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1: RACE AND THE ORIGINS DEBATE


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This underscores the fact that the Bible acted overall as a restraining influence on racism.


The so-called Enlightenment, mostly centered on the 18th


century, followed hot on the heels of the Renaissance, and increasingly eroded a biblical understanding of our origins. Ethnohistorian Dr. Rainer Baehre explains that before that century:


“the view was widely held that all humanity had descended from Adam and Eve, including ‘the savage.’ Natural philosophy eroded this theological perspective during the Enlightenment, as the ‘nature’ of race and civilization began to be studied by philosophers, zoologists, anatomists, and physicians. Reflecting Enlightenment progressivism, they ranked living things from the basest to the highest and most perfect forms in the Great Chain of Being and raised the possibility of multiple creations. While the majority position of monogenesis prevailed into the 19th


century, it was increasingly challenged by polygenesis [the unbiblical idea that various races had separate origins—CW], whose advocates included Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume [all skeptics who wrote against Christianity—CW]. Polygenesis was sometimes used to justify slavery, anti-Semitism, and European domination of indigenous peoples.”22


During both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, many in the churches favored whatever the prevailing view was in the wider society, over and above the biblical account. The widespread acquiescence of ‘religious’ folk to Darwinism in the 19th


thus had ample precedent. It was in fact mostly scientists that held out against this tide, not ‘churchians’.


Supremacism: same scene, different actors


The impetus that Darwin gave to the existing racist beliefs of his time is not hard to understand. His theory purported to give a mechanism, a seemingly rational scientific and biological


22. Baehre, R.K., Early anthropological discourse on the Inuit and the influence of Virchow on Boas, Etudes/Inuit/Studies, 32(2):13–34, 2008.


century


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