Colonialism: An ancient heresy reaches Australia

April 29, 2025

John Harris

The descendants of Ham had not fulfilled their mission, and they must retire before the descendants of Japhet, who had entered on a great, a mighty, and a glorious mission.[1]          

These words are from an 1849 report in a Queensland newspaper of a public meeting seeking the release of more Aboriginal land for agriculture. It is just one of the countless times the ancient story of Noah cursing his son Ham and blessing his son Japheth was used to legitimise colonialism and oppression, and to justify the supposed superiority of white over black races.

 This is the colonial heresy. 

Colonial heresies

 Noah’s ancient curse, said to doom all black people to conquest, colonisation and slavery, is at the heart of a cluster of misreadings of the Bible that were widely and wrongly used in Australia to justify colonial activity. Another was that God’s primal instruction to Adam and Eve to ‘replenish the Earth’ required that Christians colonise and exploit lands which other people had failed to develop. Yet another likened Australia to the Promised Land and the British colonisers to the Israelites—the presumption being that the conquest was part of God’s providence and blessing for his chosen people. A particularly Christian variation was that God had given the British ‘the ends of the earth’ for their inheritance and that colonisation was following Jesus’ commission to take the gospel into all the world.  Together these distortions were used to assert the inferiority of Aboriginal people, and approve the dispossession and even killing of Aboriginal people by the British.

Cursings and Blessings

 It defies belief that Noah’s ancient curse, first recorded 4,000 years ago in the Hebrew Scriptures, could resurface in Australia to justify the occupation of Aboriginal land by white settlers. Aboriginal people were judged to be the cursed, black descendants of Ham. The European people identified as the blessed white descendants of Japheth, whose ‘great, mighty and glorious mission’ was to take over this land.  It is incredible that this unlikely interpretation of an ancient account of the destinies of ancient peoples and nations was such common knowledge in Australia. But it was.

In the Genesis narrative, Noah and his family began farming. Noah made wine and got drunk. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, discovered his sleeping father naked. Ham told his brothers, Shem and Japheth. They discreetly covered their father with a cloak. When Noah woke up and learned what Ham had done, he pronounced a curse—not on Ham, but upon Ham’s son Canaan.

Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers. (Genesis 9:24)

We may be surprised that such a distasteful and seemingly insignificant event could influence world history, but we would be underestimating the reverence given to the text of the Bible and thereby its potential to be abused by unscrupulous people to justify their personal and political ambitions.

The simplest interpretation of the curse of Canaan in the biblical context is that it looked forward to the future takeover and enslavement of Canaan’s descendants by the Israelites when they aggressively invaded and occupied Canaanite lands, as recorded in the Old Testament book of Joshua.

Early Jewish interpreters, however, proposed wider implications of this passage, suggesting that Noah’s curse of Canaan applied also to his father Ham and all Ham’s other offspring. Embraced by the Christian Church, this ‘curse of Ham’ was used for centuries to justify the conquest and oppression of black people. The supposed Scriptural basis for this was its account of the location of different races. According to Genesis 10, all peoples of the world descended from Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth.  African people descended from Ham, and this was extended to include all black people. European people descended from Japheth and were white. 

After Noah cursed Canaan (Ham), he went on to bless Japheth.

May God extend the territory of Japheth … and may Canaan be his slave. (Genesis 9:27)

European Bible scholars took this to mean that black descendants of Ham were doomed to be subservient to white Christian Europeans descendants of Japheth, and so the destiny of Christian nations was to rule the black peoples. European Christendom thus found in this text the validation of Empire. Bishop Thomas Wilson wrote in 1740:

The negroes, the descendants of Ham and Canaan … according to one of the most ancient of prophesies ... are to become … slaves of Christians.[2]

The views of Bishop Thomas Newton, a very influential theologian of the English-speaking world, were widely quoted on both sides of the Atlantic: 

