Legacy of the “Genre of the Human”: Theological Justifications for Enslavement and the Construction of Race and Gender

Abstract

This article examines the theological and biblical frameworks that helped naturalise racial hierarchy in the Atlantic world. Employing a qualitative desktop methodology, the study draws on the critique of the “genre of the human” to critically discuss theological justifications for enslavement and the construction of race and gender. Wynter argues that Western modernity has over-represented a particular figure of “Man” as universal while rendering other peoples as deficient, subordinate, or not fully human. The article demonstrates how this figure of “Man” corresponds with theologies that interpret biblical passages on order, such as 1 Corinthians 14:40, as divine endorsements of hierarchical structures of power. Through critical discourse analysis, it shows how such interpretations helped justify enslavement, racism, and gendered hierarchies. The article further traces the persistence of this theological hierarchy across changing historical forms, from mediaeval Christian cosmologies through early modern race-making to modern capitalist conceptions of productivity and worth. It concludes by arguing that any credible theological response to racism must dismantle the binary logic that underwrote racialised chattel enslavement through an intersectional interrogation of religion, race, and gender and recover a decolonial account of the human grounded in relational dignity, justice, and shared vulnerability.

1. Introduction

The history of Atlantic chattel enslavement is often narrated primarily as a story of the trafficking of African peoples, forced labour, economic exploitation, and imperial extraction. Those dimensions are indisputably central. Yet such narratives remain incomplete if they overlook the conceptual work required to make enslavement morally plausible and socially durable. Atlantic enslavement did not persist simply because it was profitable or because military force made it possible. It endured because institutions, including churches and theological traditions, helped construct a moral universe in which the enslavement of African peoples could be interpreted as compatible with Christian truth, social order, and divine providence (Gerbner 2018; Goetz 2012; Shaw 1996). Furthermore, as Quijano (2000) demonstrates through the concept of the coloniality of power, this theological sorting was foundational to establishing a global racial taxonomy that linked social rank and human worth directly to colonial labour extraction. In that sense, theology was not merely a spectator to the system. It was one of the conceptual instruments through which the system was stabilised.

This article begins from that premise and asks a basic but unsettling question: how did Christian thought contribute to the making of race? The question matters because the language of race did not emerge fully formed. It developed through a series of distinctions that linked spiritual authority to social status, Christian identity to freedom, whiteness to civilisation, and African descent to bondage. Over time, these distinctions hardened into a racial order. However, race was never constructed in isolation. As Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality makes clear, race and gender are not “mutually exclusive” categories but intersect to constitute the multiple identities of marginalised peoples (Crenshaw 1991). In the Atlantic system of racialised chattel enslavement, the same theological logic that subordinated Africans also subordinated women, and the two forms of subordination were mutually reinforcing rather than separate processes. Theological discourse was central to this process because it provided the symbolic vocabulary through which hierarchy could be narrated as natural, providential, and even benevolent (Gerbner 2018). What appears at first to be a religious issue is therefore also a history of political classification, human sorting, and epistemic violence.

A trifocal analytical framework is therefore essential. As Klingorová and Havlíček (2015) argue, the status of women in society is an outcome of the interpretation of religious texts just as the status of racialised peoples is shaped by biblical hermeneutics. Seeing gender as a variable of equal or complementary importance (Klingorová and Havlíček 2015) in the production of inequality, the theological structure of Atlantic chattel enslavement was never only about race; it was always also about gender. The same interpretive traditions that justified the enslavement of Africans also mandated the submission of wives to husbands, the exclusion of women from religious authority, and the denial of women’s bodily autonomy.

