The "Curse of Ham"| (The Curse That Never Was)
Discover how racism wrung and twisted Scripture until the truth was drained away; then pulverised what remained, packed it into neat little capsules, and offered them to the very people it had wounded—gently assuring them that this was, and always had been, the divine order of things.
Thus were slavery, colonialism, and racial supremacy clothed in the language of faith and presented as the will of God.
So I listened to a racist pastor—perhaps a priest—speaking about Africa on Bishop Talbert Swan's Facebook wall.
(A brief aside: Bishop Swan consistently exposes false teachers—Black or white—and defends the dignity of Black people in a way I deeply admire.)
His argument was simple.
The only period of sustained progress in Africa, he claimed, came under European colonial rule.
Then he declared that it was the natural order of things for Hamites to live under the supervision of Japhethites.
Those were his words.
"Hamites" I recognised. I assumed he was referring to Black people through that long-discredited interpretation of the so-called Curse of Ham.
But "Japhethites"?
I'd never even heard the term used in my life.
(Their label had to have more syllables than ours? 🤓😀)
And the man saying all this...
...was wearing a priest's collar.
I could have called him many things.
I won't.
His ignorance exposed him far more effectively than any insult ever could.
The "Curse of Ham" That Never Was
One of the strangest things about this entire doctrine is that Ham was never cursed.
Read the passage carefully.
After Noah awoke from his drunkenness, he did not say:
"Cursed be Ham."
He said:
"Cursed be Canaan." (Genesis 9:25)
Canaan.
Ham's son.
Not Ham.
That single fact should have ended centuries of racist theology before they ever began.
But it didn't.
The biblical text never explicitly explains why Canaan, rather than Ham, received the curse.
Many interpretations have been proposed over the centuries, but Scripture itself does not tell us.
Some argued that Ham's offence was simply seeing his father's nakedness and telling his brothers. Others proposed far more elaborate—and highly speculative—theories.
None of these explanations appears plainly in the text.
What is remarkable is not the ambiguity of Genesis.
What is remarkable is the determination with which people built an entire racial hierarchy upon that ambiguity.
The Bible never says Black Africans descended uniquely from Ham.
The Bible never says Ham was cursed.
The Bible never says skin colour had anything whatsoever to do with Noah's words.
Yet for centuries Christians in Europe and America transformed this obscure passage into a theological justification for slavery, colonialism, segregation and racial oppression.
That tells us far more about the human heart than it does about Scripture.
Sometimes we do not read our prejudices into the Bible.
We read them out of ourselves.
Racism Draped in Biblical Language
What struck me was not simply his racism.
It was the theology beneath it.
This was not Christianity.
This was racism draped in biblical language.
People like him love to quote passages from the pre-Christ era—the Old Testament—as though they justify a world built upon ethnic hierarchy.
It is true that, in the Old Testament, God chose a people for Himself.
That is beyond dispute.
But the Old Testament is also the story of those same chosen people repeatedly proving unfaithful to the covenant.
God did not revoke His covenant, for He remains faithful even when we are not.
Instead, He sent prophet after prophet calling His people back to Himself.
Then, at last, He sent His Son.
As Jesus explained in the Parable of the Tenants, the owner of the vineyard sent servant after servant.
They were rejected.
Beaten.
Killed.
Finally he said,
"They will respect my son."
Instead, they killed him too.
The parable reflected Israel's long history of rejecting those whom God had sent.
It is almost as though they believed they possessed God's PIN code.
God had entered into covenant with them.
Surely He could never take it back.
But that misses the point entirely.
God did not abolish His covenant.
He fulfilled it in Christ.
Then He did something astonishing.
Through Christ, He opened the covenant to every nation on earth.
Those who belong to Christ become the people of God—not through ethnicity, but through faith.
That is the Gospel.
So whenever people continue speaking the language of ethnic superiority after Christ, they diminish the work of Jesus.
They try to replace the Christ who came for the whole world with a Christ who came only for themselves.
That is not Christianity.
It is the very opposite of Christianity.
The Historical Myth
Then there was his historical claim.
He argued that Africa experienced sustained progress only under European colonisation.
History tells a rather different story.
One of Europe's greatest periods of intellectual renewal began when North African Muslims—the Moors—crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and established Al-Andalus in Spain.
They did not arrive merely with armies.
They brought mathematics.
Astronomy.
Medicine.
Engineering.
Irrigation.
Architecture.
Philosophy.
Libraries.
Universities.
They preserved, translated, commented upon and expanded the works of the ancient Greeks while much of Western Europe struggled through the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
Through Arabic scholarship, Europe recovered Aristotle and many other classical writers whose works had become scarce in the Latin West.
Knowledge flowed.
Ideas flowed.
Civilisations learned from one another.
Many historians regard this exchange of knowledge as one of the great foundations of the European Renaissance.
The point is not that Islamic civilisation was perfect.
It wasn't.
Nor is the point that Europe contributed nothing of its own.
It certainly did.
The point is simply this:
Civilisations borrow.
Civilisations lend.
Civilisations teach.
Civilisations learn.
Or, borrowing President Obama's cadence:
"It's what we do, stupid."
History is richer—and humbler—than the racist myth suggests.
The Hardness of the Human Heart
Perhaps the saddest lesson in all this is not about history.
It is about ourselves.
Human beings possess an astonishing capacity to construct elaborate theologies to justify what they already wish to believe.
They ignore what Scripture plainly says.
Invent what it never says.
Then preach with absolute certainty what God Himself never revealed.
Not because they love the truth.
But because they love the comfort that false certainty provides.
The so-called Curse of Ham remains one of history's greatest examples of this.
A doctrine built upon words the Bible never says.
Used to defend evils that Christ came to destroy.
That is what happens when hard hearts become more authoritative than Holy Scripture.
Which is why every Christian must read the Bible through the lens of Christ.
Because Jesus is not merely part of the story.
He is the key that unlocks the whole story.
I rest my case.
Don Kenobi
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