Racial mixing is perfectly biblical!
Debunking the anti-biblical racist arguments of ‘Christian Identity’
We at CMI have been fighting against racism (in all forms) for decades. Over our many years of existence, we have published numerous articles, videos, and books defending the biblical truth that there is but one human race (Adam’s), that all people on earth are equal in both God’s sight and in light of science, and that the early Darwinists contributed greatly to the misanthropic idea that some people groups are superior to others. And yet, our message has not penetrated to all areas of society or even to every corner of Christendom. The Internet has made the situation even worse. With just a few clicks, one can find a huge number of false claims about races, racial mixing, racial purity, and what the Bible says about races.
Sadly, we were recently contacted by a person who holds views contrary to our own. This was not the first time we have received such a message, nor is it the first time we are reporting on one, but it has been several years since the last time we tangled with this subject and new articles and ideas have been published in the meantime. Thus, we are taking the time to bring up the issue again. We reproduce his message to us below. After that, we will refute it point by point. This type of writing, however, was not invented in a box. The terminology is associated with long-standing false teachings, mainly from certain groups based in America, but with tendrils across the world. The person writing probably did not think up these things himself. Instead, he appears to be pulling his rhetoric from others. For the record, we disavow any and all such teaching.
This is from “F.D.”:
“God condemns race mixing. Adam is and was the father of the white race. Adam means to show blood in the face, to blush. Only white people show blood in the face red and blush. Race mixing is a sin. Noah was a direct descendant of Adam and he was a white man. It is impossible for a white man to have a black kid, an Asian kid, and a white kid. All of Noah’s sons were of the white race. The other races were created before Adam and Eve. God couldn’t even find a compatible mate for Adam, that is why he had to create one for him. Adam is not the father of all races. That doesn’t make any sense and I can prove what I am saying.”
Our reply:
We are dismayed to read statements like this. Your ideology stems from racist groups, such as the unbefittingly named ‘Christian Identity’ movement. As Christians, we completely repudiate this pernicious belief system! Based on clear teachings of the Bible your statements will be refuted, point by point below. It will be easy to show that you make a lot of broad, sweeping statements that are not based on fact. We do this also to help our readers see how far away from the truth you are. Yet, our ultimate goal would be for you to repent. There is hatred behind the words. You might not feel it, but hatred is what generated these thoughts among the people from whom you learned these ideas. Please give us a moment to point you to a better way of thinking.
Your email raises two important issues. Are all humans related? Or if God created different races, does this mean that some races are favored over others? This could lead to certain undesirable racial implications. The second, but more important issue concerns salvation. If God created different races, does He deal with each one separately? If only one race sinned, does this mean that people from other races aren’t in need of redemption?
“God condemns racial mixing … Race mixing is a sin.”
It is true that God commanded the Jewish people (and only the Jewish people), in the Old Testament, to separate themselves from all other nations. God wanted Israel to be distinct from the surrounding nations so they could preserve their religious identity (Leviticus 21:14; Numbers 36:3–6; Deuteronomy 7:1–5; Ezekiel 44:22), yet the Jewish people never followed through on God’s command. In a mixed religious marriage, there is always a risk that one party will succumb to the religion of the spouse. Time and time again, whenever the Jewish people intermarried with other people groups, it led to idolatry (i.e. Numbers 25:1–9). This is because the pagan spouses would often lead them to worship idols and false gods. In this way Solomon’s many wives drew his heart away from the Lord (1 Kings 11:4). The New Testament also commands believers to marry only “in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39), and not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers (2 Corinthians 6:14). But note that these are religious reasons only! They have nothing to do with ‘race’.
Yet, Israel also was never ‘racially pure’ anyway. Not only did they not start out ‘pure’, they continued to mix with outsiders throughout their entire history. Outsiders from other people groups married into the Jewish race on multiple occasions, and God often blessed or sanctioned those unions. Such people include Ruth the Moabitess who married Boaz (Ruth 4:13–17) after she expressed faith in God (Ruth 1:16). Ruth is included in the genealogies as the great-grandmother of King David and the ancestress of Jesus (Matthew 1:5). Boaz was the son of Salmon, who married Rahab, a pagan prostitute in Jericho who trusted the Lord when she hid the Jewish spies sent by Joshua during the conquest of Israel. Yet God clearly approved of these marriages. In the New Testament, no prohibition of marrying people from other groups remains, since salvation has been extended to the nations (Acts 28:28). The only restriction is that one must marry “only in the Lord”, as already mentioned.
If you are trying to suggest that the non-white races are not human, that they are somehow inferior, or that they are in any way “less” human, you are not going to be able to support your thesis. One NY Times reporter recently tried to make such a case, but we soundly debunked him. It is true that the evolutionary community has a long track record of racist beliefs and teachings. Even Charles Darwin is on record saying things that are considered completely inappropriate today. For example, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, he wrote:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world … At the same time the anthropological apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state … and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
Clearly, you and he believe(d) similar things. And yet, over a decade ago, the well-known geneticist Lluis Quintana-Murci said:
“But the genes that explain the phenotypic differences between populations only represent a tiny part of our genome, confirming once again that the concept of ‘race’ from a genetic standpoint has been abolished.”1
Thus, modern evolutionists are repudiating the racist rhetoric of the earlier evolutionists. Their science is finally catching up with the Bible! You now find yourself out on a limb. Neither ‘science’ nor the Bible agree with what you are teaching.
“Adam is and was the father of the white race.”
