Religious movements and churches that originated in the nineteenth or early twentieth century often bore traces of that era's obsession with race. The science of race, after all, seemed, like these new religious formations, to offer new insights into human nature, history and society, of which previous centuries had been unaware. This is not to suggest that there is something unambiguously racist about the religious groupings discussed in this chapter; indeed some of them articulate explicitly anti-racist doctrines. The objective here is not to denigrate organisations ‘tainted’ with racialist assumptions, but to explore racial-theological connections in the milieu from which they emerged. Religious movements arising in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries bore the imprint, sometimes perhaps unconsciously, of that era's peculiar concerns and fascinations, among which racialism ranked prominently. Moreover, it should also be remembered that racialism was at that time as often as not a supposedly neutral or disinterested line of analysis in history and the human sciences, and it did not always take the form of an overt prejudice. During the nineteenth century the application of ethnology and philology to the truths of scripture seemed likely to yield dividends for modern and sophisticated biblical interpreters. The ‘science’ of biblical criticism was itself inflected with contemporary racialist assumptions. Christians recognised that, although the truths of Christianity were timeless, the human understanding of scripture belonged to the realm of history and might be enhanced with the latest aids which the progress of knowledge had made available, the science of race included.