“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”
It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born between Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq is “white supremacist”? There’s something more nefarious under the brainlessness, however, and we shouldn’t breeze past it.
This headline is just the latest in the left’s crusade not only to brand everything that challenges their worldview as racist, but also to grant scientific legitimacy to their race-baiting. This time, however, they’re aiming their fire straight at the heart of the scriptures on which Christians base their beliefs — and they aren’t trying to hide the reason why.
If they can convince you not only that your Donald Trump-voting Christian neighbor is a racist but that the Bible itself is the epitome of white supremacy, they can ban it from polite society and ostracize anyone who would defend it. Critical race theory is good. Jesus is bad. Now cough up your hard-earned tax dollars so we can teach that to your kids.
The author, Allison Hopper, isn’t out to provide proof for evolution (and by “evolution,” both that article and this one refer to macroevolution). She merely asserts it as fact. Instead, her quest is “to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”
After lamenting that bookstores don’t contain enough tomes about our dark-skinned ancestors who launched not only human genetics but also human culture, she lambastes creationists for “loudly insist[ing] that their point of view deserves equal time in the classroom” under what she calls the “guise of ‘religious freedom.’”
Many people oppose teaching intelligent design in government school science class, and that’s a debate for another day, but Hopper’s opposition cuts deeper. She says:
At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God’s image. Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants’ skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment.
This is patently false. While Joseph Smith and Brigham Young fabricated the Cain narrative (among other heretical myths) for the Mormon church, the idea of black skin being a punishment is not in any way biblical, and it certainly isn’t “at the heart of white evangelical creationism.”
That Isn’t Biblical…
Hopper is referring here to Genesis 4:15 following the murder of Abel. The passage says, “And the Lord put a mark on Cain.” No reading of the Hebrew words translated as “mark” implies “dark skin,” as Hopper insists. In fact, the mark placed on Cain isn’t even part of his punishment; it’s a result of Cain crying out that his punishment of being a “fugitive and a wanderer” is more than he can bear and will lead to his own murder.
The mark God places on Cain is actually an act of mercy and grace. Look at the account:
Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.’ Then the Lord said to him, ‘Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.
Orthodox Christianity, and thus “literal interpretations of the Christian Bible” do not teach that “white skin was created in God’s image.” Hopper’s claim to the contrary is either glaring intellectual dishonesty or plain ignorance. The Bible teaches, and Christians believe, that man — as in, mankind or humanity — was created in God’s image. Among many other biblical teachings, this one about human beings being made in the image of God, or imago Dei, is one of the most powerful Christian condemnations of racism.
While evolutionists such as Hopper say the Bible is rife with racism, they elevate an origin theory that posits black African descendants as little more than animals, and brutal oppression of the weak as the only way to advance and thrive. Dehumanization and oppression sound an awful lot like real racism. Nonetheless, Hopper suggests Christians believe the Bible narrative is made up of an all-white cast and that scripture is thus a source of racism.
“The fantasy of a continuous line of white descendants segregates white heritage from Black bodies,” she says. “In the real world, this mythology translates into lethal effects on people who are Black. Fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible are part of the ‘fake news’ epidemic that feeds the racial divide in our country.”
Evolution Has Fueled Racism
Of course, woke evolutionists are desperate to flip the racism argument on Christians because it diverts attention away from the racist genesis of the Darwinian theories they espouse.
The complete title of Charles Darwin’s seminal book was “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” In his book “The Descent of Man,” Darwin recorded, “The Western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilization,” and said, “The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world.” In other words, Darwin’s white supremacy was underpinned by his evolutionary theory, the same theory Hopper champions.
Darwin’s white supremacist musings weren’t confined to the page. As Phil Moore noted, Darwin’s evolutionary theory influenced racism and genocide the world over. In America, it was used to justify the killing of Native Americans. In Germany, the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the murder of non-Russian people. The Serbs used it to rationalize the genocide against Kosovans and Croatians.
Just as there’s no way to get around the horrors that evolutionary ideas have prompted, there’s no way to get around the actual anti-racist message inherent in the biblical message: From salvation being for both Jews and Gentiles, to the parable of the Good Samaritan; from Gentile women such as Tamar, Ruth, Rahab, and Bathsheba weaving through the ancestry of Christ, to his command to preach the gospel to all nations. The thrust of Reformed belief is that sin damns, Jesus saves, and people can be justified by faith alone — there are no ethnic or racial advantages or disadvantages.
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” the apostle John wrote of heaven, as recorded in Revelation, capturing the diversity of God’s kingdom.
Hopper’s goal, and that of the radical left, isn’t to make a legitimate argument for evolution or a good-faith case that the biblical creation account is racist, however. The author of the Scientific American article explicitly states her activist aim: “My hope is that if we make the connection between creationism and racist ideology clearer, we will provide more ammunition to get science into the classroom — and into our culture at large.”
That’s it. It’s a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance its opposition among your kids and with your tax dollars, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.