The argument developed here is that Christian theology played a formative role in the creation of modern racial thinking by helping define who counted as fully human. In the Atlantic world, enslaved Africans were not merely denied freedom; they were repeatedly represented as spiritually deficient, culturally backward, intellectually limited, or morally immature. These portrayals did important ideological work. They enabled enslavers and their allies to depict domination as discipline, conversion as benevolence, and unequal power as divinely sanctioned order. Such claims relied on deeply rooted dualisms: spirit and flesh, light and darkness, reason and passion, and order and chaos. When mapped onto human populations, these dualisms became mechanisms of hierarchy (Haynes 2002; Whitford 2009). When understood through the prism of gender, these dualisms portray women, especially enslaved women, as more in tune with nature, the body, and irrationality, intensifying the complicitous link (Klingorová and Havlíček 2015) between racial and gender injustices. To analyse this history, the article draws on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the “genre of the human” (2015). Wynter argues that Western modernity has repeatedly over-represented a particular historical model of the human as if it were universal. In her account, the human has been imagined in successive genres: homo religiosus, homo politicus, and homo oeconomicus. Each genre is linked to specific historical conditions and forms of power, yet each also reflects a broader tendency to universalise one culturally produced model of personhood (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). Wynter’s insight is especially useful for the present discussion because it helps explain why enslavement was not only a labour regime but also a regime of human classification.

This article therefore situates biblical enslavement, Protestant supremacy, and colonial race-making within a broader genealogy of the human. Catholic legal traditions and Islamic fiqhi discussions, too, developed elaborate theological frameworks around slavery and the intra-African slave trade, but this study centres Atlantic Protestantism and how Reformed biblical hermeneutics informed early modern race-making. Rather, it follows the flow of ideas throughout the Atlantic world and how Christian institutions, missionary practices, and interpretive habits shaped a larger racial order. Scholarship by Gerbner and Goetz demonstrates that Christianity was entangled with race not as a secondary or accidental feature, but as a constitutive part of the colonial formation (Gerbner 2018; Goetz 2012). Wynter (2015) then provides the theoretical vocabulary for understanding how these entanglements were possible in the first place.

The article is organised into three main sections. The first develops the theoretical framework by setting Wynter’s work in conversation with scholarship on Protestant supremacy, Christian enslavement, and race-making. It also brings in intersectionality as an analytical tool to understand how religion, race, and gender worked as mutually constitutive systems. The second section examines the theological and biblical mechanisms of justification of hierarchy, paying special attention to dualism, the Curse of Ham, the Household Codes, and the moral coding of Christian belonging. This section also addresses how enslaved women’s bodies were subjected to a trifocal project of exploitation: their labour was extracted (race/class), their reproductive capacity was controlled (gender), and their spiritual lives were subjected to coercive ‘correction’ (religion). The third section considers the afterlife of these ideas in contemporary discourses of morality, merit, and social value. The conclusion reflects on what this history means for theology, ethics, and decolonial thought. The aim throughout is not merely to analyse a past injustice but to illuminate the conceptual conditions under which that injustice became possible and the ongoing forms of life that it continues to shape (Adams and Weinstein 2020; Wynter and McKittrick 2015).

2. Theoretical Framework

Sylvia Wynter’s work is indispensable for any analysis of racialised chattel enslavement, race, and the human because it shifts attention from race as a perceived (by some) fixed biological category to human identity as a historically produced and politically governed form. Wynter’s central argument is that Western modernity has repeatedly over-represented one particular genre of the human as if it were the human itself. In different periods, this has taken different forms. Wynter articulates in “The Ceremony Found” (2015), human beings are autopoetic subjects whose nature is instituted through self-narrating cultural scripts. The mediaeval Christian world privileged homo religiosus, a figure ordered by cosmological dualism and clerical authority. The Renaissance and early modern period produced homo politicus, a secular yet still hierarchical subject defined by statecraft, reason, and civilisational rank. Modern capitalism intensified this process through homo oeconomicus, the productive, competitive, bourgeois subject whose value is measured through utility, accumulation, and disciplined selfhood (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).

These genres, however, were not merely racialised; they were also gendered. Each genre over-represented a European Christian patriarchal male as the normative human subject. As Sally Haslanger argues, both “gender and race are motivated and justified by cultural [religious] responses to the body” (Haslanger 2000). The European Christian male body became the standard against which all other bodies, whether racialised or feminised, were measured and found deficient. The “civilisational ideals” that Wynter identifies—reason, restraint, productivity, gender order, and imperial command—were fundamentally patriarchal (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). They defined “reason” and “authority” against both the “irrational” racialised subject and the “subordinate” female subject (Haslanger 2000). Although scholarship on empire, race, and gender emphasises that gender was not a secondary appendage to colonial expansion, we argue that it is a co-constitutive axis of racialisation through which enslaved women’s reproductive capacity and bodily autonomy were systematically regulated. In this sense, the genre of the human was always a genre of masculine humanity.

