Christian Supremacy

Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism

By: Magda Teter

Narrated by: Erica Stevens Abbitt

This audiobook narrated by Erica Stevens Abbitt presents a panoramic cultural and legal history that traces the roots of antisemitism and racism to early Christian theology

Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians expressed pervasive anxiety about Jews as equal members of society, and, with European expansion in the early modern period, that anxiety extended to people of color. This troubling legacy still haunts us today. Christian Supremacy demonstrates how theological and legal frameworks created by the church centuries ago laid the seeds of antisemitism and anti-Black racism and reveals why Christian identity lies at the heart of the world’s violent white supremacy movements.

In a powerful historical narrative spanning nearly two millennia, Magda Teter describes how Christian theology of late antiquity cast Jews as “children born to slavery,” and how the supposed theological inferiority of Jews became inscribed into law, creating tangible structures that reinforced a sense of Christian domination and superiority. With the dawn of European colonialism, a distinct brand of European Christian supremacy found expression in the legally sanctioned enslavement and exploitation of people of color, later taking the form of white Christian supremacy in the New World.

Drawing on a wealth of primary evidence ranging from the theological and legal to the philosophical and artistic, Christian Supremacy is a profound reckoning with history that traces the roots of the modern rejection of Jewish and Black equality to an enduring Christian heritage of exclusion, intolerance, and persecution.

©2023 Magda Teter (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“Christian Supremacy adds depth and nuance to today’s very important public debates about the origins and nature of racism and antisemitism and, most importantly, shows how the two have been linked over time. Teter looks into the deep roots of these two forms of hatred and locates them within the history of Christian teachings and white domination, providing a useful framework for understanding the struggle against these two different forms of hate as a common struggle. This is a valuable book for a public in real need of new tools for understanding some of our era’s most challenging structural problems.”—Lisa Moses Leff, author of The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust

“Christian Supremacy is a provocative piece of scholarship that uncovers the misunderstood (and/or generally ignored) relationship between anti-Black racism and antisemitism. Moving seamlessly between biblical exegesis, legal history, and the twin histories of race and colonization, Teter has managed to capture the essence of two separate yet very much interrelated practices of dehumanization.”—Andrew S. Curran, coeditor of Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

Excellent on historical theological issues only

Book gives excellent review of long history of Christian Theological Rationales for supremacy views and is worth hearing for that alone. However, author has various biases preventing the recognition that these views are not limited to whites or to any specific political group. There is also little said about the means by which the supremest views are transmitted in current times, even amongst what appear to be secularized Individuals.