Having No Argument Is Better Than Having A Bad Argument

 Abraham Lincoln is credited for saying: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." In her Federalist article, "The Left Wants You To Believe The Bible Is White Supremacist So They Can Force Evolution Down Your Throat," Kylee Zempel attempts to refute a Scientific American op-ed, "Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy" and in doing so falls into the error described by Lincoln.

    The author of the Scientific American piece, Allison Hopper, states that her purpose is "to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies." Her argument, however, is actually pretty childish in its logic.

 

    Hopper's first premise is that since "[t]he global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent," (which isn't true if you only consider scientists that study human evolution), "[w]e are all descended genetically, and also culturally[!], from dark-skinned ancestors." (brackets added).

    Hopper's second premise is that the Bible is racist, writing:

At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God's image. Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants' skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment.

Therefore, she concludes, anyone that believes the Bible creation story not only is in denial of evolution (because dark skin preceded white skin), but is of necessity a racist (for believing that dark skin was a curse).

    Zempel's rebuttal begins on a good note by pointing out that Hopper has an ulterior motive in her argument, which is to "ban [the Bible] from polite society and ostracize anyone who would defend it." Zempel basically skips over Hopper's first premise concerning the truth of evolution, other than to criticize Hopper for assuming the macroevolutionary theory is true, and goes on to attack the second premise: that the Bible asserts that the mark of Cain was the curse of black skin (and, by implication, that blacks are descendant of Cain).

    Zempel takes the position that the Bible does not, in fact, state any such thing. It is a viable argument, because the Mark of Cain is never actually explained in Genesis. Theories abound: some Jewish teachings suggest that the mark was actually some form of trembling or palsy, and thus the name for the land where Cain went to live (Nod, which apparently means trembling); others that it was a mark on Cain's head to distinguish him from others or mark him as someone not to be touched; and yet others suggest that the mark was actually a hairy body. Some apologists debate whether the mark was even a curse, saying it was actually a blessing to Cain because it protected him. But there is no getting around that, in fact, some religions and many religious authorities did believe that the mark was of black skin. And this is where Zempel confirms she is a fool.

    Rather than address the issue head on, though, Zempel decides to point fingers. Essentially, she argues, it wasn't the "true Christians" that held that belief, but it was those "heretical" Mormons. (I am reminded at this point of Adam pointing at Eve and telling God that it was the woman He gave Adam that made him eat the forbidden fruit). Zempel writes: 

This [Hopper's second premise] is patently false. While Joseph Smith and Brigham Young fabricated the Cain narrative (among other heretical myths) for the Mormon church, the idea of black skin being a punishment is not in any way biblical, and it certainly isn’t “at the heart of white evangelical creationism.”

The problem is that Zempel's assertion is, itself, patently false. I'm not denying that Brigham Young taught that the curse of Cain was black skin. (I'm not personally aware of any such teachings from Joseph Smith). But the LDS Church was not the originator of such teachings, nor the only Christian sect to teach it. In fact, the curse of Cain being black skin was the general consensus among Christian thinkers of the 18th and 19th Centuries, and preached by the Southern Baptists, among others, in the 19th and 20th Centuries (see also here and here). Certainly it is clear that tying black skin to a curse from God was widespread before and independent of the LDS Church (see also here).

    There is some debate as to when the Black Cain theory arose. In The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by David M. Goldenberg, he writes (p. 179, footnotes omitted):

    ... A curse of blackness on Cain, from whom the Blacks are descended, is often noted in European literature of the seventeenth to nineteenth century. In England Thomas Peyton referred to the black African as "the cursed descendant of Cain and the devil" in his The Glasse of Time published in 1620, and in 1785 Paul Erdman Isert more expansively recorded the view that the Black's skin color "originated with Cain, the murderer of his brother, whose family were destined to have the black colour as a punishment." In France the Curse is mentioned in a 1733 Dissertation sur l'origine des nègre et des américains, and is recorded by Jean-Baptiste Labat, the Dominican missionary and explorer (d. 1783), as also by Nicolas Bergier in his Dictionnaire Théologique in 1789. It is also found in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Portuguese empire. And just as in America, Cain's black color continued, at least in some parts of Europe, into our times. A modern Greek folk legend sees Cain in the cycle of the moon, which, like Cain becomes dark (as it wanes monthly).