The significance of this framework lies in its insistence that the human is not a neutral category. It is a genre, and genres are historical. Each genre of human has been shaped by institutions, cosmologies, and regimes of knowledge that naturalise some forms of life while marginalising others. Wynter’s critique therefore exposes the contingency of the so-called universal human. What is presented as universal is in fact a particular model, historically located and culturally specific, even when it is projected as standard. Once this happens, human difference is not experienced as equal difference but as deviation from the norm (Adams and Weinstein 2020).

This is relevant to racialised chattel enslavement because the system was based not only on economic inequality but also on the symbolic production of diminished humanity. Enslaved Africans were not only forced into providing free labour for their enslavers. They were represented as beings closer to nature than culture, closer to body than mind, and closer to disorder than rationality. Such representations were not incidental prejudices. They were part of the epistemic infrastructure that made enslavement appear legitimate. Wynter’s work helps explain why enslavement could be justified not only in economic terms but also as a supposed civilising, religious, and moral project. The enslaved were classified as people in need of rule, correction, or conversion, rather than as equal persons whose liberty had been wrongfully taken (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). Enslaved women occupied a unique position within this epistemic infrastructure: their bodies were marked as doubly deficient, both racially and sexually, and therefore as requiring a trifocal project of regulation: economic exploitation, reproductive control, and spiritual correction.

Wynter’s emphasis on over-representation also clarifies the relation between theology and race as a social construct. The European Christian subject came to appear as the human norm, and this norm was not purely religious. It incorporated civilisational ideals of reason, restraint, productivity, gender order, and imperial command (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). Once this norm was naturalised, those outside it could be described as lacking the qualities of full humanity. Theology thus supplied not only a doctrine of salvation but also a model of social ranking. The idea of the properly ordered Christian subject could be extended beyond the church into law, labour, empire, and race (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).

To this theoretical foundation, the scholarship on Protestant supremacy adds critical historical depth. Gerbner (2018) shows how Christianity in the Protestant Atlantic world became entangled with notions of liberty, whiteness, and political belonging. Many Protestant slaveholders believed that Christianity could not coexist with the conversion of enslaved people because they equated Christian status with freedom and European identity. Later missionaries tried to reconcile conversion with enslavement, but this was not a matter of dissolving hierarchy; it was a matter of reconfiguration. They could convert to Christianity and yet remain enslaved, showing that Christianity was less a universal equaliser than a system for sorting people within a racial order (Gerbner 2018). Goetz’s work on early Virginia shows a similar process. Her study demonstrates that baptism and conversion did not overcome racial difference. Rather, they helped constitute it. Christianity became a mechanism through which social distinctions were codified and inherited difference was stabilised. Religious belonging was therefore not separate from race-making but integral to it. Once Christianity was tied to order, discipline, and civility, it could be used to differentiate those considered fit for freedom from those deemed suitable for perpetual servitude (Goetz 2012). The significance of this insight is that religion was not merely imposed on race after the fact. It was one of the fields in which race itself took shape.

Theoretical clarity also requires attention to the biblical texts used to justify enslavement. Pro-enslavement interpreters repeatedly turned to Genesis, especially the story of Ham, to construct a theology of racial bondage. But historical studies indicate that the relationship between the biblical story and African slavery was not essential to the text itself. Instead, it was generated through later interpretive traditions that adapted the scripture to the needs of plantation society and imperial expansion (Haynes 2002; Whitford 2009). The hermeneutic violence here is great. Scripture was not simply misread by accident; it was re-engineered within a social order that needed religious authority to naturalise racial domination. The same hermeneutical violence was deployed in the service of gender subordination, as biblical texts were interpreted to mandate women’s submission and exclude them from religious authority.

