There is only one race - the human race
Ken Ham is president of Answers in Genesis and co-author of the book "One Race, One Blood."
In the past two centuries, Christian politicians and church leaders were among the great leaders in America's fight against the scourge of racism. Following the example of the courageous English abolitionist and devout Christian William Wilberforce in the early 1800s, anti-slavery activists in America (many of them pastors) helped abolish slavery. During the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, many of its key leaders were pastors, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Cincinnati’s very own Fred Shuttlesworth.
Although racism sadly exists in many churches today, Christians are the ones best equipped to counter it. As they look back on the church’s abolitionist heritage, Christians should continue to use their very powerful weapon, the Bible, to fight racism, especially today when tensions mount as white supremacists stage protests, statues are taken down and Cincinnati deals with simmering racial issues.
Christian teachings formed much of the playbook for the great civil rights leaders. They recognized that humans were made in the image of God and thus they all shared the same value in the eyes of their Creator. Adam and Eve were recognized as the first couple, and as their descendants, we inherited their tremendous genetic variation that gave us the different skin shades, eye shapes, etc., we observe today. Furthermore, the Bible’s book of Acts teaches that all people are of “one blood.” In the Christian worldview, there are no different races but just one.
Contrast those beliefs to what society has largely been taught over the past 100 years. During the time of the Scopes trial (1925), a major biology textbook (“A Civic Biology”) declared, based on Darwinian evolution, that: “There exist upon the earth five races . . . the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.” The late Stephen Jay Gould (the famous Harvard evolutionist) even acknowledged: “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 [the date of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”], but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” While Christians should not argue that evolution causes racism, we can point out that some white supremacists will use the “science” of evolution to justify their evil racist beliefs, as they declare that some groups have evolved to become more intelligent and advanced than others.
As the acceptance of Darwinian evolution has grown, much of society has adopted a belief that the different people groups and their physical characteristics (like skin shade and eye shape) came about through the processes of evolution. But we are not very different. The truth is that the so-called “racial characteristics” are only minor variations among people groups and make up only 0.012 per–cent of human biological variation. Regardless of our skin “color,” we are far more alike than we are different.
Furthermore, there is only one skin color. There is but one major pigment, called melanin, that produces various skin shades of brown, from light brown to very dark brown. That’s why we depict Adam and Eve in our Creation Museum as middle brown.
What should we be teaching inside our churches and beyond their four walls? For one, point out the common ground of both evolutionists and creationists: the mapping of the human genome concluded that there is only one race, the human race. Science has confirmed we are all of “one blood.”
Had generations been taught the correct account of the origins of the different people groups, racist beliefs that cause prejudice could have been greatly diminished. It’s not too late to take a bold stand on the clear teaching of Scripture that opposes the sin of racism.
