Racist theological ideas sanctioned and made American slavery acceptable to Christian churches

Evidence

STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING narrates the entire history of racist ideas, from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets. Five main characters, in particular, will serve as our tour guides as we explore the landscape of racial ideas through five periods in American history. During America’s first century, racist theological ideas were absolutely critical to sanctioning the growth of American slavery and making it acceptable to the Christian churches. These ideas were featured in the sermons of early America’s greatest preacher and intellectual, Boston divine Cotton Mather (1663–1728), our first tour guide. Cotton Mather was the namesake and grandson of two of New England’s intellectual trailblazers, John Cotton and Richard Mather, Puritan preachers who helped carry two-hundred-year-old racist ideas from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean. To substantiate American slavery and win converts, Cotton Mather preached racial inequality in body while insisting that the dark souls of enslaved Africans would become White when they became Christians. His writings and sermons were widely read in the colonies and in Europe, where the progenitors of the scientific revolution—and then the Enlightenment—were racializing and whitening Europeans, freedom, civilization, rationality, and beauty. During the American Revolution and thereafter, years that saw the stunning growth of American slavery, politicians and secular intellectuals alike joined slavery’s justifying fray. These justifiers included one of the most powerful politicians and secular intellectuals of the new United States—our second tour guide, the antislavery, anti-abolitionist Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 20

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s tour-guide structure (Mather, Jefferson, and others) and the era-by-era organization, giving the reader a roadmap for placing any argument about race.
• XREF: connects to: Evangelicals frame abortion as the slavery of their generation — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 248; Theology justified slavery and genocide by marking whiteness as Christian — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 145; Defending a Christian nation has meant defending the racial order — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 476 (+26 more)