This framework therefore brings together Wynter’s critique of the human and the historical scholarship on historical Christian support for the system of racialised chattel enslavement. Together, they show that the system of enslavement was sustained by more than law and force. It depended on a grammar of humanity, a set of assumptions about who counts as fully human, who belongs to the Christian moral order, and who may be subordinated for the supposed good of the whole. That grammar was neither innocent nor peripheral. It was constitutive of Atlantic modernity itself (Gerbner 2018; Wynter and McKittrick 2015). The task of theory, then, is to make visible what that grammar concealed. An intersectional trifocal approach reveals that this grammar concealed not only racial hierarchy but also gendered hierarchy and that the two were constructed through the same theological mechanisms.

3. Findings and Discussion

Theological Dualism and the Grammar of Hierarchy

This section presents the main textual findings and their theoretical discussion. We aimed to maintain the interpretive flow of Critical Discourse Analysis but also to provide clear empirical evidence.

Textual Evidence and Primary Source Discoveries

All three primary sources share the same discursive mechanism that constructs human hierarchy, namely the biblical mandate of “decency and order” (1 Corinthians 14:40) [24–26]:

• John Calvin, Institutes (Calvin 1845): Takes church order to regulate polity and to prevent “all confusion, barbarism, contumacy, all turbulence and dissension” (Chapter 10, Section 29). It does not address the contemporary colonial race, but it does lay out a structural logic of control through the exclusion of women from church office (Chapter 10, Section 29) and the division of humanity into the “godly” elect versus “ungodly” outsiders (Chapter 5, Section 10).
• 1857 South African Reformed Synod Proceedings: Uses the principle of “decency and order” to endorse physical racial separation in worship, affirming that it was desirable “in principle” to welcome non-European “Gentiles,” but that racial separation was permissible “whereas due to the weakness of some in the body of the congregation separate services would do more to promote the cause of Christ” (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk van Zuid-Afrika 1858, p. 60).
• Barrows (1890) US Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question: Describes industrial labour as a moral imperative for ‘order and decency’ among emancipated Black Americans, arguing that hard work is the most important force in Christian civilisation without which order and decency would fall apart (Barrows 1890).

The findings and discussion begin with a fundamental feature of the theological imagination: dualism. Christian thought as expressed in Calvinism, for example, has frequently organised the world through oppositions such as light and darkness, heaven and earth, soul and body, and sacred and profane. In themselves, such distinctions are not necessarily harmful. They become dangerous when one pole is treated as intrinsically superior and then mapped onto a population already positioned for domination. In the Atlantic racialised chattel enslavement world, this is precisely what happened. Africans were regularly coded as dark, fleshly, irrational, and disorderly, while Europeans were associated with light, rationality, self-control, and divine favour (Haynes 2002; Gerbner 2018). The same dualisms were applied to women: associated with body rather than spirit, emotion rather than reason, and nature rather than culture. For enslaved women, these dualisms converged, producing a figure positioned as doubly Other, racially and sexually subordinate, and therefore subject to a particularly intense regime of domination.

These contrasts did more than describe differences; they established a moral hierarchy. Once Africans were cast as spiritually immature or morally deficient, enslavement could be reframed as tutelage. Once they were seen as socially disordered, plantation governance could be represented as necessary oversight. Once they were imagined as not yet fully formed Christians, coercive conversion could be justified as benevolence. The result was a tragic inversion in which oppression could be narrated as care and domination as discipline (Gerbner 2018). Dualism thus became a mechanism for turning religious language into social control.

Order, Decency, and the Hermeneutics of Human Hierarchies

Biblical interpretations that defend enslavement, colonisation, or misogyny cannot be treated as minor interpretive errors. The three primary texts offer insights into the writers’ emphasis on power. The pairing of “decency” and “order” that are drawn from 1 Corinthians 14:40 (“Let all things be done decently and in order”, KJV) is cited or adhered to in all three texts. Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion emphasises church order, arguing that the early church left an example for the future church to do all things “decently” and with “order” (Chapters 8 and 10). This would help them to regulate their church polity and theological positions and help them to avoid “all confusion, barbarism, contumacy, all turbulence and dissension” (Chapter 10, Section 29). The document is important to our discussion because although it does not refer to racial and cultural hierarchies, it established a structural logic of strict church-based social control that shaped later social hierarchies. It prescribed the exclusion of women from church leadership (Chapter 10, Section 29) and divided the world into a “godly” elect versus “ungodly” outsiders (see Chapter 5, Section 10).

