How An Old Christian Doctrine You’ve Never Heard of Kick-Started American Racism

As Americans shoulder into the long work of dismantling systemic racism, let’s not overlook the oldest, largest, and deepest system that’s been active through it all, and not in a good way: Western Christianity.* Even before Columbus set sail to voyage to the wrong place, the Church planted the seeds that rooted deep into this culture and still cause people of color to suffer today.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t write about race. I’m a white woman who lives on a farm in Vermont, so I figure keeping my pie hole shut on current racial thought makes sense. I do write about Christianity, especially Catholicism, and its conflicts with the natural world. (More on that another time).

But during a recent jag of compulsive reading along those lines, I came across something I couldn’t unsee. I’ve read a lot of papal bulls (aka edicts) and encyclicals, and yes, I know that makes me weird, but I’d never come across it. I asked friends and family, religious and not: They had never heard of it. They were blown away once they did.

Introducing the Doctrine of Discovery: This series of three 15th-century Papal bulls granted ownership of everything — and everyone — on planet Earth to Christians. Period. And since we’re talking about Renaissance Christians, we’re mostly talking about white Europeans.

So what could possibly go wrong?

With time and use, the Doctrine of Discovery cemented the belief that specific groups of people are fully human and others are not — and that this is the natural order of things, even beyond being profitable. The doctrine devalued indigenous and conquered peoples worldwide; in what would become the United States it rallied the eradication of American Indians and their cultures, and the abuse of Africans and their descendants as labor and property. If the Doctrine of Discovery doesn’t sound familiar to most, its consequences should.

How a Religion Takes it All

How does a religion vindicate taking everything on Earth for its believers alone? The Doctrine of Discovery’s opening bull, Dum Diversas, written by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, declared that the first European Christians to land on any territory anywhere in the world, known or unknown, in the name of a Christian king, could just plant the flag and the cross, and finders keepers. Once his minions had officially arrived, the king owned the land, the people on it, and all their stuff, in perpetuity.

Dum Diversas was written for King Alfonso V of Portugal, and it handed him a massive prize: Africa. The pope granted Portugal the right to “‘capture, vanquish and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ…and put them into perpetual slavery and to take all their possessions and their property.” Instead of haggling with Saracens (Muslims) to access their age-old desert slave routes, Alfonso’s men could now ply the African coasts to capture non-Christians as slaves and expand European slave routes and profits.

Pope Nicholas declared any natives left could still occupy the land now exclusively owned by Christians, but these people (inevitably pagans, heathens, savages, enemies of Christ, and headed for hell), were not living in accordance with God’s will and Natural Law. Instead they were “living in the country like animals,” Nicholas said, echoing Pope Innocent III’s earlier statement, “…every rational creature is made for the worship of God…It is natural for man to worship the one and only God, not creatures.” That alone disqualified them as full humans.

One bull was not enough for Nicholas and Alfonso. In 1454 Romanus Pontifex confirmed Portugal’s sole right to Africa. Nicholas promised to excommunicate any other Christian nation that impeded Alfonso’s explorers, whose holy work was “to cause the most glorious name of the said Creator to be published, extolled, and revered throughout the whole world, even in the most remote and undiscovered places.”

By now the Spaniards were restless. Their final defeat of the long-ruling Muslims at Granada in 1491 gave Ferdinand and Isabella fresh impetus to expand their territories. Of course, a year later, Christopher Columbus would land on Caribbean islands that could fulfill their wishes, with the hopes of much more. The response of the new Spanish pope, Alexander VI, aka Rodrigo Borgia (yes, that Borgia), did not disappoint.

Alexander issued the third Doctrine of Discovery bull in 1493: Inter Caetera. He acknowledged the Spanish monarchs’ victory in restoring a Catholic Spain, and how that task had kept them from their long-desired work “to seek out and discover certain islands and mainlands remote and unknown…to the end that you might bring to the worship of our Redeemer and the profession of the Catholic faith their residents and inhabitants.” And by the way, “In the islands and countries already discovered are found gold, spices, and very many other precious things of divers kinds and qualities.”

