Book Review

The Negro a Beast, or In the Image of God

This book from 1900 is perhaps the most racist thing I've ever read. It angers me that a man claiming to be a minister of God would dare to write such words, and furthermore that he would twist the Scriptures to justify and support his dehumanizing ideas.

I only read this so I could understand the rebuttal published a year later by a Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) minister.

The following is a summary of the book's contents. It feels wrong to sanitize the language when the whole idea behind the book is so offensive, so I'll use the terms Charles Carroll uses (like negro, beast, and amalgamation) even though they are out of date and somewhat offensive.

Chapter 1
Man is a special creation, unlike anything else. He is made in the image of God, unlike the animals. This is at odds with the atheistic theory of Naturalistic Development which says that man is simply a species of ape. He leans heavily on 1 Corinthians 15:39 wherein Paul draws distinctions between various "kinds" of flesh, distinguishing animal flesh from human flesh.

Chapter 2
Chas. Carroll spews pages of anatomical "evidence" about hair quality, facial features, bone structure, and brain size to "prove" that negroes resemble apes more than they resemble white men. He presents sociological and academic findings as well.

Chapter 3
Carroll rejects the theory that black people are the cursed descendants of Ham or of Ham's son Canaan. He also rejects the "scientific" theory that men are highly developed apes, and that there are five so-called races of man, which are (from lowest to highest development): Causasians, Mongolians, Indians, Malays, and Negroes. He recalls again 1 Corinthians 15:39, pointing out that if we have rejected both biblical and atheistic attempts to classify Negroes as humans, the only answer must be that Negroes are merely the most advanced animals. Carroll argues that God created Negroes to work for Adam's race, as Adam, in his pre-fallen state, would surely not have been expected to work the soil, yet someone must till the soil and perform manual labor in order for Adam to carry out the command to "subdue" the earth. Hence, God created Negroes as servant creatures.

Chapter 4
More "scientific evidence" that Negroes are not part of the human race. Carroll tackles the argument that Negroes possess a moral faculty and thus must have a soul and be more than animals. Carroll responds that the moral faculty is a product of the mind, not of the soul, and thus is available to animals. Further, lacking a soul, no offspring of a Negro can have a soul, no matter how much "white" heritage is mixed in. There being no soul (only matter and mind) on the Negro side, whatever germ of "soul" exists on the "white" side has nothing to "attach" to, and thus forms no part of the resulting offspring. Carroll is just making things up here, he isn't even trying to cite sources. (The three "creations" being matter, mind, and soul.)

Chapter 5
Carroll connects Genesis, Jude, and 1 Corinthians 15 to argue that Cain's sin which caused God to reject his offering was taking a different flesh, that is, a Negro, as a wife. He also argues that the Levitical prohibition on bestiality is actually a prohibition of amalgamation, and a principle reason for its prohibition is that the resulting offspring would be of corrupted flesh. All products of interracial breeding are animals, not part of mankind.

Chapter 6
Non-white races are the result of interracial breeding, and are corrupted flesh. So now not only are Negroes mere beasts, but so are the Malay, the Indian, and the Mongol. As mere beasts they are "not included in the Plan of Salvation." He interprets Matthew 7:6, "neither cast ye your pearls before swine," as a command not to give the gospel to non-white races. "It is criminal to undertake to Christianize the negro" or "mixed-bloods." He brings in anthropological and archaeological "evidence" to prove that the non-white races are incapable of civilization, and that the ruins of ancient American civilizations were created by white men who later mixed into the other races and died out, resulting in the collapse of civilization on the American continents.

Chapter 7
Carroll looks at how the Bible distinguishes between cattle and the beasts of the earth, and decides this can only possibly mean that cattle refers to quadrupeds and beast refers to bipeds. He then takes some references to beasts of the earth devouring the flesh of dead men, and concludes this can only possibly refer to Negroes, because as everybody knows they are the only cannibals. Good gravy, this is cartoonishly racist. Carroll also says that the terms adultery and formication have been misunderstood—that adultery means illicit sex between whites, and fornication is sex between whites and beasts—that is, negroes and mixed-bloods. Finally, Carroll claims that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is not a serpent or a snake, but was rather a particular negro individual (a beast of the field) that Adam had given the name “Serpent.” This means the first sin was not in eating the fruit, but in listening to the negro rather than ruling over him. Thus negro equality is the sin which brought about the Fall.

Chapter 8
More wicked heresies. Carroll claims the Flood was God’s way of wiping the earth clean of mixed-bloods. Unfortunately mankind fell back into amalgamation and atheism and spread evolutionary ideas throughout the world. God being constrained by his promise to Noah not to flood the world again, he tried something new: he picked Abraham and made a nation of pure-blood men, who would then carry God’s message (about his Plan of Creation, which is that men of pure Adamic stock are to rule the negroes and have dominion over the whole earth) to the whole world. But Israel failed in this, and the world continued to intermarry with beasts. So God tried again: he sent them prophets, one after another, but the people still persisted in their “atheism, amalgamation, and idolatry.” So God sent his son to warn them. Rather than repent of amalgamation, the people killed him.

Carroll specifically and vigorously denies that Christ’s death was part of God’s original plan of salvation. It was only a last resort. The actual plan, which is yet to be realized, is the re-establishment of Man’s rule over the beasts (the negro and the mixed-bloods), then the development of Man’s dominion over all the earth, which will usher in the Millennium. Jesus’s death was a failure, because the Christian religion he established was quickly infiltrated by atheistic ideas, including and particularly the idea that negroes are human.

Carroll is not only preaching a racist message, he’s preaching a thoroughly unchristian gospel. There is no call to repentance for sin, there is no Law, no Grace, no forgiveness for sins through faith in Christ Jesus. No, the only gospel Carroll gives us is the gospel of white dominion.

Chapter 9
Carroll complains about all the crimes committed by negroes since they were freed after the Civil War, and opines that they were never enslaved, because as beasts designed to serve whites they were never free to begin with. He rails against spending money to educate negroes, he complains bitterly about money wasted on foreign missions to beasts and mixed-bloods.

Chapter 10
Carroll runs through his arguments once again, explaining why he thinks the negro is not a man. He also claims that in the book of Jonah, the sin of Nineveh was an improper relationship between pure Adamic men and their “beasts.”

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