The Racial Contract

Mills makes references to premodern European Christian thought to illustrate how white supremacist ideology, especially regarding morality and cognition, has antecedents in Christian ideology. It should be noted, however, that the outlook is a distinctly Western phenomenon, and the relationship between Christianity and white supremacy is not an indictment of Christianity as a whole. In the Western religious and philosophical tradition, the crucial distinction between persons and subpersons, and therefore eligibility for political membership, is initially a distinction between Christians and so-called heathens, or stated another way, between Europeans and non-Europeans. For example, in Thesis 4, Mills discusses European cartography and how Europeans mapped the world according to religious belief. He explains that the mappa mundi, a European medieval map of the world, was organized “around the Christian cross” (46), so that the world was partitioned by Christian and non-Christian territories. 

The distinction, of course, entails mutually interdependent moral and cognitive dimensions, in which the non-European territories are characterized as having a “blindness to Christian light” (46). While the Enlightenment era ushered in increasingly secularized views of society and politics, the influence of Western Christianity on Enlightenment-era philosophy is not simply eradicated in one fell swoop, but rather is translated into secular terms for state politics and the establishment of the modern civil polity.