WARS AND RUMORS OF WAR · SERIES
By Watchman | Watchman Insight
SECTION I
A Resolution Signed, a Pattern Unresolved
In June 2018, the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention gathered in Dallas and voted to formally disavow what their own forebears had once preached as gospel truth. The resolution — titled “On Renouncing the Doctrine of the Curse of Ham as a Justification for Racism” — declared that many SBC churches had once “openly endorsed the false teaching of the so-called ‘curse of Ham’ narrative which errantly construed Genesis 9:25–27 to say that God ordained the descendants of Ham to be marked with dark skin and be relegated to a subordinated status based on race” (SBC Resolution, 2018). The messengers resolved to “remain vigilant” against any future version of that teaching. They signed the document and went home.
Six years later, at the 2024 SBC Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, the Convention voted — by a margin of 92 percent — to remove First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Virginia from fellowship, citing its employment of female pastoral staff (Baptist Press, 2024). The stated issue was complementarianism. But threading through the floor debates, and through the broader conservative mobilization inside American evangelical circles since 2020, was something older and less easily named: a renewed insistence on divinely ordered hierarchy — between men and women, and, for some voices at the margins of that movement, between peoples whose separation they argue was encoded in the very chapter the Convention had once tried to close.
Genesis 9 has never stayed buried for long. That is the argument of this installment. The text itself is not the problem — it is the recurring pattern of its misuse that demands attention.
In the previous installment, we examined how ancient boundary conflicts carried theological weight that would echo across centuries of warfare and political theology. Here, we follow one of the most durable of those echoes.
SECTION II
The Anatomy of a Misreading: From the Medieval Pulpit to the Antebellum Court
The story that generates the curse is, in its original telling, almost domestic in scale. Noah plants a vineyard. He drinks too much wine. He lies uncovered in his tent. His son Ham sees his father’s nakedness and tells his brothers. Shem and Japheth walk in backward, averting their eyes, and cover him. When Noah wakes and learns what has happened, he pronounces a curse — not on Ham, but on Ham’s son Canaan: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brothers” (Genesis 9:25, KJV).
The narrative is spare. The offense is ambiguous. Scholars have debated for centuries whether Ham’s transgression was voyeurism, mockery, or something more violating. The genealogical structure is stranger still: a son is punished for a father’s act.
And yet from this compressed, uncertain episode, two of the most consequential systems of human hierarchy in Western history drew their theological oxygen.
Case One — The Medieval Order: God’s Taxonomy of Servants
Medieval European theologians were not primarily concerned with race in the modern biological sense. But they were deeply invested in the legitimacy of social stratification. The schema they reached for was tripartite and tidy: Shem was the ancestor of clergy; Japheth was the ancestor of warriors and nobility; and Ham — cursed, diminished, marked for service — was the ancestor of the laboring poor, the serfs who owed their station to something older than any feudal contract.
The scheme served an obvious function. Peasant uprisings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forced the church to articulate why the existing order was not merely pragmatic but providential. The answer Genesis 9 seemed to supply was not subtle: some were born to serve because, through Noah, God had ordained it. The political theology of serfdom and the genealogical mythology of Noah’s three sons were, in this reading, two faces of the same coin (Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, Princeton University Press, 2003).
Case Two — The Antebellum South: Canaan Becomes a Continent
The redeployment of the curse in the American slave economy required one additional interpretive move: the equation of Ham’s descendants with the peoples of Africa. That equation had no serious exegetical foundation, but it had enormous political utility. It found advocates at the highest levels of Baptist institutional life. Patrick Mell (1814–1888), the fourth president of the Southern Baptist Convention, proposed in print that “from Ham were descended the nations that occupied the land of Canaan and those that now constitute the African or Negro race” (cited in Kell, The Gospel Coalition, 2021). Iveson Brookes (1785–1868), a Baptist pastor and Southern Seminary trustee, taught that “Negro Slavery is an institution of heaven and intended for the mutual benefit of master and slave, as proved by the Bible . . . God himself authorized Noah to doom the posterity of Ham” (cited in Kell, 2021).
