Adam’s generations: Theology and race in English Protestant thought

This essay investigates how race operated in the English genealogical imagination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through a study of reformed thinking on original sin and salvation, it examines the link between Protestant theology and ideas of lineage and teases out the ambivalences and tensions intrinsic to this nexus between c. 1560 and 1660. It explores the linguistic and conceptual traces of race in a series of intersecting semantic and cultural fields and and considers how categories of identity and difference, belonging and affinity, inclusion and exclusion, were constructed in the context of a Reformation which inadvertently entrenched religious diversity. The twin problems of whether iniquity and faith were transmitted down the generations illuminate how reformed Protestants reconciled the doctrine of predestination with ideas about nature, nurture and heredity. They demonstrate some of the ways in which theology simultaneously stimulated and inhibited racial thinking.