I wrote these articles for United? We Pray in December 2020. Below is the introduction. You can read the full articles here – Part 1, Part 2.
When I started researching teaching about the “curse of Ham,” I thought I was wading into a legitimate theological debate, a back-and-forth of exegetically and hermeneutically credible ideas. The more I studied, the more I realized that this was something entirely different: a story of self-delusion, how we embrace baseless Biblical interpretations—posturing them as objective exegesis—because they help us make sense of our world and ease our consciences.
The worldview shaped by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim teaching on the curse of Ham has been used for millennia to equate dark skin with everything negative about humanity and justify the enslavement of those who have it. All these years later we are still untangling the deception.
In this article we will explore the history and foundations of the curse of Ham teaching, and in the next we will look at the societal havoc it has wreaked particularly in America. Detailed academic works have been written on this topic and it has been addressed in a number of popular books as well. This will be represented here only in summary, hopefully without oversimplification. But this is ultimately about more than scholarship. This is about the stories we tell ourselves to justify self-benefiting beliefs, the narratives we accept without scrutiny to the hurt of our image-bearing neighbors.
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