The whole continent of Africa was peopled principally by the children of Ham …  In what wickedness, ignorance, barbarity, slavery, misery, live most of the inhabitants! …  How many hundreds every year are sold and bought like beasts in the market and are conveyed from one quarter of the world to do the work of beasts in another![3]Since the 1600s it had been convenient for European Christendom that this distortion of the Bible provided a rationale for enslaving African peoples. Eventually, it became shrewd to apply the ‘curse of Ham’ not only to Africans, but to all black peoples of the southern part of the world. This not only legitimised American slavery, but also apartheid in South Africa and the invasion and subjugation of southern hemisphere lands. This very matter was discussed in the editorial of a Melbourne newspaper in 1856:

It was common for even religious men to be engaged in the slave trade. They considered that the sons of Ham were lawfully the prey and property of the sons of Japheth.[4]

This is a terrible truth. The first Anglican (Church of England) missionary organisation, the Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), accepted a bequest of slave-worked plantations in Barbados. SPG branded their slaves Society. Many early colonial clergy in Australia were supported by SPG. Renamed USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), the Society has apologised for its involvement in slavery and is engaged in truth-telling and reparation.

It is an utterly disgraceful history for which USPG apologises unreservedly. USPG is committed to engaging critically with this shameful history.[5]

Martin Luther King named the heresy for what it was, the conscious distorting of Scripture for political, national and selfish personal ends: 

It seems to be a fact of life that men cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe an obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness. This is exactly what happened during the days of slavery. Even religion was used, or I should say misused, to crystalize the patterns of the status quo and to justify the system of slavery. And so it was argued from some pulpits that the Negro is inferior by nature because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. The Apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword: That servants be obedient to your master. [6]

Shakespeare insightfully has Antonio tell Shylock that ‘the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose’.[7] But European theologians and clergy were deluded. Blinded by Empire, they believed a heresy, uncritically promoting the ‘curse of Ham’ as biblical truth.

To the British colonisers of Australia, black people were doomed to suffer as the inheritors of the curse of Ham. They had been taught this from their pulpits and read it in the interpretive margins of their family Bibles. According to the notes (‘evangelical reflections’) on Genesis 9:25-27 from Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible—exactly the kind of family Bible which had pride of place on English Christian’s dining room tables—biblical prophecy was being fulfilled in Africa. God had ‘abandoned’ its people to the curse of Ham. Their centuries of suffering and abuse were the fulfilment of biblical prophecy: 

The bulk of the Africans have been abandoned of Heaven to the most gross ignorance, rigid slavery, stupid idolatry and savage barbarity … For many ages the northern parts of Africa were enslaved …  by the Greeks … the Romans and vandal descendants of Japheth … And what multitude of the Western Africans are annually bought for slaves by the English, the Spaniards, the French, Portuguese or Dutch, and condemned to the hardest drudgery in their American plantations.[8]

Millions of copies of Brown’s Bible were published for 150 years from 1778 until well into the 20^th century, brought to Australia by countless free settlers, and eventually printed in Australia. My grandfather owned one and read Bible stories to me from it as a child. I now know its notes affirmed that the prophetic curse of Ham was being fulfilled in this continent.

 

The ‘Primal Command’

  Anther influential misapplication of Scripture used in Australia in support of the dispossession of Aboriginal people was the false notion that non-agrarian cultures, particularly hunter-gatherers, had failed God’s first command to ‘replenish the earth’.

So God created man in his own image … male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth … (Genesis 1:27,28. KJV)

 This was not a command but a blessing for human beings to inhabit the earth and to use it responsibly. It was never a licence for aggression.  Naming it ‘the primal command’ gave it considerable force, especially when it was conveniently linked with the curse of Ham and interpreted for avaricious and aggressive purposes. The consequent misreading made it appear that God’s primal instruction to Adam and Eve to ‘replenish the Earth’ required Christians to colonise and exploit lands which other people had failed to develop for agriculture.

 The British saw themselves as the nation representing the Kingdom of God on earth. Their King ruled Dei Gratia—by the grace of God—and therefore they had a strong responsibility to colonise other lands in God’s name. This marginal note on Genesis 10:5, from the 1835 edition of Alexander Fletcher’s Family Bible, proclaims that Britain was ordained to become that place where the Kingdom of God in all its fullness would be shown to the world. 

