Colin Kidd writes that he began reading for The Forging of Races with a strong thesis: the decline of the authority of the Bible and the advance of the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment eventuated in the growth of racism. As he read, he realized that he had been wrong, and his “book does not, therefore, advance any grand overarching thesis about the relationship of race and theology” (p. 272). Indeed, this book is an encyclopedic overview of four centuries of Protestant thought about race, reminiscent of the early works of David Brion Davis.

The indeterminacy of both the Bible and rationalism in relation to race and racism encourages the encyclopedic form. For, as Kidd shows, the Bible can be interpreted in both racist and antiracist moods. Both the adherents of racism and the proponents of equality find support in its pages. The value of The Forging of Racism lies in the kaleidoscope of arguments it presents for and against racial exclusivity, all drawing from either the Bible or scientific rationality. No other author has so well observed so many of the currents and eddies of racial thought in the Protestant and the scientific worlds. If the book has a forceful thesis, it is that for most of the modern era, which is defined in part by the Euro-American appropriation of African and African-American labor, issues of race have been subordinated to matters of biblical authority and biblical interpretation.

The best use readers can make of Kidd's book is to treat it as a reference work, checking their own interests in religion and race against it. One might quibble over the depth of his treatment of particulars (as one often does with David Brion Davis' work), but since there may be as many quibblers as there are readers, this is not the right place for that. Instead, here one wants to press Kidd on the leading assumption of The Forging of Races, that the most powerful force for human equality in society and under law derives from the Old Testament account of monogenesis and the New Testament corroboration found in verses such as Acts 17:26. “Adamic sameness,” Kidd writes, “must, according to the revealed Word of scripture, lie beneath the apparent Otherness of the world's people” (26). Perhaps common sense leads us to think that equality is rooted in sameness, and perhaps it often has been. But the nature of the sameness has been hotly contested for the last two and a half centuries. Affirmations of sameness have not always benefited the victims of racism. True, the earliest critiques of the slave trade and slavery (which were also criticisms of incipient racism) stood their ground in sameness. As abolitionism developed in the eighteenth century, sameness came to imply accord and unity of the races on a full register of social, economic, religious, and sexual interactions. Those who opposed abolition rarely defended enslavement but rather feared that register of interactions. What Kidd does not notice is that sameness was radically redefined in the first half of the nineteenth century, replacing the broad unity of earlier thought with a narrow accord on economic principles that allowed liberty to the racial “others” but forestalled many other kinds of equal interracial interaction. Some commentators have seen the modern understanding of sameness as a critical problem in racialist thought. Kidd deals uncritically with an older notion of sameness, indeed one untouched by the challenge of racism. His book thus misses one of its chances to advance a robust argument, and remains an encyclopedia.