On the heels of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and its call — among other things — to keep fighting against racism — I recall some anti-evolution attitudes I have encountered among my fellow Christians, as well as antagonism I have personally received as a Christian who thinks that evolution is a good scientific theory. I recall these things on MLK Day because I have known Christians who have claimed that evolution undermines the value of human life and calls for the kinds of immorality displayed in racism.

On the contrary, if you study some of the history of interpreting the Bible and interpreting science, you will find that both the Bible and science have been interpreted to support racism, and to oppose it. I invite you to engage, for example, this excerpt from a book by Ron Cole-Turner, my doctoral professor and advisor:

“In the United States, many who embraced traditional Christian theology or Biblical literalism objected to evolutionary theories, polygenic and monogenic alike. Our theories of human origins, they insisted, must be based on the Bible. The distressing thing is that in the end, it really did not matter whether one accepted polygenism, monogenism, or a literal Adam and Eve. Each view was interpreted to support racism.”

Ronald Cole-Turner, The End of Adam and Eve (2016), pp. 134-135

The context for this excerpt is that, in the late-1800s and early-1900s, there were people in the United States of America who used science to justify racism, and there were Christians who used the Bible to justify racism. In other words, it did not matter whether one appealed to science or one appealed to the Bible; if you wanted to justify racism, you would find a way to do so, even if it meant using God or scientific study to justify your beliefs.

Ron Cole-Turner’s discussion is based, in turn, on his interaction with another worthwhile read, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins, by David Livingstone (Johns Hopkins, 2008).

A corollary of the foregoing is this: if you think that the Bible, or a particular — or so-called “literal” — interpretation of the Bible, is the solution to racism, think again. Scientific understandings of human origins will not, in and of themselves, end racism. Biblical literalism will not, in and of itself, end racism. Ending racism is a deliberate and conscious decision on the part of people who have become convinced, for whatever reason(s), that racism is a human contrivance and construct that lives on the lies we feed ourselves about being better than others.