eye color—none of that matters to God, which means none of it is to matter to us, either.
He loves everybody, and so we are to love everybody.
We’re all God’s children, he loves us all, and so we are to love all of our brothers and sisters in the human family.
Take cosmetic differences and put them aside, because they don’t matter to God, so they are not to matter to us, either.
Work to Do in the Present
Because of Christianity’s universal ethic of love, we have work to do.
Racism is a real thing, and it needs to end. Nobody—of any skin color or ethnicity—should regard any one else—of any skin color or ethnicity—as intrinsically better or worse.
As Martin Luther King indicated, we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
Fortunately, since his time, there has been great progress on that front—at least here in America—and that should be celebrated.
However, there is still work to do. Racism of the old form still exists, even if it has been marginalized, and new forms of racism are out there.
We also need to work against Slavery. While it is now illegal all over the world, Slavery still exists. It’s just now we call it = Human Trafficking.
Because of human trafficking, there are millions of labor slaves, sex slaves, and slave soldiers in the world today.
Since slavery is illegal, this means that it is a criminal enterprise, so firm statistics are hard to come by, but it has been estimated that there are 50 million slaves today.
These are people of all colors, because slavery is a global enterprise, and if the estimates are correct then—by raw numbers—there are more slaves alive today than there were back when slavery was legal.
Furthermore, because it is now a criminal enterprise, it can be even more dangerous for the people who experience it since it is kept hidden—away from government and law enforcement.
We thus need to do what we can to end this terrible scourge.
Hope for the Future
Fortunately, there is also hope for the future.
Ever since its earliest days, Christianity has shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with all people—like with the Ethiopian eunuch—and, thanks be to God, it’s spread to every continent and every people.
The idea that Christianity is a “white man’s religion” is nonsense. Or, to put it a bit more bluntly, it’s crap.
There have been Christians of all colors throughout history, starting with the very first Gentile to convert to Christ—the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts.
As a Catholic Christian, I’m very aware of the universality of the Church and how it has members in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Oceania, and in the Americas.
I love going to Rome and seeing all the people visiting it from cultures all over the world.
All you have to do is look at the college of cardinals to see the wonderful diversity of peoples who are Catholic and Christian.
Now, every time a pope is elected, the new pope is chosen from the college of cardinals, and in recent conclaves there have been multiple cardinals from sub-Saharan Africa who have been considered strong candidates for the papacy.
I look forward to the day when we have a pope from that part of the world. Partly, because I like the theology that African cardinals tend to have but also because having a black pope would once and for all put the lie to this white man’s religion nonsense.
And that would help all Christians, because the pope is the leader of global Christianity, so it would be good for all Christians.
So, I’m looking forward to the first black pope . . . whoever he turns out to be!
A Very Special Gift
I’ve planned to do this episode for a long time, but I decided to move it up in production order and make it now because of a very special gift I recently received.
If you’re watching the video version of this episode, you’ll have noticed that I’m wearing something that looks like a blue scarf around my neck.
The man who gave it to me is named Peter. I won’t say his last name, since he didn’t give me permission to do that, but it’s an African name.
He wrote me an extremely kind letter in which he said how much he values my apologetics work, noting how I keep my calm when debating and answering questions, and how he thanks God he’s a Catholic.
He concluded by saying, please accept this Kente stole and wear it with pride.
I was incredibly moved by this gift.
Before I explain it, notice what Peter has done here. He’s had my name—Jimmy Akin—embroidered into the cloth that the stole is made of.
And he’s spelled my name correctly!
Wow! He’s given me a personalized Kente stole! That is so awesome!
Now, in case you’re not familiar, Kente is an African cloth that has been made for hundreds of years, and today Kente stoles are worn by some religious leaders and at events like graduation.
According to the sources I’ve checked, Kente stoles can be worn by people of African descent to celebrate their heritage, accomplishments, and struggles, and they can also be worn by anyone who wishes to show appreciation for African culture, heritage, and the symbolic meaning of the fabric.
Well, recent scientific findings suggest that human beings evolved in Africa, so we all have African ancestry.
It’s just a question of how long it’s been since our ancestors lived there.
I’m a human being—so, like everyone else—I have African ancestry.
I own that! I’m proud of it!
Of course, that’s not what’s meant in this case. What’s meant is that they’re worn by people whose ancestors have lived there recently, and I don’t qualify in that sense.
It’s been a while since my ancestors moved from Africa, first to Europe and then to North America.
But I do wish to show appreciation for African culture and heritage and show solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the human race who happen to have recent African ancestry.
Of course I do! I take Jesus’ teaching on love seriously, so I love everybody!
I’d also like to call attention to the colors on the stole, because they have symbolic meaning.
You’ll see some green and red on it. Green can symbolize growth, and red can symbolize things like blood and passion.
The stole has more yellow on it, which can symbolize royalty and high value.
But the dominant color on this stole is blue, and blue symbolizes peace, harmony, and love.
Okay, that hit the nail on the head. I think Peter really gets what I’m trying to do, which is trying to promote peace, harmony, and love among all God’s children.
I know I’m not perfect, but that’s what I’m trying to do, so a personalized, blue Kente stole is one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.
So Peter, I want to thank you publicly for such an awesome gift and I will—as you said to—wear it with pride.
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God bless you always!