The Cross and the Whip: Christianity as an Engine of Racialization and Global Oppression
Christianity, though rooted in the radical teachings of a persecuted brown-skinned Jewish Palestinian prophet under Roman occupation, has historically mutated into a global apparatus of white supremacist hegemony, colonial domination, and capitalist violence. Far from merely a set of spiritual doctrines, Christianity - especially in its European and North American incarnations - has functioned as a civilizational matrix for systems of racialization, passive-aggressive moral justification of domination, enslavement, and white European imperial exploitation.
The Invention of the White Christ
At the heart of the Christian imperial project lies a profound act of racial fabrication: the whitening of Christ. The transformation of Jesus of Nazareth into a blond-haired, blue-eyed icon was no mere artistic license. It was the theological basis for sanctifying whiteness itself. This image allowed European Christians to claim divine legitimacy in defining themselves as the ‘chosen race’, whose mission was to civilize the rest of humanity. This racialized Christ became the emblem of empire and expansion, from the Crusades to the Conquistadors, from the Puritans to the present.
The Doctrine of the Unique Incarnation: Theology as Spiritual Imperialism
At the metaphysical core of Christianity lies its most absolutist claim: that Jesus of Nazareth is the only incarnation of God, the singular divine entry into history, and the sole mediator between humanity and salvation. This is not a benign theological opinion. It is a totalizing metaphysical axiom that has functioned for centuries as the engine of spiritual imperialism. The doctrine of the unique incarnation did not merely proclaim Christ - it annihilated all other sacred possibilities.
By asserting that God became flesh once and only once, in a particular man, at a particular place, within a particular ethnic and linguistic framework, Christianity set the terms for a spiritual colonization of the entire world. Every other revelation, tradition, or embodiment of the divine - whether found in African ancestral worship, Indigenous cosmologies, Vedic insight, or Islamic prophecy - was now delegitimized, reduced to ‘error’, ‘paganism’, or ‘preparation’ for the supposedly final truth of Christ.
This monopolization of the divine incarnate served as the theological basis for the global missionary enterprise. The uniqueness of Christ’s incarnation justified the destruction of temples, the burning of sacred texts, the forced baptisms of entire peoples, and the erasure of indigenous epistemologies and ways of life. The Christian missionary did not arrive merely to ‘preach good news’ - he arrived to declare spiritual war: to inform the world that their gods were false, their ancestors damned, and their cosmologies nullified by the birth of a Galilean man claiming to be God Himself in the flesh.
The incarnation became the metaphysical counterpart to the flag and the sword. Christian empires - from Byzantium to Britain - insisted not merely on the political subjugation of peoples but on their spiritual reprogramming. The native soul had to be broken, re-scripted, and re-formed in the image of the white Christ. In this, the incarnation was not a symbol of love but a philosophical totalitarianism: the divine as a single, Europeanized person to whom the whole earth must bow - or be damned.
Today even within much of ecumenical and liberal theologies, the incarnation continues to assert itself as the immovable center. Interfaith dialogue is tolerated only to the extent that it bends toward Christological supremacy. Pluralism becomes patronizing when filtered through the unspoken assumption that no other tradition actually reaches God - except through the mediation of this one, historical man, whose institutional legacy is drenched in blood from the north to the south poles.
The result is a metaphysics of nihilistic annihilation disguised as compassion. A divine dictatorship masked as salvation. Thus the doctrine of the unique incarnation is not a spiritual truth - it is a colonial axiom weaponized as theology. Literally, there is no way to accommodate this kind of spiritual totalitarianism. Instead it must be rejected and resisted, never mind that from the Bayān’s perspective Christianity and its book are abrogated and so contain no ‘grace’.
Christianity and the Architecture of Slavery
Now, European Christianity provided the ideological scaffolding for the transatlantic slave trade. Popes such as Nicholas V issued bulls (e.g., Dum Diversas, 1452) that authorized the perpetual enslavement of non-Christians. Portuguese and Spanish empires, justified by the Doctrine of Discovery and its Christian legal theology, launched genocidal campaigns against Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa. Enslavement was seen not only as an economic necessity but as a spiritual good, under the perverse claim that enslaving ‘heathens’ allowed their souls to be saved through baptism.
Slaveholders in the Americas cited Christian scripture - especially the Pauline epistles - to justify the ownership of black bodies. Passages like ‘Slaves, obey your masters’ (Ephesians 6:5-9) were weaponized to enforce obedience, while the plantation chapel became a grotesque altar to white supremacy dressed in Christian vestments. The Church in both its Catholic and Protestant forms was complicit, often directly invested in slave economies and theologies of racial inferiority.
Passive-Aggression as Theology
Unlike more overtly militaristic systems of domination, Christianity perfected a subtler tool: moral passive-aggression. In Christian imperial rhetoric, violence is sanctified by love, conquest is recast as mission, and genocide is softened as salvation. The victims of Christian empires were told they were being ‘loved’ into submission, and that their subjugation was a path to redemption. This moral doublespeak remains the hallmark of Christianized neoliberalism, where structural violence is baptized in the language of virtue.