    In seventeenth-century Europe and eighteenth-century America we begin to see the Cain myth quite frequently. But the notion of Cain's darkness can be found much earlier, if less frequently, in European literature and art. The Irish Saltair na Rann (tenth century) has God send the angel Gabriel to Adam to announce: "Dark rough senseless Cain is going to kill Abel".... The Vienna Genesis, an eleventh-century (or early twelfth-century) German poetic paraphrase of Genesis, says that some of the evil descendants of Cain "lost their beautiful coloring; they became black and disgusting, and unlike any people . . . . [They] displayed on their bodies what the forebears had earned by their misdeeds. As the fathers had been inwardly, so the children were outwardly." A thirteenth-century English psalter depicts Cain with Negroid features, as it does another figure--one of the men who arrested Christ at the Betrayal. If one scholar's reading is correct, the black women in Hieronymus Bosch's (d. 1516) Garden of Earthly Delights are the biblical "daughters of man" who are descended from Cain. And a Greek poem dated to about 1500 C.E. and containing earlier traditions describes God's curse of Cain as consisting of a change of color to black and loss of power....

Goldenberg looks at some possible earlier sources, and notes that the name of Cain in Islam suggests that Cain had black skin. But he concludes that "the Armenian Adam-book [of the sixth-century] seems to be the first record of the notion that Cain was punished with a change of skin color." This, he theorizes was from a "linguistic confusion" that misunderstood the Syriac 'tkmr ("he became sad"), as said of Cain, being misunderstood as "he became black". (p. 182). 

    Others within the Christian and Jewish communities apparently rejected the curse of Cain theory, but instead advanced a curse of Ham theory--that the descendants of Ham were cursed with darker skin. For instance, Goldernberg notes Jewish teachings that indicate that when God blessed the sons of Noah and apportioned the earth to them as an inheritance, God blessed Ham and his sons making them shehorim (black or dark, including brown and gray) as the raven and gave them the sea coasts. (p. 183). Elsewhere, Goldenberg noted:

Indeed, the most recent and pernicious attack against Judaism is now being mounted by several academics who base their assault on a purported scholarly reading of ancient and medieval rabbinic literature. Their claim: these texts reflect an invidious racism against Blacks, subsequently adopted by Christianity and Islam, which played itself out on the stage of history. In short, the source of anti-Black prejudice in western civilization, it is alleged, is found in rabbinic literature. 

The rest of his paper is trying to dispute the many passages from Rabbinical teachings that do seem to indicate Jewish racism toward blacks. But in a 2003 paper, he admits that Rabbinical sources as early as the 9th Century had adopted a curse of Ham explanation for the black race.

    In his 1843 book, Slavery as it Relates to the Negro or African Race, Josiah Priest related the Jewish belief that Cain was cursed with a palsy or trembling, and that the Jewish belief was that it was the descendants of Ham that were the source of the negro race. (p. 134). This was also picked up by some Christian teachers. For instance, Tony Evans has note that "the famous Old Scofield Reference Bible (5), which had become the official version of American fundamentalism, endorsed the curse of Ham theory...." 

    The gist of all of this is that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity had generally believed since the First Millennium A.D. that the black skin of Africans was a curse, whether that curse originated with Cain or with Ham.

    This does leave Kylee Zempel in an awkward position because not only has she lied about one Christian sect in order to absolve all others, but the facts tend to support Hopper's second premise making Zempel look even more foolish or dishonest. And, to top things off, Zempel has alienated a potential ally for no appreciable gain.

    There are a couple of ways, I believe, that Zempel could have addressed this issue. First, she could have (correctly) argued that if Hopper is going to use centuries old teachings of racial differences based on the Genesis story, Hopper must not only condemn white Christians, but must also condemn Jews and Muslims. This would leave Hopper in the embarrassing position of having to condemn two other victim groups or try to explain away her hypocrisy on leaving them out.

    Second, Zempel could have (correctly) argued that while Hopper's premise might have been true 50 or 100 years ago, it is no longer true: i.e., no main stream Christian denomination (including Mormons or Southern Baptist) currently teach that blacks are descendants of Cain and/or that blacks exist under a curse. Zempel could have then addressed Hopper's implied thesis which is that what Hopper actually seeks is acknowledgment of black supremacy. That is, Hopper seeks to do through evolutionary theory what she accuses white Christians of having done with scripture: to elevate one race (in Hopper's case, blacks) over another (in Hopper's case, whites).