What both historical cases share is not simply theological error — it is the interpretive move of turning a family quarrel into a cosmic mandate. A domestic scene in a tent becomes the warrant for an entire civilization’s division of labor. The particularity of the curse — addressed to Canaan, rooted in a specific relational breach — is dissolved into abstraction.
What was personal becomes racial. What was contingent becomes eternal.
That governing premise, once established, does not require the same target to repeat itself. It requires only the same structure.
SECTION III
What the Text Actually Says — and What the Rest of Scripture Does with It
Any careful reading of Genesis 9 must begin with what the text does not say. It does not say Ham was cursed. It does not say that dark skin is a mark of divine displeasure. It does not describe a racial category — the concept did not exist in the ancient Near Eastern world in which the text was composed. The curse falls on Canaan, one of Ham’s sons, and the narrative context suggests it belongs to a much older cycle of Israelite storytelling about the Canaanite peoples and their eventual displacement — a literary function that has nothing to do with African peoples or the Atlantic slave trade (Goldenberg, 2003).
The three passages that matter most here do not resolve the theological tension by explaining the original curse. They resolve it by transcending it.
Genesis 9:25–27 (ESV)
“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.”
The text establishes the curse in its original, bounded context — a word of judgment addressed to a specific descendant in a specific genealogical situation. What centuries of misreading accomplished was to flatten this specificity into universality, making what was a particular pronouncement into a general law of nature.
Galatians 3:28 (ESV)
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Paul’s language here is not naive egalitarianism — he is not denying that differences exist. He is making a theological claim about the ultimate horizon within which those differences must be understood. The gospel does not merely tolerate human diversity; it insists that no human hierarchy can be the final word on human worth. The curse of Canaan, read through the lens of Paul’s letter to Galatia, cannot function as a divine architecture of permanent servitude. It becomes, instead, one moment in a much longer story that moves in a different direction.
Revelation 7:9 (ESV)
“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.”
The eschatological vision of Revelation 7 is the strongest counter-narrative Genesis 9 has ever faced. The end of the story is not servitude ratified but diversity gathered — every tribe, every tongue, every lineage, standing without hierarchy before the same throne. If the curse of Canaan were intended as a permanent architecture for humanity, Revelation presents a remarkably different horizon.
The same principle applies here. The recurring weaponization of Genesis 9 is not incidental. It is a pattern that points to something in the moral conditions that produced it — a persistent hunger for theological cover to sanctify social power.
SECTION IV
The Scale of the Error — and the Shape of Its Return
The numbers help clarify what is at stake. Between 1500 and 1900, an estimated 12.5 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic under conditions of captivity (SlaveVoyages Database, Emory University, 2023). The theological infrastructure that made this system feel ordained to those who profited from it was not incidental to the enterprise — it was essential. The curse of Ham was not a fringe interpretation held by unlettered demagogues. It was the position of seminary presidents, church trustees, and denominational leaders. Patrick Mell served four terms as SBC president. Iveson Brookes sat on the board of the institution that is now Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
The pattern did not disappear. It adapted.
The 2017 SBC Annual Meeting in Phoenix was the moment when that history surfaced most visibly in the modern denomination. The Reverend Dwight McKissic, a Black SBC pastor from Arlington, Texas, introduced a resolution calling on the Convention to formally renounce the curse of Ham doctrine by name. The initial resolution committee rejected his language, substituting a different text that did not explicitly name it (Baptist News Global, 2017). The episode illustrated something the data alone cannot measure: that an institution can formally apologize for a theology while remaining reluctant to name precisely what made it so useful.
