Terence Keel's fascinating and provocative book begins by unsettling some preconceived notions about the impact of Christian thought on ideas of racial difference. Drawing on recent scholarship, including what is sometimes termed the ‘radical new perspective on Paul’, Keel argues that early Christianity did not (or did not only) inaugurate a vision of humanity that transcended or relativised supposed racial difference. Instead, not least through hostile attitudes towards rabbinical or post-biblical Judaism over many centuries, Christian belief created the intellectual conditions for the kind of racial reasoning that has nurtured, and continues to nurture, racist thought. Keel's main concern is to demonstrate how Christian modes of thought shaped what has too quickly been described by historians and others as purely scientific and secular forms of racism. He does this by examining select but significant episodes in the history of scientific accounts of racial difference. These include the intellectual and political influences formative for the German physician and naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), the ‘secular creationism’ of American polygenists active in the mid-nineteenth century, the enduring influence of polygenist thought on the science of public health in the United States in the early twentieth century and the surprising and paradoxical persistence of crude racial typologies from Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley to recent work on traces of Neanderthal DNA in ‘non-African’ populations.
Keel does not claim to have written a comprehensive history of racial science. Instead, he skilfully pursues a line of argument through a linked set of highly engaging, well researched and important case studies. At under 200 pages, this is not a long book, but it is one that cannot be read quickly or quickly put aside. Moreover, the sheer scope and ambition of the central thesis, and the variety and extent of the scholarship on which it relies, makes it difficult for any one reader to assess it with any degree of confidence. But with that qualification in mind, let me offer one or two reasons why, in the end, I was not fully persuaded by the central argument or its application to the episodes that Keel recounts.
In general terms, there is surely no doubt that the history of the formation, and reformation, of Christian self-understanding involved typecasting those thought to be beyond the reach of salvation (and a harsh supersessionism may well be the earliest and ugliest manifestation of this). It is also apparent that Christian ideas about creation and the final goal of human history have shaped deeply troubling accounts of human difference in ways that can hardly be (but often are) underplayed. Yet at the same time, for internal as well as external reasons, these trends faced countervailing attempts to resist or subvert presumed or identifiable limits to the scope of salvation without denying, erasing or denigrating human diversity. If this is granted (and of course we have a debate on our hands) then Christian intellectual history cannot be reduced to an intractable and invidious form of racial reasoning. What I want to suggest is that Keel, in the examples that he explores and against the drift of his argument, provides some pertinent material to support this claim.
Take, for example, the case of American polygenists. They certainly promoted a notion of racial fixity that was based on the sudden appearance (whether supernaturally or naturally caused) of separate species of humans. This may indeed be defined as a form of secular creationism, even if the declared purpose of at least some (not least Josiah Nott) was to undermine the influence of the Bible on the development of racial science. Yet as Keel notes, the polygenists were fundamentally opposed to the idea that the human form rapidly altered on moving to a different natural environment. Their monogenist foes, on the other hand, had to suppose that the human body was highly mutable and sensitive to changes in environment, albeit within (to them) clear species limits. Might we not argue, then, that this environmentalism could be regarded as at least as much of a logical entailment of a Christian account of human origins as (racial) fixity? And like the idea of fixity, that it too lingered long in the (post-Christian) development of racial (and anti-racial) science? As many have pointed out, such environmentalism has been used to construct appallingly racist accounts of human difference. But equally, it has provided a basis for significant critiques of invidious racist schemes. Keel, indeed, provides us with an attractive and compelling example of the latter in the person of Charles V. Roman, the black American physician who strongly resisted the racialist public health science of his early twentieth-century contemporaries. It might even be argued that for every racial thinker influenced by Christian ideas about humanity there is one, equally so influenced, who stands in direct opposition. For every Blumenbach (if his scheme was indeed as ineradicably racist as Keel appears to suggest) there is a Friedrich Tiedemann (1781–1861), or for every Josiah Nott there is a Martin Delany (1812–85) or Daniel Wilson (1816–92), and so on; and they all, more or less, rely upon what Keel describes as the ‘muddy stream’ (p. 26) of Christian intellectual thought on human difference. It is also worth pausing over the fact that the influence of Christian modes of thought are arguably more in evidence in the thinking of Charles V. Roman than they are in the rather deracinated form of ‘creationism’ operating in the racial reasoning of polygenists like Agassiz, Gliddon, Morton and Nott.
Perhaps Keel would grant all this but insist that it remains critical that science divorces itself entirely from any kind of classificatory schemes that purport to represent or explain human variation on a large scale. Such schemes will only finally dissolve and lose influence once the geneticists and palaeoanthropologists that Keel so effectively critiques shake free from the now tacit but still powerful effects of Christian patterns of thought. On this account, Charles Roman, as much as anyone else, remained entrapped by the very form of reasoning on which his opponents so effectively relied. What ‘alternative habits of mind’ (p. 146) might permit us to move completely beyond the reach and influence of Christian racial reasoning are not spelt out by Keel. He has, however, given us several clues. The earliest, perhaps, can be found in the thorough-going evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley. I was not persuaded, however, that Keel's diagnosis of the lingering racist notions found in Darwin and (especially) Huxley is correct.
In his chapter on ‘Noah's mongrel children’ Keel argues that Darwin and most especially Huxley offered an account of racial difference that was at odds with their view that the evolution of life had taken no definite or directed path. In Keel's account, the paradoxical persistence of ranked racial types in Huxley's discussions of ethnology reflected instead the continued influence of cultural (which is to say Christian) ideas about human progress. It seems doubtful, however, that Huxley regarded the idea of undirected evolution, taken by itself, as incompatible with identifiable, stable and ranked human types. In his early efforts in this regard, Huxley quite deliberately appealed to the theory of natural selection to account for what he termed ‘persistent modifications’ that directly mapped on to discrete racial groups (somewhat reorganised according to Huxley's favoured scheme). A hierarchy of intellectual capacity and moral culture, based on varying physical properties, was exactly what Huxley expected once Darwin's theory was accepted and precisely applied. As Huxley memorably declared, Darwinism combined what was best in monogenism and polygenism and provided (for the first time) a scientific explanation for racial diversity (and natural inequality). Darwin's own account of race was rather different from Huxley's early efforts (sexual rather than natural selection was critical). Yet, as Evelleen Richards has recently argued in Darwin and the making of sexual selection (Chicago 2017), the famous Victorian evolutionist also fundamentally relied on, and indeed reinforced, the notion of innate and inimical racial difference. It is hard to see that Darwinian naturalism, at least in this nineteenth-century guise, did not produce – against rather than with the grain of Christian thought – a pretty appalling and enduring form of scientific racism.
I might risk pushing this further and suggest that in view of recent resurgence of ‘scientific realism’ about race, it is not at all clear that, by its own lights, Darwinian evolutionary theory can provide the alternative patterns of thought that Keel appeals for. His important book has argued with verve and vigour that the entanglement of Christian thought with racial science helped to form persistent and pernicious kinds of scientific racism. This is far from a baseless argument. But, at least in its drift and rhetorical framing, there is a risk that it unhelpfully obscures countervailing trends within the history of Christian thought which might turn out to provide vital aids for constructing more nimble, just and reparative ‘habits of mind’ in the face of ongoing challenges to them.
