This dissertation hermeneutically reconstructs insights from critical race theory and the nineteenth-century German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher to propose a novel theological diagnosis of antiblack racism’s tenacity in American life. It argues that Schleiermacher’s recognizably Pauline interpretation of recalcitrant affections as supra-personal, apocalyptic powers that exceed and permeate the agents caught within their grip suggests new ways to ameliorate longstanding debates in scholarship on racism and illumines the basic structures of moral agency that make social evils like racism so intransigent. Both contributions hinge on the claim that, in addition to the social-structural and embodied-psychological mechanisms that make racial inequality so resistant to moral suasion and political subversion, racialized societies are also marked by affective dynamics that are neither personal attitudes nor impersonal features of an agent’s environment, and, for that reason, they tend to elude moral-philosophical and social-scientific analyses. Rather, these “atmospherics of race” name more ambiguous powers that ineluctably influence, even if they never determine, agents in race-salient situations by coordinating their immediate affective and perceptual responses to one another and by aligning those responses with a racial hierarchy of personhood. This theory of racial atmospherics helps to explain how even apparently good and strong-willed agents can routinely find themselves committing the very racial evils they abhor without thereby reducing agents to mere functionaries of social systems or amalgamations of embodied-psychological processes. The more provocative claim is that these atmospheric powers bear a distinctly religious valence and that the condition of agents who live and act under their sway is most coherently understood by invoking the theological symbols of sin, soul death, the conscience, and grace.