Arizona Pastor Dale Partridge Says God Assigned Black People To 'Subordination' And Calls For Recolonising Africa

Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge is drawing fresh condemnation after weeks of sermons claiming God assigned Black people to 'a civilizational station of subordination and dependence' and urging a return of European colonisation in Africa.

The remarks were surfaced on 8 July 2026 by Right Wing Watch, the monitoring project of People For the American Way, which tracks the Arizona preacher's output. They cap a sermon series at his Prescott church built on the Curse of Ham, a discredited reading of Genesis that was used for centuries to justify the enslavement of Africans.

Partridge, a former Silicon Valley area entrepreneur turned Reformed pastor with a large online following, has spent the past year courting controversy over race, women's suffrage and interracial marriage.

A Sermon Series That Revives The Curse Of Ham

Since early June, Partridge has been preaching through Genesis 9, the passage in which Noah curses Canaan after his son Ham sees him drunk and naked in his tent. The racialised theory built on that passage holds that Black people were perpetually cursed to serve those descended from Ham's brothers.

The description of one instalment on his own sermon podcast says the passage reveals God's design of distinctions among what he calls the 'three macro-races of humanity' descended from Noah's sons, and frames later sermons as testing whether Noah's words were fulfilled in history.

Partridge claims 'the African peoples' and some people from India are the modern descendants of Ham. He teaches that they have been divinely assigned to be ruled over by, and dependent upon, the supposed descendants of Ham's brothers Shem and Japheth, whom he identifies as White people, Europeans, Asians, Jews, and Arabs

Partridge has defended the doctrine publicly, posting excerpts from Reformation-era commentaries by Martin Luther, John Calvin and Matthew Henry on his X account to argue that the curse extended to Ham's entire lineage. Mainstream biblical scholarship rejects that racialised reading, noting that the Genesis text curses Canaan alone and says nothing about skin colour or Africa.

From Genesis Genealogy To A Case For Recolonising Africa

The sermons move from ancestry to policy. Because 'God has sovereignly assigned different stations and trajectories to different peoples,' Partridge argues it is proper for African nations to be recolonised by 'white Christians.'

He told his congregation that sustained improvement in African infant mortality, disease, and violence has only ever occurred 'under Japhethite supervision,' and pointed to an unnamed colonial-era territory he claimed white Christians turned into a first-world nation within a century.

Historians of colonialism broadly document the opposite record across the continent, including forced labour regimes, resource extraction, famine and the violent suppression of independence movements.

Partridge delivers the series from King's Way, his church in Prescott, Arizona, and distributes it through Relearn.org, the ministry platform he heads. He also hosts a weekly programme on a network run by fellow Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, according to Right Wing Watch, placing him within a cluster of preachers who openly advocate an explicitly theocratic politics.

A Pulpit With A History Of Incendiary Claims

The colonisation sermons extend a pattern. In November 2025, Partridge was widely mocked after claiming women's votes were responsible for 'moral atrocities' and suggesting husbands should effectively cast the household ballot. In January 2026, The Roys Report covered his assertion that women lack the emotional capacity to vote.

That same month, he declared interracial marriage 'not ideal,' remarks that Premier Christian News reported drew a backlash over perceived hypocrisy given his own marriage to a Mexican American woman. The New York Times has previously noted his following was built on 'incendiary commentary,' and Partridge styles himself an 'aspiring general in the culture war.'

The 41-year-old came to ministry from business rather than the seminary track. He founded the charity apparel firm Sevenly and wrote bestselling entrepreneurship books before earning a graduate certificate in theology in Portland, Oregon, and launching his church, his ministry platform, and his own Reformation Seminary.

The Curse of Ham occupies a singular place in the history of American racism. Slaveholders and segregationist preachers invoked it for generations as divine sanction for chattel slavery and later for Jim Crow, and major denominations spent the late twentieth century formally repudiating it. The Southern Baptist Convention, founded in 1845 in defence of slaveholding missionaries, apologised in 1995 for its role in defending slavery with Scripture, and modern scholars across the theological spectrum treat the racial reading as an invention layered onto the text centuries after it was written.

Partridge's sermons revive a doctrine that much of modern Christian scholarship and many denominations have repudiated. His sermons remain publicly available on his church's podcast and YouTube channels, and neither Partridge nor King's Way had publicly responded to the Right Wing Watch report at the time of writing.