The Bible never mentions God creating more than one race of humans. God created all of mankind from one man, Adam: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). It is true that God allowed different nations and people groups to derive from Adam over the long course of world history, but this verse does not say that people cannot cross these boundaries to intermix with one another. To claim that God placed people groups within certain physical boundaries to prohibit racial mixing is to isolate this verse from the rest of Scripture. As we have seen previously, God sanctioned the marriage of some Jews with non-Jews. We have to interpret isolated verses of Scripture based on the whole of Scripture.
This means that all people are inter-related with one another. It is possible for a man and a woman from any two people groups on earth to interbreed with one another. The genetic difference between any two individuals on Earth is about 0.2% on average. A mere 6% of that 0.2% corresponds to the average genetic difference between two different people groups (i.e. Asians and Europeans). This is clearly minimal, to say the least. People from two different races and people groups can even be organ donors for one another. There is zero evidence that God created multiple races.
It is a known fact in population genetics that there are around 10 million genetic variants among all people on earth. However, a recent paper which describes the comparison of 929 genomes from diverse people groups shows that there are no fixed genetic differences between people groups from larger geographic regions.2 This means that all genetic variants in humans are either shared by all populations on earth, or they are restricted to a subgroup of a subpopulation. No variants are found in all Europeans, all Africans, or all Asians. There is no genetic marker which designates a certain people group as completely distinct from others. In other words, there is no way to separate the world population into ‘races’.
“Adam means to show blood in the face, to blush. Only white people show blood in the face red and blush.”
The Hebrew language gives multiple meanings to some words. The word adam (אָדָם) indeed means red, but it does not mean to blush, or to become red in the face. That is merely a distortion of the word’s original meaning. The word adam also means earth, indicating that Adam was created from the ground. Interestingly, many soils are reddish in color due to their iron content. We do not know what Adam or Noah physically looked like. We often say that Adam probably had middle-brown skin, hair, and eyes, because that would mean he would have the genetics to have children with the entire range of skin colors. Jesus Christ was Jewish, not European. We know that Jews of the first century generally had olive-colored skin with dark hair and eyes. This means that Christianity is not just for white people. In fact, Christianity arrived in Africa (Acts 8:26–40) before it got to Europe, as any Bible reader should easily understand.
“All of Noah’s sons were of the white race.”
Here you make an error of basic logic. If Noah’s sons were all white, everybody today would be white. Everybody alive today is a descendent of Noah and his family, according to what the Bible says:
“… when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water.” (1 Peter 3:20)
If Noah’s sons’ wives were of a different skin color, all people today would be of mixed race. Think about it: Noah’s descendants would have stayed together until Babel, where all of humanity was united. They were one people (Genesis 11:6), with one culture, and one language. The sons of Ham would have married the daughters of Japheth, and the sons of Japheth the daughters of Shem, etc. There is no opportunity for ‘races’ to develop until after Babel, when the population was subdivided into isolated groups. But that was only about 4,500 years, maybe 150 generations, ago. We are all kissing cousins, and there is nothing you can do to change that.
If you are implying that the Flood was local and only involved a subset of the human race, we would encourage you to accept what the Bible teaches: the Flood was worldwide and every air breathing vertebrate on the planet that was not on the Ark died (Genesis 7:21–23).
If you are suggesting that non-white people were brought on the Ark as chattel, you will fail to explain why humans of all colors are freely interfertile, across the world. There are no barriers to reproduction, because we are the same species, the same created ‘kind’. We source from a single population, which is clear from the genetics, and we have been ‘mixing’ since the dawn of time. Your ideas about race are simply wrong.
According to Isaiah 59:20, “A Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression”. Jesus Christ is our kinsman-redeemer, since only a member of the human race can die as a sacrifice for others. It would be pointless for a man to die for an animal. Jesus Christ came to die for people from all people groups. This is the reason God took on flesh and became man. If God had created several races in the beginning, with a white Adam being only one of them, that would mean that there would be several racial groups which are not in need of being saved, which the Bible clearly contradicts (Acts 17:30–31). And that is the real problem. Your ideas conflict with the Bible. It is not enough to lift a single verse here and there to try and support an idea. One must consult the whole of Scripture, and clearly you have not done that. For if you had, you would have seen that Adam is the father of all people and that there is no difference between Africans, Asians, and Europeans in the Bible.
The most shocking thing is that people of European descent, which includes both the authors, would be incorporated into a very Jewish religion. Our pagan Celtic, Germanic, and Hungarian ancestors knew nothing about the events of the Bible. They were as vain and wicked as any people could be. They had no knowledge of the God of the Bible, and history gives us no indication that they even cared before Christianity was brought to their countries. And yet, our Savior sought us out! We are under the umbrella of Jesus’ redemption! We are not Jewish, but Jesus is still our Kinsman Redeemer. Why? Because we are related to him though Adam, the father of all people on earth today (including those native to Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia, etc.) and the federal (covenantal) head of humanity.
In conclusion the idea that Adam was white and that God created other races before him has no scriptural or scientific support. Rather, these ideas are derived from now-discredited evolutionary thinking. God loves all people equally, irrespective of their skin color. Likewise, God shows no partiality towards or against any group of people (Romans 2:11). And, God can approve of marriages between any two races. The only important thing is for two believers to marry in the Lord (1Corinthians 7:39). Let us trust God’s Word and not man’s opinion, even over scientific theories of human origins.
References and notes
- Quintana-Murci, L. (National Centre for Scientific Research (France)), Human variation chalked up to natural selection: study, PhysOrg.com, 4 Feb 2008. Return to text.
- Bergström, A. et al., Insights into human genetic variation and population history from 929 diverse genomes, unpublished manuscript obtained from bioRxiv.org, 2019 | doi:10.1101/674986. Return to text.
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