Are Blacks Cursed by God?

MANY religious leaders have answered “Yes.” Clergymen Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown, in their Bible commentary, assert: “Cursed be Canaan [Genesis 9:25]​—this doom has been fulfilled in. . . the slavery of the Africans, the descendants of Ham.”​—Commentary, Critical and Explanatory, on the Whole Bible.

When did church commentators begin applying the curse to Ham?

A churchman of about 1,500 years ago, Ambrosiaster, applied it thus, saying: “Due to folly Ham, who foolishly ridiculed the nakedness of his father, was declared a slave.” And John F. Maxwell observes in his recent book Slavery and the Catholic Church: “This disastrous example of fundamentalist exegesis [explanation] continued to be used for 1,400 years and led to the widely held view that African Negroes were cursed by God.”

Even up to a hundred years ago the Catholic Church held the view that blacks were cursed by God. Maxwell explains that this view “apparently survived until 1873 when Pope Pius IX attached an indulgence to a prayer for the ‘wretched Ethiopians in Central Africa that almighty God may at length remove the curse of Cham [Ham] from their hearts.’”

Churches as Slave Owners

◆ Many people have been shocked by recent revelations about the treatment of black slaves. But “one of the most startling bits of information about the role of the church in slavery,” writes clergyman A. C. Forrest in the Toronto Star, “appeared 19 years ago in the fourth volume of Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking People. Churchill wrote:

“‘. . . over 650,000 slaves were held by ministers of the gospel and members of the different Protestant churches. Five thousand Methodist ministers owned 219,000 slaves; six thousand five hundred Baptists owned 125,000; one thousand four hundred Episcopalians held 88,000; and so on. Thus the institution of slavery was not only defended by every argument of self-interest, but many a Southern pulpit championed it as a system ordained by the Creator and sanctified by the Gospel of Christ.’”