Reconsidering Interracial Marriage: The Christian Case for Intra-Racial Marriage, Part One

“I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

The question of the relevance of race to marriage, for those seeking the truth with no preordained conclusions, is observed to be a one-sided exercise in rhetorical prejudice.

The issue is usually addressed in a negative manner, such as “Does the Bible forbid interracial marriage?”  The answer likewise is given in a negative manner, assuring the questioner that the only requirement of a believer is that their spouse be Christian, and that those, presumably parents, who oppose such a union must necessarily care only about racial heritage rather than the more important spiritual qualifications of potential mates for their children.  With the “straw man” thus established, the answerer proceeds to invoke the politically correct shibboleths of our age, complete with the usual slippery slope logical fallacies leading inevitably to a passing reference to Hitler[1] and condemnations of racism[2].

But these answers, while helping pastors and teachers ingratiate themselves with the multicultural, globalist zeitgeist of the world, do little to answer the real question.  While all honest Christians must acknowledge a minimum Biblical requirement for Christians to marry Christians, in addition to, not instead of that requirement, can the Bible or practical wisdom offer lessons on the question of interracial marriage?

I am convinced after careful study of the question that the weight of Scripture and empirical evidence favors a norm of intra-racial marriage, that is, marriage within the same race.  Furthermore, the question of whether interracial marriage is forbidden carries with it the baggage of an extra-Biblical and decadent Western individualism.  This extreme individualism, born of the atheistic influence of the Enlightenment and coming of age among the devils of the French Revolution, vainly seeks to transcend the limits God has placed on us as creatures.  In His Providence, He has created and ordained our lot not as merely spiritual abstractions but as members of a particular family, tribe, nation and race with concentric levels of responsibilities toward each.

Before proceeding, I wish to make a general disclaimer regarding the purpose of this document.  There are a small but slowly growing number of individuals in the Church who have married interracially.  This document is not addressed to those individuals or meant as a condemnation of their decisions.  My audience, frankly, consists of my own children and my future grandchildren, Lord willing.  I am not here to offend or condemn, but to pass along wisdom to my descendents and to others who may agree with my reasoning and profit from it.  For any who are offended, I humbly ask for your forgiveness and forbearance as an imperfect brother in Christ[3].

This subject is important because many families feel an instinctual preference that their children marry within their race.  However, due to the politically correct pressures of our time, these preferences are either repressed or uttered in secret.  This issue, like any other, must fly or fail in the face of Scripture.  Silencing or censoring our feelings on this issue for the sake of political correctness gives the appearance that there is something wrong with such a preference, when in fact this may not be the case.

Finally, it is important to limit the scope of our discussion.  Many Christians have had the displeasure of attempting to discuss some moral issue on a Biblical basis, perhaps in a political context, and someone takes issue by making fallacious arguments that such positions lead directly to a Religious Right theocracy and from thence to the Inquisition.

Let us reason together on this most controversial of subjects with humility and self-control.  The question of preserving the historical norm of intra-racial marriage is not about denying any person their civil rights.  It is not about denying the beautiful diversity that God has created among the human race (to the contrary, as we shall see, it is about preserving it), or denying that all men and women, of every race, are made in the image of God.  It is not about unlawfully and unjustly segregating people on the basis of race.  It is not about hating anyone or denying the fundamental multiracial nature of Christ’s Church.

This is simply my attempt as a father to come to terms with the realities of our multicultural society and set a course for my family to navigate this new era without losing our sense of identity, place and purpose.

The History of Race and Marriage

“It has become fashionable in recent times to talk of the leveling of nations, and of various peoples disappearing into the melting pot of contemporary civilization. I disagree with this, but that is another matter; all that should be said here is that the disappearance of whole nations would impoverish us no less than if all people were to become identical, with the same character and the same face. Nations are the wealth of humanity, its generalized personalities. The least among them has its own special colors, and harbors within itself a special aspect of God’s design.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In the Bible, we see a human grouping quite alien to the contemporary Western perspective, that of tribe.  One way to define the tribe is that of a sufficiently distantly related group of individuals for whom intra-marriage would not result in the competitive disadvantages of incest.  In the bare-bones scarcity of the ancient world, tribes were the smallest coherent group competing with other groups for land, dominance and resources.

