By Roger Marshall*
Theology of racism was the title of Mr. Orlando Marville’s article, which appeared in the October 5, 2003 edition of the Sunday Sun. In that article he sought to lay much of the blame for the ills of modern-day racism at the feet of an erroneous “Christian” theology which permeated vast segments of 19th century European thought. However, while contending (with good grounds) that there was a massive revision of history which de-Africanised the Egyptians and instead Europeanised them, it is amazing that he is so prepared to accept as fact an even greater revision of history which claims that mankind evolved from ape-like soulless animals in the jungles of Africa.
While it is true that the Bible has been used to propagate theories which claimed that the African was an inferior species not imbued with a human soul which in turn gave a rational for enslaving millions of Africans in the Americas, it must be bourn in mind that such theories are no where taught in the Bible neither have they been taught by true Biblical Christianity. The true Judeo-Christian worldview of humanity states that God
“…has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth…”
(Acts 17:26). In other words all men regardless of ethnicity are created equal.
On the hand Darwin’s theory of evolution gives the perfect rational for the theories of racial superiority and inferiority. In the fact the full title of Darwin’s book published in 1859 was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races In The Struggle for Life. In Darwin’s subsequent book The Decent of Man he espoused his belief that different races of people evolved at different levels and that some were closer to ape-like creatures than others. In fact Darwin believed that the Australian Aborigines were the most primitive and the most closely related to our supposed ape-like ancestors.
It was Darwinism, which gave Hitler the “scientific” rational to carry out his atrocities against the Jews and other “lower races.” As Robert Clark observed, Adolf Hitler “…was captivated by evolutionary teaching – probably since the time he was a boy. Evolutionary ideas – quite undisguised – lie at the basis of all that is worst in Mein Kampf – and in his public speeches…Hitler reasoned…that a higher race would always conquer a lower”(Darwin: Before and After by Robert Clark, p. 115). In his own words at the 1933 Nuremberg party rally Hitler said that a “higher race subjects to itself a lower race…a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right”(Race and Reich by J. Tenenbaum, p. 211).
Darwinism is also central to Karl Marx’s ideology which inspired the atrocities carried out by communist monsters such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung (just to name a few) in which over 150 million people were exterminated all in the name of evolution’s survival of the fittest philosophy.
Thus Darwinism – the hub of much of Pan Africanism’s high self-esteem motivational trust, which proudly proclaims that the Black man was the original man to evolve from the apes in Africa – is in itself an inherently a racist philosophy favouring any subsequent “race”(in this case the white race) which would later subjugate the preceding race as epitomised by the transatlantic slave trade and its many varied after effects which are still being felt today.
Maybe Pan Africanists who embrace Darwinism (like Mr. Marville) have not thoroughly thought through their philosophy, but for them to abandon the Biblical doctrine of origins in which all men are created equal by God (which gives hope and scope for repentance and racial reconciliation) to replace it with an inherently racist, atheistic evolutionary philosophy (which offers no hope or scope for repentance and racial reconciliation) is a sure recipe for perpetuating racial inequality.
*Roger Marshall is executive director of Project PROBE Ministries a Barbadian Christian apologetics organisation.
2003