Terence Keel is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the African American studies department and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. He has investigated how Christian precepts have shaped racial and scientific attitudes into the 21st century.
Keel: From the 1940s, in the wake of the anti-Jewish belief that was behind the Nazi Holocaust, there was a mounting consensus that you could not divide people by stable genetic traits. UNESCO declared this in the early 1950s. But in the 2000s, there was a doubling back down [on the idea] that “race” is genetic. That was more about faith than rationality.
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UCLA: Some might think science and faith have been at loggerheads since the Enlightenment. But you don’t buy that?
Keel: I am not saying that modern scientists are somehow “Christian” by faith or conviction, or that they are not. But I argue that scientists have appropriated key elements from Christian intellectual history — a European way of looking at the world — in their effort to construct theories about human variation and race. And they still use [the Christian tradition] to frame their thinking today — sometimes at the expense of best scientific thinking.