O, let us rejoice that Britain, one of the Gentile islands of the sea, has been divided and set apart as a portion of Christ’s mediatorial kingdom, where his throne of grace is erected, and where the banners of his salvation are displayed.[9]

The Society for the Promotion of Colonization proclaimed that colonisation was a duty Britain owed to God:

Colonization is a duty we owe to ourselves, to the working population, and to God; for our colonial empire was given us for something more than mere dignity and enjoyment—to carry out the divine commandment … to ‘replenish the earth’.[10]

Thus the misconstrued biblical theology carried to these shores justified colonialism as a legitimate response to the curse upon the descendants of Ham, and to the failure of the hunter-gatherers to replenish the earth. Colonialism was, to British Christians, God’s plan for the evangelisation of the world. The Colonial Church Chronicle called it ‘systematic colonisation’:

If the duty of carrying the light of revelation to the heathen be incumbent on all Christians, it is most of all upon us Englishmen … our means and opportunities are greater than those possessed by any other nation … Our ships and our missionaries ought to be everywhere … In colonization, properly conducted, we have a champion able to cope with the Goliath of heathenism, and I have chiefly in view the colonization of Australia and New Zealand.[11] 

Bishop Broughton, when Bishop of Sydney (1848-1853), believed that the process of Empire building through colonisation of other lands was a continuation of the English Reformation:

It is impossible to contemplate the position held by England …  as the central body of a vast system of colonization ... without … a conviction that things have been ordered thus by an all-discerning Providence … The extent of the colonial dependencies submitted to our empire is a manifest signification of the intention of Providence, that we should be watchful, earnest, active to avail ourselves of the facility thus afforded us of setting up throughout the world, the Church as founded by Christ and restored at the Reformation.[12]  

 This belief in Britain’s sacred calling to establish the Kingdom of God in the world persisted into recent times. My older hymnbooks contain Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional Hymn’, from which come the words ‘Lest we Forget’. For this reason, we still hear it played at Anzac services. I sang it as a child and I know the words by heart:

God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine.

Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.[13]

We held dominion. We sang of an Empire held under God.  King by the grace of God (DG) and Defender of the Faith (FD) were emblazoned on our Australian coinage, on the penny in my pocket, but was it really God’s Empire? We sang of our domination. Now, 75 years later, I look back and wonder who I thought ‘we’ were, holding ‘dominion over palm and pine’. Was I, a white Australian child, being brainwashed by the Empire?

Into all the world.   

On 26^th January 1834, the 46^th anniversary of the landing of the first British colonists on Australian soil, Archdeacon William Broughton, soon to be Bishop of Australia, preached at St Philip’s Sydney on Deuteronomy 4:39-40—Moses’ instructions to Israel before crossing the Jordan to begin the conquest of Canaan:

Forty-six years expire this day, since the soil on which we stand was for the first time trodden by the foot of civilized man.[14]

Broughton compared the landing of the first British colonists to the people of Israel crossing the Jordan River. God’s instructions through Moses as they set out to occupy their Promised Land continued to apply every time a Christian nation like Britain occupied a new land.

As long therefore as the societies of men shall continue to multiply on earth … leading forth nations and planting them in new lands, where they may take root and multiply, and, agreeable to [God’s] primitive charter, may ‘replenish the earth and subdue it’, so long must all who believe in God as the Supreme Director and Governor of human affairs, be anxious to comply with the principles upon which they are instructed by him.

Such views were not just the province of learned theologians and Bible scholars but the stuff of sermons and public discussions. People in the pews were encouraged to think that in taking over Aboriginal land, they were carrying out the will of God. Here are the words of Canon William Coombs, Rector of Gawler, S.A. in 1870: 

For more than three hundred years have gone forth the hordes of old Europe … to ‘replenish the earth’ and ‘to subdue it’. And then, eventually, to our own Australia …  Hither the sons of Japhet have wandered. Ships, colonies and commerce have so far done their work, apparently carrying out the desires of man, yet, in reality, fulfilling the decrees of God … What under Providence has been permitted us as his instruments, to accomplish, in these uttermost parts of the earth? What rearing of town and tower … in these vast solitudes, where, but as yesterday, the savage of the wilderness alone roamed and reigned? …  What space and to spare, in this heritage of Ham, for the children of Japhet![15]

Significantly, this preacher chose the Biblical phrase, the uttermost parts of the earth. He drew these words from Jesus’ commission to his disciples. Jesus’ followers were to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. British Christians saw the fulfilment of Jesus’ words in the colonisation of distant lands and peoples, and in planting Western Christendom, that is, British law, British society and British lifestyle.   