By 2018, the full resolution passed. By 2020, the six seminary presidents had issued a joint statement declaring critical race theory “incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message” — without a single Black president among the signatories (Baptist Press, 2020). By 2024, the denomination’s conservative wing had mobilized to remove churches that employed female pastoral staff, appealing to a framework of “biblical hierarchy” rooted in complementarian readings of scripture.
The phrase “biblical hierarchy” does not invoke Noah. The underlying interpretive instinct, however, can resemble older patterns in which hierarchy is treated not merely as social reality but as divine design — an order inscribed in scripture, discoverable in the text, requiring some to serve and others to govern.
The deeper concern is not that American Christianity is about to revive the explicit language of Ham’s curse. It is that the inherited assumptions that made that curse feel like exegesis rather than ideology have not been examined with the same care given to the language itself. David M. Goldenberg’s account of this interpretive history demonstrates that what the rabbinic tradition preserves on this question is a complex, contested record — not the monolithic endorsement of racial hierarchy that later Christian readers constructed from it (Goldenberg, 2003). The gap between what the tradition actually said and what advocates of the curse claimed it said was always large. That gap is where ideology lives.
The numbers clarify the scale of what happened when that ideology held institutional power. What they cannot measure is the human weight of a text weaponized against people it was never written to condemn.
SECTION V
The Curse Was Never the Last Word
There is a particular kind of theological reckoning that changes names without changing structures. It renounces the language of Ham’s curse while retaining the framework of permanent, God-sanctioned hierarchy. It apologizes for slavery while insisting that the Bible still orders human relationships in ways that some are born to occupy and others to lead. It condemns white supremacy in a formal resolution while leaving the underlying moral grammar largely unexamined.
Genesis 9 is not a curse in search of a target. It is a text in search of readers honest enough to sit with its difficulty without reaching immediately for its utility. The medieval serfs told their station was Hamitic did not need a more sophisticated hermeneutic — they needed the powerful to stop reaching for the Bible as a tool of social management. The enslaved Africans told their bondage was providential did not need a more nuanced reading of Canaanite genealogy — they needed the institution that claimed to speak for the Gospel to stop lending theological cover to economic extraction.
What the full sweep of Scripture — from the specific, bounded curse in Genesis to the universal gathering in Revelation — resists is not complexity. It resists finality. No hierarchy, however ancient or comfortable, is permitted to be the last word on the worth of the people it subordinates.
The question for communities shaped by this text is not whether the curse of Ham was wrong — that question was answered, formally if belatedly, in Dallas in 2018. The deeper question is whether the interpretive framework that made it feel right has been examined with equal care.
That examination does not happen at a convention. It happens in the slow, uncomfortable work of reading the whole text — not the verses that confirm an order, but the ones that refuse to let any order be final.
FOOTNOTES
1. Southern Baptist Convention. “On Renouncing the Doctrine of the Curse of Ham as a Justification for Racism.” SBC Resolution, Dallas, TX, June 12–13, 2018. Available at sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions.
2. Baptist Press. “Messengers to 2024 SBC Annual Meeting Adopt 8 Resolutions.” June 2024. Reported vote: 92 percent of messengers affirming removal of First Baptist Alexandria from fellowship.
3. Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton University Press, 2003. The definitive scholarly treatment of the curse’s interpretive history across three religious traditions.
4. Kell, Garrett. “Damn the Curse of Ham: How Genesis 9 Got Twisted into Racist Propaganda.” The Gospel Coalition, January 6, 2021. Cites primary sources including Mell and Brookes in their original published forms.
5. Baptist News Global. “The Curse of Ham: Black Baptists Question Their Place in the SBC.” July 12, 2017. Reports on McKissic resolution and initial committee response at the Phoenix Annual Meeting.
6. Baptist Press. “Seminary Presidents Reaffirm BFM, Declare CRT Incompatible.” November 30, 2020. Joint statement by six SBC seminary presidents.
7. SlaveVoyages Database. Emory University, 2023. slavevoyages.org. Estimated 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic, 1500–1900.