Rhetoric Race and Religion
The curse of Ham,” an old-time Biblical (mis) interpretation used to vilify black people and justify slavery and laws against racial intermarriage, is still alive and spreading bigotry in the United States.
The Appleby Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, is among this country’s scattered, independent fundamentalist churches still openly promoting the idea that the Biblical Noah pronounced a curse on descendants of his son, Ham. Ham had sexually molested Noah as he slept in a drunken stupor, and Noah realized it, the story goes. The curse ultimately fell on Canaan, Noah’s grandson, whose descendants were black and fated to be an underclass of slaves, according to this version of the Bible, which has been widely discredited by mainstream religious scholars.
But the canard is trumpeted loud and clear in an online statement of conviction by Appleby leaders. The East Texas church, 90 miles from Shreveport, La., is “a bit of a throwback, but these people are still out there,” Rachel Tabachnick, a fellow at the think tank Political Research Associates, told Hatewatch. She researches the impact of the religious right on politics and society.
For hundreds of years, the so-called curse of Ham was frequently taught by religious leaders as the source for racial differences, and in more recent times was seized on as a Biblical excuse for segregation and slavery, said Tabachnick. “There’s been a shift, and you don’t often see churches that are this forthright now, but the underlying theme is still there in fundamentalist holdout churches.”
The Appleby church, whose pastor could not immediately be reached for comment, proclaims a litany of racist beliefs on its website: The black descendants of Ham like fair-skinned women, of course. And “the proof of the presence of God among the Israelites was the absence of the black skinned folk of Canaan … It is obvious God is a separator, not a mixer. It is God who set the boundaries.”
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