Racialised religion has not only been a white phenomenon. Many of the features of white theology over the past two centuries have been replicated by black theologians. Not only have black theologians participated, naturally enough, in the defence of monogenist orthodoxy against polygenist heresies whose logical tendencies appeared to be racialist; in addition, they have appropriated some of the less attractive elements of nineteenth-century racialism in the (otherwise perfectly reasonable) defence of the black race against white slurs. The predicament of black Americans in particular was an awkward one. Whether enslaved or formally subordinate or informally marginalised, blacks realised that they were not recognised as the equal of white Americans within a nominally Christian society. Why did white Americans ignore the teachings of the gospel? Why did the unequivocal message of Acts 17:26 – ‘And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth’ – not resonate with a Bible-reading people? Understandably, black Chrsitians responded in divergent ways to this dilemma. Whereas one stream of black culture – the tradition associated with the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jnr – emphasised the universalist message of the gospel and black equality and kinship with whites, another current reflected black disenchantment with the hypocrisy of white Christianity and instead promoted separatism and an ethnocentric reading of scripture which highlighted the special role of the black race within the unfolding drama of sacred history.