Similarly, here in the United States right up through the 1970s, Evangelical Christians frequently used the Bible to justify racially segregated schools, churches, and other public spaces. Our Jim Crow was perhaps not as legally stringent as South Africa’s Apartheid, but many U.S. Christians used the Bible to justify it in the same way.

I personally sat in mainstream Baptist churches as a child and teen listening to preachers use the Bible to justify the idea that the races should be separate.

Sure, that sounds wild today, and sure, other Christians were using the Bible to promote equality, but racial segregation was still a very mainstream Biblical idea, not in the ancient past but in living memory.

In fact, I’ve written before about how some of the very same Evangelical forces that ended up pivoting away from Biblical racism (because it was becoming publicly untenable) pivoted toward extreme anti-LGBTQ sentiment at the exact same moment.

When I was a child, for example, Jerry Falwell had a radio show in which he often espoused racist ideas, biblically endorsing segregation of the races.

Bob Jones, another Evangelical powerhouse, was doing the same, but he apparently missed the memo that public sentiment was shifting. He maintained racial segregation on his university campus after Falwell had already pivoted, making gay people his bogeyman instead. The two remained at loggerheads for the rest of their lives over Biblical racism, but they did manage to agree to hold the line against tolerating LGBTQ people at their institutions.

Still, Bob Jones University, clinging to institutional, Biblical racism, faded to cultural insignificance while Falwell’s Liberty University has become a conservative cultural juggernaut.

I guess it’s all a matter of deciding which Biblical interpretation best fits public appetite.