The most sinister violence has often come cloaked in Christian piety - whether through missionary schools that erased Indigenous languages and identities, or colonial administrators who quoted the Sermon on the Mount while administering floggings. The Christianity of empire cries peace while waging war, forgives its own sins while condemning others’, and turns the other cheek only when it is holding the whip.
Christianity and the Birth of Capitalist Modernity
The Protestant Reformation, particularly through Calvinism, birthed a form of religiosity that seamlessly merged with the spirit of capitalism. As Max Weber noted in his magisterial study, the Protestant ethic promoted a vision of hard work, thrift, and divine election that justified inequality as the will of God. The rise of industrial capitalism in Europe went hand in hand with a Christian worldview that sanctified private property, economic competition, and colonial extraction.
Christianity’s alignment with property, patriarchy, and profit reached its apex in the Anglo-American empires. Churches blessed railroads built over stolen land, banks that funded apartheid, and prisons filled with racialized bodies all the way into the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka during WWII. To this day, Christian dominionism in the US buttresses fossil fuel industries, opposes labor movements, and undermines reproductive justice - all in the name of divine order.
A Global System of Oppression
Christianity’s global reach was never just spiritual - it was strategic. Wherever Christian missionaries went, military and corporate power followed. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, missions softened populations for colonial conquest, introducing Eurocentric epistemologies while dismantling native cosmologies. Conversion was often a precursor to land theft, labor exploitation, and cultural erasure.
In settler-colonial states such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, Christianity ran boarding schools that kidnapped Indigenous children to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’. Generations were brutalized under the Christian mandate to ‘cleanse’ the savage. These systems were not aberrations but expressions of Christianity’s structural function in a racial-capitalist world system.
Christianity and Patriarchal Violence: A Feminist Indictment
Despite modern liberal attempts to sanitize Christianity as a benign cultural force, its historical record reveals it as one of the most systematically violent patriarchal institutions in human history. Feminist engagement with Christianity must confront the fact that, at its core, the faith has functioned as a theological fortress of misogyny, repression, racial and gendered violence - one far more insidious and institutionalized than what is often ascribed to Islam in orientalist discourse.
From the earliest Church Fathers onward, Christian theology has demonized the feminine. Tertullian called women ‘the devil’s gateway’. Augustine blamed Eve for the fall of man. Aquinas regarded women as defective males. The Virgin Mary was not uplifted as a woman with agency but as an abstracted vessel of purity whose model was used to police the bodies and sexualities of all women thereafter. Womanhood in Christianity was reduced to either the Virgin or the Whore - no room for autonomy, intellect, or spiritual authority.
Unlike early Islam, which recognized women like Khadīja (ع) and ʿAʾisha as powerful economic and political actors, and included provisions for inheritance, divorce, and participation in public life; Christianity buried its women under centuries of clerical gatekeeping. The medieval Church orchestrated the genocidal witch hunts, murdering hundreds of thousands of women under accusations of sorcery and ‘sexual deviance’. These witch trials were not fringe events but expressions of a theology obsessed with controlling the unruly female body. Today, these witch-hunters have returned in the form of the Jordan Petersons and the entire rightwing manosphere that openly seeks to recruit for the Church.
That aside, Christian marriage doctrine, rooted in Pauline writings, positioned women as eternally subordinate: ‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord’ (Ephesians 5:22). Domestic violence, marital rape, and the economic disenfranchisement of women were long sanctioned by Church teachings. Even today, conservative Christian denominations continue to deny women full participation in ecclesiastical life - prohibiting ordination, leadership, or even autonomous theological thought.
Moreover, Christianity’s alliance with colonialism and capitalism has imposed its patriarchal norms onto non-European societies through mission schools, family law reforms, and cultural assimilation programs. Indigenous matriarchies were dismantled, African cosmologies degraded, and feminist movements in the Global South undermined - all under the banner of the Christian ‘civilizing mission’.
Feminists who critique Islam while remaining silent on the violent patriarchies of Christianity are not liberating women - they are upholding empire. If feminism means the liberation of all genders from structural subjugation, then it must see Christianity not as a neutral terrain for reform, but as a foundational engine of gendered domination. Far from being a natural ally to feminism, Christianity - especially in its historical and institutional iterations - has been its most entrenched enemy so far.
The Cross as Colonial Weapon
To indict Christianity is not to deny the beauty of spiritual resistance that sometimes emerged within or in spite of it - whether in the Liberation Theology of Latin America, the faith of Nat Turner, or the subversive readings of Black and Indigenous Christians. But these radical interpretations are precisely deviations from the hegemonic norm of institutional Christianity.
The historical reality of Christianity is not one of peace but of war, exploitation and domination; not of love but of control; not of humility but of supremacy. As a religious system enmeshed with empire, Christianity has been less a path to heaven than a charter for hell on earth. It is time to reckon with the cross not as a symbol of salvation - but as the imperial banner under which the world was racialized, enslaved, and commodified. We say this because to us the Christ of Christianity has acted since the early medieval period as none other than the Antichrist himself. Thus, the Jesus of the Church does not save; He binds to hell on earth!
