In a May 2023 speech to graduates from a historically black college, President Joe Biden said that “white supremacy” is “the single most dangerous terrorist threat” to America. But Biden assured students that he hoped to see a future of “fearless progress toward justice,” where the “strength of [America’s] diversity” is “the center of American life.” Though President Biden is far from being the only person to hold this view in American political discourse, it reflects a peculiar neo-pagan impulse. If one views race as the “strength” of a society, and “strength” is presumably a kind of moral good, then race/strength/power is to be assumed the fundamental building block of a society’s ethics. In other words, following President Biden’s remarks on the topic, race is to justice what power (or strength) is to moral goodness: the heart of ethics. Of course, Scripture speaks to ethics and this view is antithetical to the Word of God.

For many millennia, most human societies organized themselves around an ancient tribal principle: an ethnos, the root of the English word “ethnicity.” Etymologically, the Greek term “ethno” meant a “people, nation, class, caste, tribe,” language that scripture also uses. Many passages of the New Testament use the phrase panta ta ethne, meaning “all the nations.” For instance, when Christ told His apostles in Matthew 28:19 to “[g]o therefore and make disciples of all nations,” scripture recorded Christ’s command with the language “panta ta ethne.” Christ is not endorsing ethnocentrism. Rather, he is reversing the old order familiar to Israelites in the days of the prophets confronting a pagan world. Biblical scholar Dr. Michael Heiser explains  that view through the concept of “cosmic geography” as follows:

Israel, as Yahweh’s inheritance, was holy ground. Similarly, the territory of other nations, according to Yahweh’s decree, belonged to other [false] gods [sic]. But in the course of Old Testament history, Israel had become enslaved to the Egyptians and required supernatural deliverance from Egypt and its gods. To subsequently inherit the promised land—now occupied by nations who worshiped other gods—Israel would have to reclaim its landed inheritance by holy war. Thus, once in the land, Israelites still believed that their land belonged exclusively to Yahweh and was His sacred domain: other nations, even if they were in Israel, were under the dominion of evil, lesser gods.

But this radical reversion of the old order wasn’t readily accepted in Europe; it was an affront to ethnic kinship, familial bonds. As one scholar puts it, “This family connection extended not only horizontally, between citizens of the [Greco-Roman] polis; it also extended vertically, between heaven and earth. Greek and Roman gods were known to have taken human sexual partners, from whose progeny whole human populations might descend. Sometimes the fruit of these unions might be the founder of a city.” Even in an ethnically diverse and expansive Roman Empire, there was an ethnic hierarchy. The Romans subdued all other lands and peoples within their borders; their pantheon head [“Jupiter”] was supreme to all other gods. Yahweh, though He was and is the Most High God, was no exception.

In claiming authority over all the Earth, Jesus made all who believe in Him part of His body. In the words of Paul in the letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Kingdom of Heaven is the literal, Supreme political entity over the Earth. No longer do demonic powers have a possession right to any lands on the Earth. They merely hold a license to the cosmic geography of the past so that God may liberate us just as He liberated the Israelites from Egypt—to demonstrate His Supreme authority.

Though many ancient peoples identified themselves based on their tribal ethnos, ethnic identity was not based on “race,” a word that categorizes individuals based on skin color. Rather, the early English use of the term “ethnicity” was cultural and religious. Dictionary.com summarizes this etymology as follows: “The earliest use of ethnic in English … was as a noun for a ‘heathen’ or ‘pagan.’ At that time, ethnic was also used colloquially to refer to those who originated from nations that weren’t Christian or Jewish. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that ethnicity was used to refer to social groups of a common ancestry and shared culture.”

By contrast, “race” is a relatively novel method of identification in the historical record, but was nevertheless conflated with “ethnicity” by some of America’s most liberal founding fathers. In a 1755 essay titled “Observations Concerning the Increasing of Mankind, Peopling of Countries,” Benjamin Franklin defined the category of “white people” as only those of Anglo-Saxon ethnic heritage, excluding Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Germans because, in his view, they possessed a “swarthy complexion.” Franklin wrote as follows: “[T]he Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? … But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”

Thomas Jefferson held an even more radical view than Franklin, and was arguably the foundation for eugenics. Not only did Jefferson conflate the classical understanding of ethnicity with race, he argued that race could be the vehicle to understand human anthropology. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes as follows:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question ‘What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.

Today, American Christians would recognize these views as repugnant to biblical teaching, a denial of the imago dei and a departure from the objective truth that all men are created equal. However, the mistakes of these great men in American history underscore a truth first penned by French classical author Francois duc de La Rouchefoucold: “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” In recognizing certain actions as “sinful” or “wrong,” one recognizes the converse, an objective standard of “righteous” or “right.” Societies that recognize objective, eternal moral goods also recognize sin as substandard, that which falls short of the good.

Racism, hatred for another based on their skin color or the denial of their God-given dignity based on skin color, is the successor sin to the ancient pagan sin of ethnic hatred. In light of this, racism must be understood as “neo-pagan,” a new form of an ancient impulse to arrange human society in a pagan, hierarchical manner in opposition to God’s moral law. But societies that are not guided by objective standards of truth and goodness cannot coherently explain why racism and ethnic hatred are sins. Even worse, those societies that reject objective standards of truth and goodness may even embrace a form of ethnocentrism or racism.