by Jim Phillips

Recently The New York Times and other media reported that Pope Francis has formally rejected the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery.” What the Pope’s statement actually said was: “The Catholic Church repudiates those ideas that do not recognize the human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what is known as the Doctrine of Discovery.”

This may seem like a small item of a past history, and its rejection as too little too late. But look deeper, and it takes on much larger significance for the past and especially the present, inasmuch as the ideology of “discovery” has been the underpinning and rationale of empire, colonial conquest, and Christian nationalism to the present day. In different forms, the Doctrine of Discovery justified more than five centuries of invasion, murder, slavery, apartheid, racism, and widespread misery among people all over the world.

The Doctrine of Discovery declared that Christian monarchs have the God-given right to claim the lands and labor of non-Christian peoples as part of the divinely mandated spreading of the Christian faith. This was a legal doctrine circulating among European monarchs at the time when Europe was beginning to explore other areas of the world.

The Doctrine had various manifestations, including the idea that it was acceptable to conquer and claim Indigenous land and labor if the conquest were for the purpose of Christianizing Indigenous peoples. It also had its critics, legal and theological, who held that Indigenous peoples had the God-given right to their own lands and resources, and these could not legally or morally be claimed and expropriated by foreign rulers; and that any form of enslavement of Indigenous peoples was morally and legally wrong.

Even if some monarchs accepted this criticism, European explorers and colonists routinely ignored it, using the discovery doctrine to justified the conquest and domination of millions of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, thereby creating enormous misery. In the prophecies of the Popol Vuh, written after the violent Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Mayan people in the 1500s, the Mayan author laments:

It was only because of the mad time, the mad priests, that sadness came among us, that Christianity came among us; for the great Christians came here with the true God; but that was the beginning of our distress, the beginning of…being of being stripped of everything, the beginning of slavery for debts…the beginning of the outrages, the beginning of the suffering.

-Popol Vuh

That suffering continued for centuries in various forms. When Pope John Paul II visited Peru, he received a letter from a group of Indigenous communities. The letter contained this passage: “John Paul II, we Andean and American Indians have decided to take advantage of your visit to return to you your Bible, since in five centuries it has not given us love, peace, or justice.” Even in recent decades, some religious leaders continued to teach a related idea, that the soul is more important than the body. Indigenous bodies could be enslave, disciplined, made to suffer in order to save Indigenous souls—a malicious idea that tried to divinely justify the predations of tyrants and imperialists.

The Doctrine’s pernicious influence did not stop there. It was reshaped as a tool of conquest in all sorts of ways. In Africa, European nations expropriated land and enslaved Africans, justifying this as the “white man’s burden”—to civilize the Africans by enforcing Christianity and, more important, forcing them to labor for their European conquerors. The book, King Leopold’s Mines, presents and especially stark description of the misery and chaos caused to the peoples of the so-called Belgian Congo. To this day, the western world continues to depict Africa as a continent in need of help and development, a modern version of the white man’s burden. No mention of how white Christian nations ravaged that continent for more than two centuries.

In North America, the ideology of Manifest Destiny that justified the removal of tribal peoples from much of the continent in the face of advancing Christian settlers of the young United States was based on the same mindset of white Christian superiority and privilege. This idea also justified the enslavement of millions of Black people and their social segregation from “civilized” society. By the early 1900s, the same ideology was embodied in organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. In Coos Bay, Oregon, in the early 1920s, a Klan speaker declared, “This is a white man’s, Protestant, and Gentile country and they are going to run it.” The primary targets of the Klan in Oregon at that time were Catholics. One can see even here the attempt to narrow the definition of “Christian” to one set of beliefs and values, rejecting any others.

The concepts of Christian, civilized, white, male (patriarchy),and Gentile were fused together with national identity. Those who met all these criteria were the true citizens of the nation, the true Americans. Thus, the Know Nothings of the 1840s opposed and persecuted immigrants in the U.S., and the disenfranchisement of people of color from claiming citizenship, especially if they did not adhere to the appropriate brand of Christianity. Only a certain type of white Christian Gentile could be a true citizen. Grudgingly, citizenship was conceded to white women after they fought long and hard for it. But even then, patriarchy ruled.

Today we see the resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States. Unfortunately, its current manifestation claims the right to impose a particular set of “Christian” beliefs and values on the nation. This Christian nationalism embraces a set of values that reject a woman’s control over her own body, the right to express one’s sexuality as LGBTQ or trans; and it mandates the censorship of art and books that are thought to teach” immoral” ideas. (This book banning is akin to the now-abandoned Index of Forbidden Books imposed by Popes in the 1800s.) Today’s Christian nationalism tends to see natural allies in white supremacist and other far right groups, often without explicitly embracing such groups.

The fusion of religion and nationalism corrupts both religion and nationalism, with dire results. This is why Christian nationalism is a danger to both faith and secularism, and to a diverse and inclusive America. Fundamentally the same ideology that tried to justify the subjugation and enslavement of other lands is at work in the United States. What will we do about that?