Furthermore, its model of divine decency and order was adapted in other contexts to justify racial and gendered segregation. A South African example is demonstrated in the Proceedings of the Ninth Session of the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk van Zuid-Afrika 1858). The proceedings describe the South African Dutch Reformed Church’s (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk van Zuid-Afrika 1858) synod deliberations and decisions of 1857 that include its response to concerns about worshiping with non-Europeans in church services. In its response, the synod expanded Calvin’s interpretation to include justifications for separating worship along a racial binary. Thus, using the term “Gentiles” for non-Europeans, the synod took the position that although they found it “desirable and in accordance with Scripture” that Christian “Gentiles” be admitted as members, separation would be beneficial wherever “due to the weakness of some” the measure “would hinder the advancement of the cause of Christ among the Gentiles” (1858: 60, translated).

A related use of decency and order for social hierarchies is demonstrated in the First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question (Barrows 1890) which provides a record of a conference that aimed to create ways of “civilising” recently emancipated Black people in the American context. Among various strategies, the conference used “decency” and “orderliness” in their call to coerce Black people into industrial training:

Labor is a great moral and educational force. Next to the grace of God, hard work, in its largest sense, is the most vital thing in Christian civilization. Subtract from any neighborhood, within a radius of ten miles, all industry, and in six months, in spite of churches and schools, what would become of order and decency?

(Barrows 1890, p. 12).

The use of decency and order as ways of controlling those considered “indecent” or “unorderly” reveals a much deeper problem: scripture was made to serve a racialised (and gendered) hierarchy within these contexts. In turn, such interpretations provided the framework to affirm, for example, the exclusion of women from leadership or, in terms of race, the Ham narrative that was detached from its biblical and historical context and repurposed as a racial genealogy of servitude. In early modern and Atlantic slavery contexts, this interpretive tradition became one of the most durable justifications for Black enslavement (Haynes 2002; Whitford 2009). What makes the case especially significant is that the text itself does not require this reading. The racial reading was produced by the demands of enslavement.

Theologies of Difference and the Household Codes

Decency and order regulations are an example of theologies that emphasise difference by justifying exclusion based on conformity. A parallel dynamic can be observed in the interpretation of the New Testament Household Codes (Haustafeln). The same “sacred” logic that was used to demand the submission of enslaved people to masters was also used to demand the submission of wives to husbands. Passages such as Ephesians 5:22–6:9 and Colossians 3:18–4:1 established a hierarchical order within the Christian household: wives subordinate to husbands, children to parents, and enslaved people to their enslavers. This “Theology of Difference” provided a comprehensive framework for social ordering in which submission was mandated across multiple axes of inequality. The theological grammar that made enslavement morally intelligible was the same grammar that made patriarchy morally intelligible. Both were presented as divinely ordained structures of ordered relationship, and both were justified through appeals to creation order, the Fall, and the requirements of Christian discipline. The Household Codes thus reveal that the theological construction of hierarchy was never limited to race; it was always also a construction of gender hierarchy, and the two were mutually reinforcing.

A similar dynamic can be seen in the relation between Christian belonging and social privilege. Gerbner’s account of Protestant supremacy demonstrates that Christianity in the Protestant Atlantic world was not only a religious identity but also a marker of authority and civilisation. Protestant slaveholders initially fought the baptism of enslaved persons because they worried that Christianity signified freedom. This fear reveals how deeply Christian identity was linked to status. Over time, however, missionaries developed a model of “Christian slavery” in which conversion was compatible with bondage. The enslaved could receive Christian instruction, but their social position remained intact (Gerbner 2018). In this way, Christianity was folded into enslavement rather than mobilised against it.

