Dale Partridge: White Supremacy Wearing a Clerical Collar

Pastor Dale Partridge at King's Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, is preaching that God assigned Black people to "a civilizational station of subordination and dependence" and calling for "a return to European Christian colonization of African nations." He's using the "Curse of Ham" — a doctrine invented to justify slavery — to baptize white supremacy in biblical language. This is what happens when an institution weaponizes Scripture to protect the power of the people running that institution. This is The Pattern that has poisoned Christianity for centuries.

When Institutions Weaponize Scripture to Justify Oppression

Surface story: A pastor preaches that God divinely assigned Black people to subordination under white rule. He calls for colonizing Africa. He uses a discredited biblical doctrine to justify white supremacy.

Institutional pattern: The church takes a text, distorts it to serve the power of those running the institution, then calls that distortion "biblical truth." Mainstream biblical scholarship rejects Partridge's reading — the Genesis text curses Canaan alone and says nothing about skin color or Africa. But Partridge doesn't care about what Scripture actually says. He cares about what it can be manipulated to justify. This machinery has circulated in white churches for centuries. Sometimes explicitly, like Partridge. Sometimes implicitly, coded in language about "biblical order" and "traditional leadership." But the message is the same: white leadership is God's design. Black equality is a problem. Colonialism was a blessing.

Why it matters to you: The institution using Scripture to justify hierarchy operates in every institution with power — churches, corporations, families, governments. When an institution claims moral authority, it becomes more dangerous, not less. It can justify anything — slavery, segregation, colonialism, subordination — by calling it "God's will." Understanding this pattern in the church helps you recognize it everywhere power hides behind righteousness.

1. How does an institution use Scripture to justify what it wants to do anyway?
2. What's the difference between what the Bible actually says and what institutions claim it says?
3. If you were taught a "biblical" justification for hierarchy or subordination, how would you know it was distorted?
4. What does it mean to reclaim Scripture from the hands of people who've weaponized it?
5. How do you leave an institution that claims to speak for God?
6. Can you follow Jesus without following the institution's interpretation of Jesus?
7. What would a Gospel that actually proclaims justice and equality look like to you?

Every person who has left institutional Christianity after discovering how Scripture was weaponized describes the same experience: the institution knew what it was doing. It wasn't innocent misreading. It was deliberate distortion to maintain power.

Transformation Practice

Four pathways forward. Which one calls to you?