Saturday, April 13, 2024

The Bible Is Not White Supremacist

The Bible is so clearly against white supremacy, or any kind of racial supremacist philosophy, that one has to be a thorough non-rationalist to even begin gravitating towards the idea.  As humans, white people would of course have no less baseline value than anyone else from any time, from geographical location, or or any skin color (Genesis 1:26-27), but this does not make them metaphysically superior to anyone else on the basis of skin color or lineage.  The early chapters of the Bible already affirm the tenets of this and Mosaic Law does the same.

Foreigners, which could sometimes be members of other races, are not to be treated differently than the human rights of all people under Mosaic Law dictate (Leviticus 24:22, Exodus 22:21).  People of other nations or that look different from whatever one's race is are not regarded as subhuman by any means.  However, the happenstance fact that some white supremacists throughout American history believed or claimed that Biblical theology is consistent with their racist ideology does not mean it is so.  This does not logically follow, which itself means the idea is epistemologically flawed already, and then the Bible also contradicts this.

Besides the way that the Bible repeatedly makes clear statements that would exclude racial supremacy--when other people groups besides the Jews are killed, it is not just because they are outsiders/foreigners, but because of their predominant sins--the Bible simply never says that white people are superior to others.  In fact, the only white people it directly mentions are the Greeks and Romans, though, say, the Roman Empire contained many various groups of conquered people within it.  Salvation is offered to them, white or not, just as it is extended to all people (Galatians 3:28, John 3:16).

There is only one kind of racial/national supremacy that assumptions and superficial misconceptions might lead the irrational to believe are actual doctrines of the Bible, and that would be Jewish supremacy.  Since so much of the Torah is devoted to injunctions to not mistreat outsiders and to specifying obligations without even mentioning race or nationality (the two are separate qualities anyway), the misunderstood verses would not exactly be all over the place as some imagine.  Deuteronomy 23:19-20, for instance, says charging interest to a fellow Israelite is forbidden but that interest can be charged to foreigners.

As if Leviticus 25:35-37 does not separately say to treat the poor Israelite like a foreigner or stranger by not charging them interest or even selling them food at a profit, meaning at the very least that poor foreigners were not to pay interest to Israelites either, Deuteronomy 23:19-20 would still be consistent with Genesis 1:26-27.  The obligation would be to not charge interest to people of one's own country or community, not to treat Jews as superior to the many non-Jewish peoples of the ancient or modern world.  In either case, the same obligations are universal to all, and none of this has anything to do with white supremacy.

Contemporary American liberals are in many ways just as delusional as the conservatives they oppose, sometimes pretending like the Bible is white supremacist or misogynist or some other such thing as a basis for rejecting it as even possibly true.  It is absolutely not white supremacist in any way.  Biblical philosophy is thoroughly racially egalitarian and anyone who believes otherwise only assumes out of irrationality.  Moral value, justice, and salvation are either respectively possessed, owed, or offered to everyone according to Biblical teachings.

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