The worldwide campaign Black Lives Matter seduces society in the fi ght against racism and violence against the black population. It is also an opportunity to revisit the slave past of Brazilian society and a spread of racial theories that affirmed the inferiority of all non-whites in relation to whites. In the past, slavery was also part of the expanding Iberian and Catholic colonial Christianity. The Bible and theology played a very important role in slave culture, especially in legitimizing black slavery through the account of the Curse of Ham (Gen. 9:18-29). This account is later reframed in the painting A Redenção de Cam (1895), by the painter Modesto Brocos, an iconographic expression of racial theories that aimed at the progressive whitening of the Brazilian population through miscegenation. Society changed, as did Catholic Christianity, where an evolution of doctrine took place. The marks of slavery and racial discrimination still persist, in a way, but there are new forces at work in favor of full black citizenship, including in Christian confessions.