From nearly the beginning of history, men have surely noticed that marriages of close relatives result in both moral and physical degeneracy.  We now understand the problems with incest scientifically, but it is a testament to Biblical inerrancy that what must have seemed, to the unregenerate, arbitrary and capricious restrictions in the Law of Moses also coincide with empirically validated practices in our best interest.

We now know that many human deformities are prevented due to our having two copies of each of our chromosomes, one from our father and one from our mother.  In most cases, deformities never occur because the body will mostly or totally ignore the “bad copy” on one chromosome and use the “good copy” instead.  Incest results in too many of the same copies of chromosomes, which means a higher incidence of observed deformities, since the body has no “good copy” in the case of identical chromosomes. [4]

Thus, the tribe is a practical grouping for marriage.  Of course, it is not merely that, for as I will remind the reader in the coming pages, God uses means.[5] The tribe is God’s ordained basic human grouping.  The tribe’s integrity is maintained even after the formation of the nation of Israel, as God, through the practice of the Jubilee, restored to each family its ancestral tribal land.

Similarly, the nation is a combination of tribes sharing a common lineage.  The nation of Israel is formed of the seed of Jacob and the twelve tribes correspond to those descended from Jacob’s respective children.  The word nation itself literally means of common birth, sharing a Latin root with words like neo-natal (meaning newborn) or the Nativity.

As we look at Old Testament history, an important observation is that once Israel had conquered the Promised Land, God nowhere sanctions further expansion.  Israel, of course, fought defensive wars to protect its territory, but God never ordained that Israel become an empire like her neighbors in the Middle East such as the Egyptians, Medes, Babylonians and Persians.

When Solomon attempted to build an empire, God judged him for, among other things, taking to himself foreign wives[6], a common diplomatic practice among would-be empire builders.

A reasonable conclusion from both the Bible and secular history is that the nation is the upper limit of human organization ordained by God.  All multinational empires eventually die, even mighty Greece and Rome.

Thus, God has organized men into three primary spheres of identity: family, tribe and nation.  For 99.99% of people throughout human history, one’s tribe and perhaps one’s nation contained the total universe of potential spouses[7].  When we ponder the wisdom of the previously unprecedented possibility of mass interracial marriage, it is not appropriate to justify such a position as normative based on what may be a few Biblical exceptions to a widely established historical norm.

Even these purported exceptions, such as the “Ethiopian” wife of Moses, may not be as they seem.  Let us examine a few Biblical case studies.

Continue to Part Two…

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[1] Among the early Internet enthusiasts of Usenet, the first online forums, it was observed that, given the combustible cyber-combination of anonymity and instant distribution, all arguments would inevitably degenerate into some sort of reference to Hitler or the Nazis.  Eventually, such a reference became shorthand to indicate that a discussion had exceeded its productive shelf life, as both sides had produced whatever actual arguments might support their position and proceeded to the ultimate ad hominum.

[2] Racism is notoriously hard to define in contemporary America.  Leftists decry anything short of absolute equality of outcome as racist, while conservatives point to examples like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright as those truly motivated by hate.  There are, of course, many reasons other than hate why a parent may or may not approve of a particular mate for their child.   We should not judge others’ motives in their proper sphere of parental authority.  The Apostle Paul’s warnings against being busybodies and gossips seem particularly appropriate here.

[3] St. Paul again offers much wisdom.  For those who believe Scripture supports interracial marriage, I believe the Biblical position regarding those who do not is one of tolerance, not condemnation.  As the early brothers did regarding differing opinions on meat and drink, let us avoid being stumbling blocks for each other despite our honest disagreement on this issue.

[4] This also explains the higher incidence of birth defects among males (who have only one copy each of the X and Y chromosomes) and among relatively isolated populations like Ashkenazi Jews and the Acadians of Louisiana.

[5] This phrase is simply shorthand for a particular theological understanding of Divine Providence, in that the normative work of God is done through observable, ordinary causes.  We should not, of course, commit one of the errors of Deism and restrict God to merely ordinary causes, but when seeking to interpret Divine Intent, ordinary causes are not dismissed simply because they are ordinary.

[6] See Nehemiah 13:26.

[7] This is almost a tautology.  For example, in Mitchell’s Daily Life in Victorian England it is reported that most people never traveled more than ten or twenty miles from home before the development of railways.