 

Aboriginal inferiority 

The first Christian missionaries in Australia denounced Aboriginal people as degraded descendants of Ham. The first missionary to Aboriginal people, Wesleyan William Walker, described them as ‘the progeny of him who was cursed to be a servant of servants to his brethren’.[16]  London Missionary Society missionary Lancelot Threlkeld wrote in 1835 that Aboriginal people were ‘like the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Aboriginal Canaanites’.[17] 

This erroneous Christian view was reinforced by what was considered ‘science’. Aboriginal people were low in what science termed a ‘Scale of Being’. Darwinian evolution did nothing to change that misconception. Aboriginal people were simply less evolved, doomed to be superseded by the more evolved Europeans:

The great continent of Australia is occupied by … a totally different and unique variety of man … black and of the lowest physical and mental organisation … very low in the scale of humanity. (President Ethnological Society of London, John Crawfurd, 1861)[18]

 In intellectual capacity the aborigines seem to occupy a low position in the scale of humanity …nor is there any evidence that they have advanced in any degree from their primal condition. (Official South Australian Historian, J. D. (James)Woods, 1879)[19]

 This pervasive religious and scientific heresy was not the sole province of educated or sophisticated city people but widely read and understood in remote places. Country newspapers, anxious for free copy, gladly reproduced sermons, public discussions and scientific opinion. Pastoralists, pushing their frontier further into Aboriginal land, eagerly picked up newspapers in town. Short of reading material, they avidly read them from beginning to end. The curse of Ham, the inferiority of Aboriginal people and the failure of Aboriginal people to replenish the earth became the received wisdom of both city and bush. The Aborigines had failed and must be replaced: 

This land had for ages been inhabited by the aborigines, but as they had received it, so it had continued; they had made no improvement … The descendants of Ham had not fulfilled their mission, and they must retire before the descendants of Japhet, who had entered on a great, a mighty, and a glorious mission. The squatters had well performed their part of the task … They must not be content or satisfied without trying to do more … This soil … should not be suffered to lie idle. (The Moreton Bay Courier, 1849) [20]

Taking Aboriginal land was the will of God: 

Be ‘fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it’ was God’s earliest command to man, and it conveys a divine title to the husbandman to go upon and possess the unsubdued portions of the earth … On this command is founded that law of nations which recognizes as just the civilized man appropriating to his use the wilds of the savage … He … carries out the will of Heaven. (Twofold Bay Telegraph,1860)[21] 

European explorers were making possible the fulfilment of God’s will: 

The present possessors of the soil are ignorant of its value, and therefore incapable of turning it to profit … Those who can enjoy God’s bounties and blessings are right in using their powers to enable them to do so … The expedition is helping to carry out the moral injunction of scripture, ‘Replenish the earth and subdue it’. (Inquirer, Perth, 1849)[22]

 

 Complicity in the churches

 This constant barrage of erroneous religious and scientific misinformation was very convincing—preached in churches, reinforced by science and printed in the newspapers. Aboriginal people were inferior, predestined by God to be invaded and replaced by Christian agrarian people. This very convenient set of beliefs bolstered colonialism and permitted the aggressive invasion of Aboriginal land for personal gain. It reached its terrible climax in the view that taking Aboriginal land, as a commandment of God, was so binding, so permanent, that Aboriginal people who dared to stand in the way must be killed.

The Macarthurs were a prominent colonial family. On 23 August 1842, James Macarthur spoke in the NSW Legislative Council to support the expansion of pastoral leases west of Bathurst—the invasion and occupation of more Aboriginal land. All land in NSW was deemed Crown land, the property of a King ruling by Divine Right. A veneer of legality was given to the seizure of Aboriginal land by requiring settlers to apply formally for grants.

