Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 Book

In many ways, this monograph is a terrible book even though it contains a great deal of useful information. Teasing out that information is damnably difficult,not least because Kidd does not present a properly organized narrative. Furthermore, he tries to bring far too much under the rubric of Protestantism--so wide an umbrella as to render the term useless. Sorry, Nation of Islam may have been influenced by American Protestantism, but it is manifestly NOT Protestantism. There are also points at which he conflates Protestantism with all of Christianity, which doesn't work either. He is correct in his assessment that Protestantism with its insistence on sola scripture, sola fidism, and priesthood of all believers ties itself up in knots over the issue of race (as defined by skin color); he is also correct that race is, from a biological standpoint, utter nonsense. What he tries and fails to do is chart a course of how we get from the beginnings of Protestantism to the current crop of right-wing racist & racialist nut jobs (without, of course, defining racist and racialist). And here's the worst part--his argument is so clearly teleological as to drive a reader insane. Nothing is inevitable, and nothing is a linear progression when discussing human history, nature, arrogance, and/or delusion.