When I first questioned the idea of racial equality, it never entered my mind that understanding racial differences could be incompatible with my Christian beliefs, for almost all Christian churches in the South were then segregated. My church and its private school were entirely White.

Later, I did some real soul searching on the issue, for Christianity was not just my belief, but it was also my ultimate moral delimiter. I questioned whether my beliefs on the race issue were somehow unchristian. I began to reread the Holy Bible, paying close attention to the way it dealt with tribes, races, peoples, and nations, and I prayerfully thought about it. I read an article in a Methodist Sunday school magazine that maintained that racial segregation was unacceptable to Christians. The Scripture it used to justify its position was from Acts 17:26:

And he made from one every nation of men to live on the face of the earth...¹

I remembered the deception used by the media concerning Thomas Jefferson's famous quote: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people [the Negroes] are to be free." When I thought of how they left out the next sentences affirming racial differences and supporting repatriation, I immediately opened my Bible and looked up the verse. It read:

And he made from one every nation of men to live on the face of the earth, having determined their allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitations. (Acts 17:26)²

Just as with Jefferson, important words - words that complete the meaning of the scripture - were left off. In Biblical terms nation is synonymous with people or race. I thought about the fact that God indeed made the many races of mankind and gave them their distinct characteristics and the "boundaries of their habitations." As I read the verse in its entirety, it did not seem to me that God favors racial integration, or racial mixing. He himself made us distinct races and He separated us by kind.

The more I reread the Holy Bible, the more obvious it became to me that God seemed very concerned about heritage. The Old Testament is about one nationality, one people: the Israelites, who are designated as a special people, a "chosen people." Life and death struggles between the Israelites and the Cannanites, Jacobites, Philistines, Amalakites, Assyrians, Egyptians, and dozens of other peoples are recorded exhaustively. Even though, as I've mentioned, I was quite surprised and dismayed by the genocide, I continued to find many more verses of the Bible (such as Joshua 6:21³ and 10:28-10:41⁴) detailing the slaughter of entire peoples.

The Jewish stormtroopers committed their genocide under the strict guidelines established by Moses in Deuteronomy chapter 20. He told them that in the lands set aside to become Israel, they should exterminate every inhabitant, while people in surrounding nations had to be killed unless they submitted themselves as slaves to Israel.

When you draw near a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you . . . you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies . . . Thus you shall do to all of the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.

But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites, . . . (Deuteronomy 20:10-18)⁵

The wording is unmistakable. Even innocent children were to be killed simply because they were of an enemy nation.