There could be no doubt that, in taking possession of their country, we committed what to the blacks appeared a gross outrage, and a violation of their rights, but we were only acting in conformity with the divine command … to go forth and multiply—to occupy and cultivate the earth and to render it useful … The savage was, however, unable to comprehend any reasoning of this kind, or to understand the nature of our laws, and the most advisable, as well as the most merciful course of proceeding, was at once to impress him with a due sense of our strength and our determination to punish any outrage on his part.[23]

James Macarthur’s speech was frighteningly convincing.  God had commanded us to go forth, multiply and replenish the earth by cultivating it and making it more productive. It might seem to Aboriginal people that we were violating their rights, but we were merely obeying God. To resist us is defying the will of God and we must punish them accordingly.

The difficult truth we must face is that James Macarthur was a Christian man. We cannot hide behind the pretence that Aboriginal land was taken and occupied only by non-Christians. James was a committed Christian, a member of St John’s Camden (Sydney). He gave the land on which the church was built and a large contribution to the cost of construction. Church members were genuinely grieved at his death. At the Parish AGM following James’ death, the Rector, Henry Tingcombe, spoke movingly of the loss sustained by the parish and the Camden district:

James Macarthur always took an active interest in promoting the spiritual welfare of the inhabitants and was himself a regular and devout worshipper at the church, thus showing by his example, as well as precept, the reality of those great truths in which he believed.

This was followed by a formal motion proposed by church members:

That this meeting desires to record its deep sense of loss which this parish has sustained by the death of the Hon. James Macarthur, whose consistent Christian example and liberality have so largely promoted the spiritual interests of the parishioners.[24] 

We must not, dare not, try to excuse the church by suggesting that James Macarthur was not really a committed Christian, not like us. Not only does that malign him but accuses his Rector and fellow parishioners of hypocrisy. 

 Early Australian clergy were given land grants. In Tasmania, Robert Knopwood, the first chaplain, was granted the land adjacent to the church. Sydney clergy such as Anglican Thomas Hassall at Cobbity and Wesleyan William Walker at O’Connell’s Plains had large tracts of land and were assigned convicts.  Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain and magistrate, was a wealthy NSW landowner. When the crossing of the Blue Mountains opened up the occupation of Aboriginal land to the west, Samuel Marsden and his family members immediately sought rights to huge tracts of Wiradjuri land in the Bathurst region, making Marsden one of the largest landowners in the colony.

 Throughout Australia churches gratefully received their ‘glebes’, land attached to churches to be used for clergy support. Dotted around Australia the memory of glebes remains. The suburb of Glebe in Sydney was the glebe given to the first chaplain, Richard Johnson. Glebe Park in Canberra is the last remaining piece of the glebe given to St John’s Church by the local landowners. Glebe suburb in Hobart was once a church glebe in three parts, Anglican, Catholic and Presbyterian. Most colonial towns and cities retain the memory of their glebes in the name of a street or park, including Perth, Melbourne, Goulburn, Launceston, Ipswich and Newcastle. There is no evidence that clergy or churches questioned the power of the colonial governments to ‘give’ the churches Aboriginal land. There was no critique of colonialism, no prayerful study of the Scriptures to shine light on the injustice of the occupation of Aboriginal land.

The first Bishop of Melbourne, Charles Perry, seeking support for the new colonial diocese, saw his primary duty as caring for the spiritual needs of white colonists, the new occupiers of the land. In his final sermon before departing for Australia, he spoke on Christian witness, ‘The Christian’s Light Shining to God’s Glory’. True Christians, he said, regard themselves as nothing, practise the grace of self-denial, and promote the temporal and eternal happiness of their fellow creatures. But he placed a limitation on who their fellow creatures were. When his sermon was printed, Perry appended an appeal for his new Diocese of Melbourne. The colonial settlers’ needs must come first, he wrote:

No account has been taken of the 4,000 Aboriginal inhabitants … We must first make provision for the necessities of our brethren and fellow Christians.[25]

Perry’s successor, Archbishop James Moorhouse, was an outspoken advocate of colonialism as a duty ordained by God, the Creator:

