One Blood Study guide Book index Q&A: racism

Why does it matter?

by Ken Ham, Carl Wieland and Don Batten

First published in One Blood
Closing remarks

Many years ago in Australia, a Bible college student declared that missionaries should not waste their time preaching to the Australian Aborigines. He believed they weren’t of Adam’s race, and therefore could not be saved.¹

Sadly, history reports that some missionaries didn’t see the need to take the gospel message to certain ‘primitive’ tribes because they were not sufficiently ‘human’ on the evolutionary scale.  For instance, a professor in the 1800’s wrote

If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.  This is, in fact, the opinion of many travelers, who have long watched the lowest human races in their native countries.  Thus, for example, a great English traveler, who lived for a considerable time on the west coast of Africa, says:  ‘I consider the Negro to be a lower species of man, and cannot make up my mind to look upon him as “a man and a brother,” for the gorilla would then also have to be admitted into the family.’  Even many Christian missionaries, who, after long years of fruitless endeavors to civilize these lowest races have abandoned the attempt, express the same harsh judgment and maintain that it would be easier to train the most intelligent domestic animals to a moral and civilized life, than these unreasoning brute-like men.  For instance, the able Austrian missionary Morlang, who tried for many years without the slightest success to civilize the ape-like Negro tribes on the Upper Nile, expressly says:  ‘that any mission to such savages is absolutely useless.  They stand far below unreasoning animals; the latter at least show signs of affection towards those who are kind towards them, whereas these brutal natives are utterly incapable of any feeling of gratitude.’²

Evolutionists like Hitler treated the Jews, Gypsies and other groups as inferior, and therefore argued that they needed to be eliminated.³

Today, depending on the country, marriages between different people groups often result in persecution for the parents and the children. In addition, current attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ are the result of the hatred of one particular people group toward another. Even within a segment of the church in America today, there remains intense prejudice in regard to one’s skin shade.

All of these problems, and any others concerning such ‘racial’ prejudice, could easily be solved if all people built their thinking on God’s Word, and would believe

And He has made all nations of men of one blood to dwell on all the face of the earth, ordaining fore-appointed seasons and boundaries of their dwelling (Acts 17:26).

The point is that all human beings are descendants of Adam; all need to build their thinking on God’s Word and accept that they are sinners in need of salvation; all need to judge their behavior in every area, regardless of their culture, against the absolute standards of the Word of God; and all need to repent and receive the free gift of salvation.

We all need to treat every human being as our relative (we’re of ‘one blood’), and recognize that all of us are equal in value before our Creator God.  What a difference it would make in this world if each person understood and adopted this biblical principle! Then each of us could proclaim with the apostle Paul:

For there is no difference both of Jew and of Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call on Him (Rom. 10:12).

References and notes

1. Personal conversation between Ken Ham and a Bible college student in Brisbane, Australia, 1983.
2. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Vol. II, Translated by E. Ray Lancaster, Henry S. King & Co., London, pp. 365–6, 1876.
3. Jerry Bergman, Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust, TJ 13(2):101–111, 1999.

This chapter from the book One Blood, published and graciously provided at no charge to Answers in Genesis by Master Books, a division of New Leaf Press (Green Forest, Arkansas).

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