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Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history. Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

Race --- Religion and science --- Eurocentrism --- Eurocentricity --- Ethnocentrism --- Physical anthropology --- Race (Theology) --- Religious aspects --- Christianity. --- Historiography. --- History. --- History of controversy

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Since World War II, historians have analyzed a phenomenon of "white flight" plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of "white flight" occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960's and 1970's and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. In Shades of White Flight, sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations' departure. Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion-often used to foster community and social connectedness-can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school-instead of the local park or square or market-as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy-when black families moved into the neighborhood-to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves. Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity-congregationalism-functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.

Whites --- African Americans --- Racism --- Identification (Religion) --- Race --- Evangelicalism --- White people --- White persons --- Ethnology --- Caucasian race --- Afro-Americans --- Black Americans --- Colored people (United States) --- Negroes --- Africans --- Blacks --- Identity (Religion) --- Religious identity --- Psychology, Religious --- Race (Theology) --- Migrations --- History --- Religious aspects --- Christianity. --- United States --- Race relations --- Black people