God did not make the earth simply for the savage tribes to wander over. He made it to be the scene of happy homes … supported by industry. If a set of men stood in the way of another set of men doing that work, it was the order of the Divine Providence that the hinderers should be swept away.[26]

Even those who vehemently opposed the mistreatment of Aboriginal people seem never to have understood or critiqued the indisputable nexus between the policy of colonialism itself and Aboriginal suffering and death. Edward Wilson, a practising Anglican and active member of St Stephens Church, Richmond, edited the Melbourne Argus during Perry’s tenure as Archbishop. He was angered by the laughter in the newly formed Parliament of Victoria when what he called ‘the contemptible sum’ of £1,750 was set aside for Aboriginal welfare when in just a few years of the Parliament’s existence, colonists had paid the Colonial Government a total of £4.5 million for Aboriginal land and dug £35 million from the earth. Yet not even Wilson, for all his anger at the mistreatment of Aboriginal people, thought to bring the same critical faculty to bear on the act of colonisation itself: 

We do not say that the Anglo-Saxon was not justified in taking possession of this fine country, and developing its magnificent resources, as the original occupant never would have done. If even our presence here should be made the instrument in the hands of Providence for the early extermination of this people, we still say that the onward march of the white man must not be arrested. But there is too great a readiness in recognising, as ‘the hand of Providence’, that which is directly traceable to our own nefarious neglect and wickedness. In less than twenty years we have nearly swept them off the face of the earth … We have made them outcasts on their own land and are rapidly consigning them to entire annihilation.[27]

His condemnation of the abuse of Aboriginal people was furious but he did not treat colonialism with the same indignation. Wilson employed the notion of Providence, that great 19^th century code word for God’s immutable power over human destiny. Aboriginal people had failed to develop the land. The Anglo-Saxons were destined by God to occupy and develop the land. It was unquestionable. What he condemned was the harming of Aboriginal people in the name of Providence. For that, colonists would one day have to answer to God. Yet despite Wilson’s righteous anger, he did not question the act of colonisation itself. That was still Providence. That was still destiny. 

Another vehement critic of the abuse of Aboriginal people was missionary John Brown Gribble in the north of Western Australia, whose outspokenness led to his removal by the Anglican Diocese of Perth. Yet for all his passionate plea for just treatment of Aboriginal people, he did not question colonialism itself. He saw the colonising of Australia as part of the glorious British Empire. He deplored the mistreatment of Aboriginal people as ‘unBritish’. ‘We’—that is, Christian Britain—should have been treating the Aboriginal people with justice and care. Gribble was appalled:

that Australia itself, professedly the new home of liberty and light, should also have become the theatre of the dark deeds of oppression and cruelty … that a land which professes to reflect the noble institutions of Great Britain which are ... England’s glory and boast … that a land so blessed by Divine Providence should have become the nursing mother of oppression and injustice … constitutes the foulest blot that could possible rest upon the escutcheon of Australia’s fame.[28]

The wealthy northern pastoralists pressured the Diocese of Perth to dismiss Gribble, withdrawing financial support for the new Cathedral. Construction halted and so Gribble was terminated. This shameful episode in Australian Church history is forever built into the fabric of St George’s Cathedral, Perth. When construction resumed, the new bricks were a different colour, still visible today beginning about 12 bricks above the door. 

Yet even Gribble, for all his courage and passionate denunciation of the mistreatment of Aboriginal people, did not finally question the actual right of the British to occupy the land.  He believed that the settlers were not behaving as British Christian people should. The British were a Christian people who should lead godly lives. They should treat Aboriginal people with love, kindness and respect. But it was still Christian British destiny to be here and to utilise the land.

 

Truth-telling

 Likening the colonisation of Australia to the conquest of Canaan was wrong. At best it was reading the Old Testament as if the New did not exist, as if in Christ there are still divisions of race and colour. At worst it was knowingly misinterpreting Scripture for our own ends. Rather than questioning the British colonisation of Aboriginal lands, the churches publicly justified the dispossession of the Indigenous inhabitants, supporting this heresy by an abuse of Scripture. This wrong theology was promoted by Bible scholars and proclaimed from the pulpit. This uncomfortable truth needs to be recognised and confessed.