This folding has profound implications for how race was formed. Goetz shows that early colonial Virginia used Christianity to create boundaries between populations that were increasingly understood as racially distinct. Baptism did not erase inherited difference; instead, the practice of Christian discipline helped make that difference legible and reproducible (Goetz 2012). Religious identity thus worked alongside legal and economic practices in the formation of race. The racial order was not merely imposed on Christianity from outside. Christianity became one of its organising principles.

Bodies and Embodiment: The Trifocal Approach

The dehumanisation of enslaved women exemplifies the trifocal project of domination. Religious traditions were used in the “regulation, exploitation, [and] affirmation of bodies”. Enslaved women’s bodies were subjected to a triple regime: their labour was exploited (race and class), their reproductive capacity was controlled and commodified (gender), and their spiritual lives were subjected to coercive “correction” (religion). This trifocal project was not an accidental convergence of separate systems of oppression but a unified project of domination in which religion, race, and gender were mutually reinforcing. The enslaved woman’s body became a site where the theological grammar of hierarchy was most fully and violently enacted.

Law and Governance: The Intertwining of Secular and Sacred

The convergence of religion, race, and gender is evident in the legal frameworks of Atlantic systems of enslavement. Religious laws, beliefs, and scriptures influenced the establishment of secular laws regulating gender and ethnic identities, marriages, and families. The legal maxim partus sequitur ventrem, the child follows the condition of the mother, exemplifies this intertwining. This secular legal principle, which determined that the status of a child followed that of the mother, drew on a theological dualism in which the enslaved woman’s body was denied the “sacred” protections of Christian marriage and motherhood afforded to white women. Enslaved women could not claim the protections of Christian matrimony; their children were not born into the sacred bond of family but into the secular condition of chattel. The principle thus reveals how theology and law collaborated to produce a racial and gendered order in which the bodies of enslaved women were legally and theologically stripped of the dignities afforded to white women. The refusal of Christian marriage to enslaved people was not simply a legal exclusion but a theological one: it placed enslaved women outside the sacred order of Christian domesticity, making their bodies available for exploitation without the moral claims that attached to the bodies of white women.

Wynter’s framework makes the analysis deeper by pointing out that this process was based on the over-representation of one human genre as the norm. When the European Christian bourgeois subject becomes the measure of the human, all others are evaluated relative to it. The standard human is imagined as rational, disciplined, civilised, productive, and authoritative. Those who do not approximate that model are then understood as deficient or incomplete. This is a decisive move, because it shifts difference from the domain of equality into the domain of ranking. Humans are no longer simply different; they are placed on a scale of humanness (Wynter and McKittrick 2015). The standard human is not only European and Christian but also male. Women and racialised peoples are evaluated against this patriarchal norm and found wanting.

This logic helps explain the transition from mediaeval theology to modern empire and capitalism. The old order of homo religiosus organised human value around salvation, cosmic hierarchy, and clerical authority (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, pp. 10–15). The early modern order of homo politicus transferred authority to the state, reason, and civilisational prestige (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, pp. 10–15, 35). The capitalist order of homo oeconomicus tied worth to productivity, possession, and economic utility (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, p. 17). But throughout all these changes, the basic structure remained; some lives were read as normal, exemplary, and governable, while others were consigned to the subordinate and in need of outside direction (Adams and Weinstein 2020). Throughout all these changes, the norm remained a patriarchal character.

This continuity is important for understanding the afterlives of Atlantic enslavement. Contemporary racial inequality is not only a matter of past injustice lingering into the present. It is also produced by the ongoing survival of old assumptions about who is reliable, disciplined, intelligent, civilised, or worthy of trust. Theological and cultural languages still sometimes mark prosperity as evidence of blessing and poverty as evidence of deficiency. Such associations echo the older colonial logic that linked divine favour, order, and superiority. Even when explicit pro-enslavement theology disappears, the deeper grammar of value can remain in circulation (Wynter and McKittrick 2015; Gerbner 2018). The same grammar sustains the structuring of gender relations; assumptions about women’s capacities, roles, and proper spheres of activity continue to be informed by theological traditions that positioned women as subordinate.

