Southern Baptists Won’t Renounce the so‑called “Curse of Ham”:
Sanctifying Slavery Then…
White Supremacy Now

June 23, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Away With All God! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian

In Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, Bob Avakian writes:

One of the things that David Brion Davis speaks to in Inhuman Bondage (and this is something I also pointed out in Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?) is that, along with arguments by Aristotle justifying slavery, one of the main things cited by the apologists and defenders of slavery in the southern U.S. was the Bible. More specifically, the story of how Noah’s son Ham incurred the wrath of God—so that God cast Ham into Africa and put a curse on the descendants of Ham, beginning with his son, Canaan—was repeatedly invoked to give a religious sanctification to the massive enslavement of people of African origin in the American South.²⁷

For all the reasons that I’ve been speaking to (and which the statements I have cited from Kevin Phillips shine a light on), unavoidably bound up with religious fundamentalism in the U.S., given the whole history of this country, is a definite and pronounced component of white supremacy. And this is objectively true, even though not every individual caught up in this religious fundamentalism is conscious of this fact.

And, again, one of the bitter and acute ironies in all this is the spread of this religious fundamentalism—to a large degree with the battering ram of the forceful reassertion of absolutist patriarchal authority—among those who are most directly the victims of white supremacy. To the degree that this takes hold among them, it will have the effect of binding them more firmly into a whole process which will not only greatly intensify their oppression, but which has genocidal implications, particularly in a situation in which already huge numbers of inner city youth—a large percentage of Black youth and many Latino youth as well—are already in prison or ensnared in the “criminal justice system” in one form or another.

27. In more recent times, once again we have seen arguments seeking to justify and reinforce white supremacy being treated very respectably in the bourgeois media and other “mainstream” institutions. This was the case with The Bell Curve, for example—a book that was published and was promoted very aggressively in the 1990s. In setting out to justify oppressive relations in general—and, more specifically, white supremacy—this book did not rely so much on religious scripture for justification, but based its arguments on pseudo-scientific rationalization for what it alleged were the innate inferiority and superiority of various groups. It explicitly argued that there is a genetically-based inferiority of people of African origin, particularly with regard to intellectual capacities. This was raised to oppose programs such as affirmative action, but also more generally to justify unequal and oppressive relations and to reinforce the ideology of white chauvinism (racism) that goes along with the way in which white supremacy is built into the whole history and foundation, and the dominant institutions and structures, of U.S. society. However, increasingly in these times in the U.S. we see religious fundamentalism being brought forward as a unifying ideological basis for the most openly reactionary viewpoints and political programs, including white supremacy as well as male supremacy. [back]

Download or order a print copy of the book from Insight Press here.

Going into the national convention of the Southern Baptists (SBC) last week, Dwight McKissic, a prominent Black pastor in Texas, drafted a resolution condemning “White Nationalism” and the “Alt-Right” as “totalitarian impulses, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that infect the minds and actions of its violent disciples…”

Significantly, McKissic’s resolution also stated: “[T]he roots of White Supremacy within a ‘Christian context’ is based on the so-called ‘curse of Ham’ theory once prominently taught by the SBC in the early years—echoing the belief that God through Noah ordained descendants of Africa to be subservient to Anglos—which provided the theological justification for slavery and segregation. The SBC officially renounces the ‘curse of Ham’ theory in this Resolution.”

The Southern Baptist Convention was explicitly formed in 1845 to uphold slavery. In recent decades, the Southern Baptists have moved to change their image, take formal positions against racism, and distance themselves from their slave-upholding roots. Today, a fifth of the membership of the SBC is African-American, and non-whites are the fastest growing section of their membership. In the midst of the national uproar over the Confederate Flag—after the massacre by a white supremacist of Black people in Bible study in a South Carolina church in 2015—the SBC urged Christians not to fly the Confederate flag. At the same time, Southern Baptists are home to a big chunk of Donald Trump’s white supremacist, fascist hardcore base. Statements by some SBC officials that were taken as critical of Trump aroused the ire of powerful forces in the SBC.

When word got out that the SBC leadership planned to squash McKissic’s resolution—never bring it to a vote—“all hell broke loose” in the words of one commentator. Thabiti Anyabwile, a Black Southern Baptist pastor, tweeted: “We must be clear: We live in a time when equivocating on these matters furthers the sin of racism even to violence and death. Any ‘church’ that cannot denounce white supremacy without hesitancy and equivocation is a dead, Jesus denying assembly. No 2 ways about it. … I’m done. With this Twitter spiel. With ‘evangelicalism.’ With all the racist and indifferent nonsense that passes as ‘Christian.’” Other pastors, including at least one white pastor from an integrated church, posted statements of outrage.

Further exposing the stakes, neo-Nazi white supremacist Richard Spencer tweeted: “So apparently the Southern Baptists Convention *didn't* denounce the Alt-Right after all. Interesting development!”

The controversy spiraled within the ranks of the SBC, threatening to get out of control. At the last moment, SBC officials felt compelled to come up with their own resolution. Their resolution adopted some of McKissic’s wording opposing white supremacy and the alt-right. But it gutted the sharper edges of the indictment that explicitly called out “totalitarian impulses, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies...” Most significantly, it stripped out the denunciation of the “curse of Ham.”

The SBC leadership’s resolution passed unanimously. But the fissures the whole controversy exposed reflect profound divides that are coming to a head, sharply, in every corner of society as the Trump/Pence regime moves to impose—in the words of the Call from Refuse Fascism— “their vision and plan for a nation cohered around white supremacy and a political form of Christian fundamentalism, that should rightly be called Christian Fascism.”

The racist “Curse of Ham” madness “sanctified” slavery then, and remains an ideological pillar of white supremacy now. With a fascist president of the United States, when the stakes are indeed “violence and death,” the Southern Baptist leadership refused to renounce it.

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Southern Baptists Won’t Renounce the so‑called “Curse of Ham”: Sanctifying Slavery Then… White Supremacy Now

Southern Baptists Won’t Renounce the so‑called “Curse of Ham”:
Sanctifying Slavery Then…
White Supremacy Now