The Australian Church has lagged far behind churches in other post-colonial parts of the world in recognising its past failure to challenge the oppression of black people and to renounce its past misuse of Scripture in endorsing racism. The colonisation of Australia may have taken place after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, but the Australian Churches have not yet faced the fact that they still lent theological support to the oppression and dispossession of Aboriginal People. 

Churches throughout the world have confessed their racist past and named the treatment of black people as sin. Strong apologies have been made in America, South Africa and the UK by Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and other churches: 

We acknowledge the wrongs that we, the Presbyterian Church … were complicit in perpetuating. This was done through the interpretation of selected Scriptures and    rationalization to justify human bondage and perpetuate white supremacy and privilege. We apologize for this transgression.[29]

The Episcopal Church expresses profound regret that the Church lent the institution of slavery its support and justification based on Scripture …  After slavery was formally abolished, the church continued for at least a century to support de jure and de facto segregation and discrimination. [30]

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) apologizes to people of African descent for its historical complicity in slavery and its enduring legacy of racism … We lament the white church’s failure to work for the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of racism in this church.[31] 

Significantly, these churches confessed not only the sin of slavery but the sin of continuing acceptance of racial discrimination. Here in Australia, the same kinds of segregation and discrimination confessed by these churches were enshrined in law until at least 1975. This was legalised racism. Indigenous Australians were not even citizens of Australia until 1967 and could not vote. At various times, Aboriginal people in different parts of Australia were forbidden to marry white people, banned from swimming pools and cinemas, expelled from public schools and required to have passes to enter towns. The voice of the churches condemning racial segregation and discrimination was just as silent here as in America. 

Today, we rightly understand that the invasion and occupation of indigenous lands throughout the world, in Africa, the Americas and Australia, was the direct consequence of the aggressive territorial policies of European governments, expanding their Empires by assuming their right to take and inhabit the lands of other peoples without consent, without negotiation, without compensation.  In Australia this was carried out by the British Empire. 

As Christian Australians today, it is important that the Church acknowledges its failure to question the convenient notion that the British colonisation of Australia was a Christian imperative. It is true that from time to time some Church leaders of all denominations spoke out strongly against the killing of Aboriginal people. The sad truth, however, is that no-one brought the same prophetic Christian voice, based on correct reading of Scripture, to bear on the injustice of the aggressive British occupation of Aboriginal land. Instead, they believed that they, the British people, had a God-given right, even God’s unbreakable command, to extend the Empire. When the killing years were mostly over, Churches still quietly accepted the laws which discriminated against Indigenous Australians. They believed a long-accepted but false reading of Scripture which justified the oppression of black peoples everywhere and the unhindered occupation of their lands. 

This kind of thinking was wrong. The Church’s error for centuries, it was a kind of spiritual blindness. Nowhere does Scripture justify the unnegotiated occupation and plunder of Aboriginal land. Colonisation was not the consequence of the curse of Ham. Colonisation was not the destiny of the descendants of Japheth. Colonisation was not obedience to God’s command to replenish the earth. Colonisation was not Providence. Colonisation was not the immutable will of God. Colonisation was not the evangelisation of the world. 

The aggressive takeover of Aboriginal land was sin.  The church could only justify the covetous, uninhibited colonisation which took place in Australia in the takeover of Aboriginal land by endorsing a mistaken understanding of the Bible, by sometimes consciously distorting the Word of God. This we must understand, this we must acknowledge, and this we must confess. The Church was (whether consciously or not) blind to its own error. Blind for far too long.

We, the Church, are the Body of Christ on Earth. Jesus died to redeem the world, to open the pathway to God for all people irrespective of race. The colonial church in Australia failed to preach, and failed to live out, the equality of all humankind in the sight of God. The church lent a veneer of false biblical justification to the colonial process, to the takeover of Aboriginal land, to the myth that Aboriginal resistance was opposition to God’s will for this land. This error we must understand. This we must confess. This we must acknowledge.

Then, and only then, we can engage in truth-telling                                    

 

Rev Dr John Harris is an author, linguist and Bible translator. Now in active retirement, his last position was Director of the Translation and Text Division of the Bible Society.

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