Racial rigidity at the Cape tightened with Protestant ideas of divine election

Evidence

Early Cape mixing is notable for a number of reasons. Settlement of the Cape came a century after the famous debate at Valladolid between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, a half-century of robust slave trading from Africa to the New World, and at least a century of Dutch activity in the far East Indies. The monogenism associated with the Catholic Church still reigned, equating all before God, and the connected challenges of both polygenism and pre-Adamism were yet to be registered, as too the emergent philosophical influence of John Locke, not least regarding race. Race was not yet quite so threatening, its reach not quite so universal or restrictive as it would become a century later yet. The rise of Protestantism, and most notably the strict Calvinist strain among the Dutch, elevated the notion of divine election, made conversion more difficult, and mixture between those considered chosen and those deemed doomed subject to greater constraints than they had been earlier. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1322

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article — both concern how religious-moral frameworks harden into social restriction. — connects to: Calvinist divine election hardened racial boundaries against earlier Catholic monogenism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1322
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that race’s threat-level is historically contingent — that a theological shift (Calvinist election) rather than biological theory produced stricter racial boundaries — resists summary.