“You cannot discover lands already inhabited.” – Mark Charles
The year was 1452. Pope Nicholas V passed a papal bull that laid the groundwork for the Doctrine of Discovery. This papal bull, called Dum Diversas, gave the Portuguese King Alfonso V the power to reduce pagans and Muslims to a state of perpetual slavery. Soon after, Portugal began engaging in the slave trade of West Africans. Two years later, the Romanus Pontifex papal bull was written which gave Catholic nations hegemonic superiority to discover non-Christianized lands for God. As declared by the church, King Alfonso V had the authority to:
Invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit – by having secured the said faculty, the said King Alfonso, or, by his authority, the aforesaid infante, justly and lawfully has acquired and possessed, and doth possess, these islands, lands, harbors, and seas, and they do of right belong and pertain to the said King Alfonso and his successors.
https://doctrineofdiscovery.org/dum-diversas/
Later in 1493, Pope Alexander VI wrote up the Inter Caetera papal bull which was the final foundational piece of the Doctrine of Discovery. This bull states: “Let no one, therefore, infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God.” (Inter Caetera) This bull was also conveniently created one year after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. It was largely an effort to validate the missional work of Columbus and his crew. These three papal bulls provided the basic framework of the Doctrine of Discovery, which gave Europeans theological backing to advance themselves over non-Europeans. The European “discoverers” were now backed by both church and state to claim ownership over the land, while the Indigenous Peoples who already inhabited the land were seen as a threat and unwelcome.
The ensuing colonization was inevitable. Christopher Columbus was officially coined the “discoverer” of the new world, the Americas. Of course, Turtle Island (as it was originally called) had already been inhabited for 20,000+ years by Indigenous Peoples. In order to “purify” the land, European Christians came in droves as missionaries, while simultaneously reinforcing European settler stakes in the land.
This practice continued throughout the world over the course of the next several centuries. The United States of America continued to be pushed further west, while Canada was colonized by the British and the French. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as several other regions, enhancing the British Empire. Missionaries were always a useful tool in the attempt to colonize the “pagan” Indigenous Peoples of these lands. In the words of Stephen Newcomb, “what is generally referred as the doctrine of discovery might be more accurately called the doctrine of Christian European arrival, or, better still, the doctrine of Christian European invasion.” (Stephen T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, 94)
In Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah’s Unsettling Truths, they state that the Doctrine of Discovery “defined the parameters of European imperial greatness [that] arose from an ecclesial treatise rooted in dysfunctional theology. At the foundation of this doctrine was a narrative of European Christian purity and supremacy that negated the value and worth of the other and permitted European Christians to assume their own supremacy and privilege on specious theological grounds.” (Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, 22)
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the “new world” with his crew. To this day over 500 years after the fact, statues of Columbus act as religious icons of American nationalism. Columbus Day continues to be celebrated as a holiday in the United States. The church has typically joined in on the celebrations or has been complacent in it. The myth of America runs deeply in the veins of the church.
Millions of Indigenous Peoples died over the centuries from colonialism. Their immune systems couldn’t handle diseases such as smallpox that European colonizers brought with them. Many were killed by the colonizers, often justified by quoting biblical passages from Deuteronomy, Joshua or Judges. To this day, towns and census designated places such as New Jerusalem, Pennsylvania or New Canaan, Connecticut are a stark reminder of the genocide of Indigenous “Canaanites” that took place under church endorsement.
Furthermore, the Doctrine of Discovery laid the groundwork for the racism we continue to see in the West. It created a dominant white race in which Europeans became entitled to land and power. Many Europeans engaged in dehumanizing chattel slavery of black bodies. Millions of Africans were taken captive by imperial colonizers to work the land that had been colonized. They were treated as less than human, often beaten and raped by their masters. During the years leading up to the American Civil War, the Baptist Church split over the issue of slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in the South as a result of their stance upholding slavery. Today the Southern Baptist Convention has condemned their support of slavery of blacks, but racism will always flow through the veins of an institution built on it.
Canada was not exempt from colonial sin either. One of the most dehumanizing laws, The Indian Act, still exists to this day. Though it has been amended several times it holds the same basic framework that it did when it was first created in 1876. It continues to allow the Canadian government to control most facets of Indigenous Peoples’ lives. The goal of The Indian Act was (and continues to be) assimilation. From 1879 to 1996, the church in Canada was either complacent to or involved in residential schools. Residential schools were created to force Indigenous children to forget their culture and language, and many of them were abused in the process. This dehumanizing law continues to wreak havoc on the lives of Indigenous Peoples across Canada in the form of trauma, loss of culture and language, and in some cases less access to basic necessities such as clean drinking water.
It is long overdue that the church in the West recognizes its original sins of Indigenous genocide and slavery of black people. The church must repent of these original sins, must seek forgiveness from the people it has hurt, and seek reconciliation/conciliation with those it has colonized. The church must stand up against racism and join the fight against all forms of injustice; for its silence is deafening. The church must actively engage in repairing the harm it has caused in colonialism, while recognizing their historical place in it. Inaction could prove to be detrimental to the survival of the church in the West. Hundreds of Millennial generation Americans are leaving the church every day. The future of the Western church is dependent on its decolonization.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is liberating for all people. White Jesus was brought to the West in order to control and manipulate the colonized into adapting the Western way of life. Currently and historically, threats of hell and God’s wrath were used as fear tactics because of its power to manipulate and control people. The Western church desperately needs a new reformation of its theology. If the gospel isn’t liberating, then people are still slaves to a system of oppression. If the gospel isn’t good news for all people, it isn’t good news at all. A decolonized church will liberate not only the oppressed, but the oppressor.