Colin Kidd surveys the ways race influenced and was influenced by biblical interpretation in the Anglo-Atlantic world from 1600 to the present. He shows how Europeans—mostly Britons—dealt with the challenge to scriptural authority represented by the human diversity they found during the age of discovery. Because the Bible did not in any obvious way explain the existence of Native Americans, or the apparent differences between Africans and Europeans, Europeans’ growing engagement with the wider world challenged the authority of scripture. The Forging of Races traces the history of intellectuals grappling with this challenge, providing a useful new perspective on the rise of racial thinking in the West.

Kidd began expecting to find the key to racial thinking in the Enlightenment's critique of scriptural monogenism and the resulting loss of authority for Christian universalism. He discovered instead that “the historical record—even in the field of ideology—is replete with unpredictable and apparently illogical developments” and that people had proven “equally capable of interpreting the Christian scriptures” to support racist and antiracist visions (271). Thus, while the book shows that race became increasingly central to Western ethnology after the early modern period, Kidd resists any simple story of the twinned rise of secular and racialist thought.

He begins by asserting that “scripture has been for much of the early modern and modern eras the primary cultural influence on the forging of races” (19). Early modern Protestants struggled to understand human diversity through Old Testament genealogies. They did so not because “race” needed clarification, but because the scriptural account of man's origins held a central place in Christian orthodoxy: “race occupied a marginal position in early modern intellectual discussion, except as it related to the theological problems associated with the origins and distribution of mankind” (55). Early modern thinkers addressing what were, to them, inextricably related questions about theology, geology, ethnology, and comparative religion insisted that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, that racial groups’ genealogies reached back to the sons of Noah, and that apparent differences among peoples—whether visual, religious, or social—masked fundamental similarities that were rooted in the blood kinship of all human beings.

The Enlightenment's attack on biblical authority altered the relationship between race and scripture, but the Enlightenment did not, as previous scholars have claimed, serve “as the doctrinal fount of modern racism” (80). Kidd follows convention in differentiating among several enlightenments. While the more skeptical and anticlerical (and French) “radical” enlightenment engaged with polygenist accounts of human origins, the “mainstream of Enlightenment,” especially in Great Britain, was dominated by theological moderates who sought to reconcile modern science with the Bible. Even the notorious Lord Kames offered his polygenist theory to supplement, rather than supplant, the story of Adam and Eve, arguing that Genesis explained the origins of God's Chosen People—the forebears of the white race—but that other races had been created separately. The “British Enlightenment did witness a significant … departure from the older canons of ethnic theology,” for it abandoned the “details of sacred history” (114–15) and began a “gradual move from the realm of theology to the province of biology” (116). This gave “birth to a de-Christianized form of scientific racism,” while nurturing a Scottish vision of universal development that became a “sustaining ideology” (120) for Christian missions throughout the world.

Race and Christian theology in the nineteenth century became more deeply entangled. Racial thinking and ethnocentric condescension reached new heights, but “the arrogance of western racial superiority was tempered by a troubled sense that God was dying” (121–22). The “reluctance to abandon monogenesis” made “the question of mankind's racial origins … a constituent element in the nineteenth-century crisis of faith” (127). Many thinkers sought to solve these tangled problems and produced an array of arguments, ranging from polygenist arguments for essential human equality to monogenist racialist theories, and encompassing most positions in between. Even during racial science's ascendance, many resisted “the temptations of arguments that might justify their own racial superiority”; at the same time, “the defence of sacred history was rarely constrained … by anxieties that racialism might be at odds with the deepest truths of the Christian message” (167).

Kidd then turns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when belief in essential differences among human races dominated Anglo-American thought. Many became less concerned with how the Bible explained racial difference than in discerning how language and traditional religion reflected a people's racial essence. Comparative linguistics and religion offered ways to categorize the world's population into different racial groups, and doing so revealed the superiority of Aryan peoples. Much of this might seem laughable—Aryan children of Japhet securing the true meaning of Christianity, thereby saving it from its Semitic roots—if the results were not so tragic. These interpretations traveled various ethnocentric paths toward racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism. Protestantism, understood as an Aryan religion, came to be seen as the natural fulfillment of the religious longings of all the peoples of the world, and Christianity became an ideological handmaiden to imperialism.

An intrepid band of theorists took one more step by offering explicitly racialized religious doctrines. “British Israelites” insisted that the “Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain and North America” could be traced directly to the lost tribes of Israel, making Anglo-Saxon Protestants God's true chosen people. British Israelite theology informed the emerging Pentecostal movement in the early twentieth-century United States and provided intellectual cover for the explicitly racist Christian Identity movement from later in the century. Kidd provides a brief interpretation of the role of racial thinking in the Church of Latter Day Saints and closes by examining African-American movements that he thinks appropriated white Protestant traditions of racial thinking in the process of formulating “Black Counter-Theologies.”

The Forging of Races covers a great deal of ground in less than three hundred pages. This makes the book enormously useful but creates two problems. In such a rapid survey each individual thinker necessarily makes a brief appearance as representative of an important trend. Kidd argues for contradiction and complexity in the development of Protestant racial theologies, but he cannot delve into complexity when discussing individual writers. This can produce crudely functionalist assertions. To give a single illustration, Kidd says that nineteenth-century white southerners “recognised that polygenist racialism—however superficially convenient it might appear—was an even greater threat to their worldview than abolitionism or abolitionist readings of scripture” (145). Here and elsewhere, Kidd portrays writers trimming their beliefs for convenience, something that happens often enough, but something that should be demonstrated rather than asserted. Another aspect of the book that may give pause is the title. Kidd promises an analysis of race and scripture in the “Protestant Atlantic World,” but his focus is Anglo-Atlantic. He occasionally engages with German, French, and Dutch thinkers, but only briefly, and only if they influenced English-language authors. These shortcomings result, however, from one of the virtues of The Forging of Races—brevity. Colin Kidd has produced a readable and compelling interpretation of the interweaving strands of racial thought and Christian theology among Britons and North Americans.