That grammar is particularly evident in the way modern societies speak of merit and development. In meritocracy talk, success is often taken as a sign of moral virtue, while structural disadvantage is reinterpreted as individual failure. Although this language may appear secular, it draws on older theological patterns in which hierarchy is moralised, and inequality is naturalised. Wynter’s critique is helpful here because it shows that the problem is not only bad policy but also the human model underlying the policy. If the standard human is already biased toward a specific historical subject, then social systems built around that standard will reproduce exclusion in predictable ways (Adams and Weinstein 2020). When that standard human is also gendered male and raced white, the exclusion is doubly determined. The intersectional critique reveals that contemporary inequalities of race and gender are not separate problems but different expressions of the same underlying logic of human ranking.

These intersections also bring in class and ecology, further deepening the “epistemic infrastructure” of the Atlantic world, as Joerg Rieger’s work on theology in the Capitalocene shows (Rieger 2022). The theological grammar which graded people also graded the natural world, with some people closer to nature and hence more amenable to domination. This ecological dimension of the trifocal project, the intertwining of religion, race, and gender with the exploitation of the natural world, reveals the full scope of the theological architecture that underwrote Atlantic modernity.

For theology, the implications are unavoidable. A church or theological tradition that does not examine its own participation in human ranking risks repeating the very logic it seeks to oppose. This does not mean abandoning Christian faith, but it does mean refusing inherited frameworks that linked order with domination and election with social supremacy. It also means acknowledging that scripture was historically weaponised in the service of enslavement. Genuine theological renewal requires more than a better proof text; it requires a rethinking of the categories through which human beings are seen and valued (Haynes 2002; Gerbner 2018). It requires an intersectional interrogation of how religion, race, and gender were constructed, contested, and experienced as a unified project of domination.

For Black, African, and diaspora theology, this task is both urgent and constructive. Urgent because the legacies of enslavement continue to shape community life, institutional trust, and bodily dignity. Constructive, because Wynter’s thought provides a way to rethink the human as an unfinished, relational, and shared project rather than a fixed hierarchy. Such a perspective resists both racial hierarchy and religious exceptionalism. It insists that no group can monopolise the meaning of humanity, and no theology can legitimately turn proximity to a European norm into a measure of truth. In that sense, decolonial theology is not simply reactive. It is world-making (Wynter and McKittrick 2015; Adams and Weinstein 2020).

4. Methodology

This paper employs a qualitative desktop methodology, drawing on close textual analysis of the source manuscript alongside secondary scholarly literature on Atlantic enslavement, Protestant supremacy, race-making, and Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the genre of the human. A desk-based qualitative design is appropriate because the paper’s aim is interpretive rather than empirical in the interview sense: it seeks to trace how theological concepts, biblical interpretations, and historical arguments have been assembled to produce racial hierarchy and to legitimise enslavement (Gerbner 2018; Goetz 2012). The approach follows the logic of desk-based research, in which the researcher systematically reviews, compares, and interprets written materials to generate conceptual insight and a defensible scholarly argument. The interpretation is within the critical discourse analysis (CDA) framework. CDA is a “qualitative analytical approach for critically describing, interpreting, and explaining the ways in which discourses construct, maintain, and legitimise social inequalities” (Mullet 2018, p. 116). The method relies on approaches and methods that depend on research goals and theoretical perspectives (Mullet 2018, p. 116). Thus, primary texts were chosen for their representation of frequently cited biblical justification for binary structures and assumptions about racial and gender hierarchy.

Three primary texts were identified that provide insight into the theme of “decency and order” (based on biblical texts like 1 Corinthians 14:40) and how such themes influenced ideas of social hierarchies. The texts help us trace how theological traditions like the Reformed tradition rehabilitated Wynter’s Man1 (of the Renaissance and its secular humanism that emerged from and built on expressions of European Christianity that centred European masculinity and ways of being) for a Christian context. The texts also help us trace such traditions’ support of what Wynter describes as Man2 with its Darwinist overtones (which translated into racism). These three texts are chosen because they represent critical historical moments in different geographical and theological contexts in which Reformed Christian discourses were used to configure human hierarchy.

