Decades ago, I remember my parents speaking in a disapproving manner about a marriage between black and white people. There was something about staying with "their own kind" because the couple would trouble from both sides. Nowadays, mixed marriages are common, but they still may receive some flak.
For millennia, people have had negativity toward different groups due to pigment, culture, and other things. Racism sounded scientific because of Darwinism and it grew tremendously because of it. Biblically, God created only one race — and science is catching up with the Bible.
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| Bible and wedding rings, Pexels / Alexander Mass |
Just a side note here. I am writing this on what would have been our twentieth wedding anniversary if my wife had not died just over two years ago.
Remember the evolution story about Neanderthals? Stupid brutes that were a link between humans and apelike creatures — except that the evidence shows they were fully human, and they interbred with modern humans. Neanderthals were the same species as us.
I'll allow that the words race, racism, racist are used for convenience because people of different pigments often have different cultural heritages. (My parents were not racist, they just didn't think mixed marriages were a good idea; I have no idea how they felt about it as time went on and societal values changed.) Genetics, biology, medical science, and other things show that there is only one actual race and the differences between us are actually minor.
Even though the Bible makes it clear that all people are descended from Adam and Eve (so they must be very closely related), there are still misconceptions among some Christians surrounding ‘race’. Surprisingly, perhaps, this can include concerns about the idea of marriage between two believers from different so-called races.
But these concerns have no basis in either science or the Bible. Science has finally caught up with God’s Word in affirming how very closely related we all are at the genetic level. Evolutionary thinking has, historically, exacerbated racism dramatically. Darwin believed that some groups were less evolved toward humanity than others—with his own group, unsurprisingly, the most evolved. Darwin’s ally in Germany, Haeckel, even attacked the Bible for its antiracism.
To read the rest, see "The Bible and interracial marriage."