The works cover three centuries and different geographical settings. The 1857 Synod document of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk/NGK) is of importance because it was composed almost a century before state-sanctioned Apartheid in 1948 and demonstrates how NGK Calvinists were theological pioneers of racial segregation. By contrast, the 1890 US Mohonk Conference, convened after the Civil War by Quakers and attended by a range of religious leaders, demonstrates the use of paternalistic notions of ‘decency and hard work’ across denominational lines in an effort to manage and discipline newly freed Black populations. The three were examined as discursive artefacts, with attention to recurring binaries, rhetorical contrasts, theological claims, and implicit assumptions about humanity, order, and difference. To improve interpretative validity and lower the possibility of drawing conclusions without sufficient evidence, this interpretation was then cross-checked against peer-reviewed historical and theoretical sources (Haynes 2002; Whitford 2009; Wynter and McKittrick 2015). The analysis proceeded through iterative reading, note-taking, thematic coding, and synthesis, moving from broad conceptual categories, such as dualism, election, and Christian supremacy, to more specific patterns in the text.

Because the study is desktop-based, no human participants were recruited, and no ethical risks associated with interviews or observation were involved. Instead, the main quality criterion was source credibility, supported by using established academic books and journal articles. The methodology is therefore best understood as qualitative document analysis grounded in critical theory and historical interpretation, designed to produce a publishable scholarly paper rather than primary field data (Adams and Weinstein 2020; Gerbner 2018).

5. Conclusions

This article has shown that Christian theology played a formative role in the making and maintenance of racialised chattel enslavement in the Atlantic world. By drawing on biblical interpretation, dualistic moral coding, and Christianised notions of order and civilisation, theologians and church actors helped produce a world in which the enslavement of Africans could appear legitimate, even benevolent. The historical scholarship demonstrates that Christianity was deeply implicated in race-making, while others show how scripture was repeatedly mobilised to sanction bondage. Crucially, the article has further demonstrated that this theological architecture was never merely racial but always also gendered. The same interpretive traditions that justified the enslavement of Africans also mandated the submission of women, excluded them from religious authority, and denied their bodily autonomy. The interpretations of decency and order, the Household Codes, the legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem, and the denial of Christian marriage to enslaved people all illustrate the trifocal character of theological domination: religion, race, and gender operated as mutually reinforcing systems of inequality.

Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the genre of the human provides the conceptual key to understanding why this was possible. Enslavement in the Atlantic world did not merely exploit labour; it depended on a redefinition of humanity in which a particular European Christian bourgeois model was elevated as the norm. Those who did not fit this model were marked as deficient, subordinate, or less fully human. The consequence was not only enslavement but the enduring racial order that continues to shape modern life. Wynter’s framework must, however, be extended to recognise that the normative human was not only European and Christian but also male. The genres of the human, homo religiosus, homo politicus, and homo oeconomicus, were always genres of masculine humanity, and their patriarchal character was as constitutive of Atlantic modernity as their racial character.

The challenge today is, therefore, not only historical remembrance but also conceptual transformation. A credible theological response to racialised chattel enslavement’s legacy must dismantle the hierarchies that made the system intelligible in the first place. This requires an intersectional interrogation of religion, race, and gender as a critical tool for a fuller understanding of how these categories were constructed, contested, and experienced as a unified project of domination. Such an intersectional approach transforms the conclusion from a summary into a scholarly imperative: the work of sustained liberation, freedom, and justice requires that we attend to the trifocal character of theological domination. That requires a decolonial theology of the human grounded in dignity, relationality, and accountability. Such a theology would not pretend that all traditions are equally innocent. Rather, it would name the past honestly and seek to build a more truthful and just account of human life together. It would also recognise that the struggle against racial hierarchy is inseparable from the struggle against gender hierarchy and that any credible theological response must address both.

Future research could compare this theological–racial grammar across African, Caribbean, and North and South American Christian contexts. It would also be valuable to study how contemporary Pentecostal and prosperity teachings reproduce, resist, or reconfigure the older genre of the human.