To keep the peace among his Catholic kings, Alexander’s Inter Caetera drew a line from the North Pole to the South Pole near the Azores and Cape Verde. Spain could vanquish, subdue, and own all lands and waters to the West and South, and Portugal all lands and waters to the East. (A later treaty shifted that line west, giving Portugal eastern Brazil. A supplemental bull, Dudum siquidem, gave Spain anything they might encounter “toward the West and South…and India.”) It was all settled.

A Whole New Domination

Nasty as they were, what makes these conquests any worse than, say, Alexander the Great’s, or Julius Caesar’s? Didn’t their ilk also invade and kill people, enslave them, and establish punishing dominion?

Yes, but…

What upped the stakes in these later invasions was the Christians’ starkly different worldview that featured punishment for all eternity. As polytheists, Greeks and Romans didn’t care what other deities their conquests worshipped, as long as they respected the gods who protected the empire. Invading Greeks and Romans wanted glory in battle, more land, labor, and stuff. What went on in a tribal people’s heads and hearts, or what they believed happened after death, wasn’t the victor’s concern. No religion had yet insisted that disobeying a deity — or being born with a sin you hadn’t even committed — could merit eternal torture.

Christians, on the other hand, believed (and mostly still do) that humans were born corrupted by Original Sin — fourth century Church Father Augustine of Hippo sunnily called humanity “a mass of damnation.” Their one God, and his scripture, was the only way out of a perverted, fallen world on this side of death, and eternal suffering on the other. [We’ll talk Puritans later.]

Another key difference: Christians are biblically commanded to “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). When those other “nations” don’t look, act, or believe as you do, you have a duty to show your Christian love by correcting them, harshly if needed, for their own eternal good. Pope Innocent III warned, “There is only one right way of life for mankind, and…the papal monopoly of this knowledge makes obedience to the Pope the only means of salvation.”

Or, as Rice University Professor of Religion Anthony B. Pinn says in the documentary Holy Hierarchy, The Religious Roots of Racism in America “…they understood taming folks and taming the land was what they needed to do to live out God’s will…the Bible understands difference as a problem to solve.”

In exchange for their lands and goods, the European conquerors would give indigenous people of Africa and the Americas the greatest gifts of all: Christianity, salvation from sin, and civilization. If the natives refused to accept this correction, their new overlords were entitled to wage Augustine’s “just war” against them. (The Spanish conquerors commonly read aloud their version of these terms, the Requerimento, to the natives when they first landed, while unloading their horses and cannons. Many natives had never seen horses or cannons and were terrified.) Any native resistance meant death or enslavement; they had, after all, just been warned — in Latin or Spanish, which they had never heard before.

Unloading Ancient Baggage

Religion and riches spurred the Christian European conquest, but the conquerors also brought ashore heavy baggage from ancient sources. Lumbee Indian scholar Robert A. Williams, Jr. details in his book Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization, how ancient Greeks and Romans such as Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and Cicero established qualifications that identified who was fully human and who wasn’t. Their ideas, minus the paganism, circulated through the medieval educational canon and the Church (basically the same thing at the time). Western Christianity to this day draws deeply on Plato and neo-Platonists via Augustine; and Aristotle, through Aquinas.)

Aristotle, for example, believed lower classes, especially “savages” and “barbarians,” (i.e., non-Greeks) “are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.” Williams notes, Aristotle’s teacher Plato believed that lower types deserved domination because they lacked the refined “categories” that defined the Greek polis: written laws, formal religion, government, private property, currency, cities, and extensive agriculture. Savages were, at best, a rough draft of humanity. It was their role to serve their more advanced masters, thereby freeing them to pursue the intellectual and cultural interests that advanced humanity’s highest calling, civilization.

In Christianity’s translation, this idea of humanity’s calling meant humans progressing with one god through linear time. Human history had a beginning (with God); an exile on Earth (longing for God, and trying to please Him); and an end (hoped-for eternal bliss with God).

No more loops and cycles of time, no more karmic waves of rebirth. Earth was now a stage set upon which the people lived their one life with their one god and at the end of it were judged for their obedience. Christians had a future and a goal, and it was up there, in our true home, not here.

This spirituality no longer spoke the languages of Earth’s multitude of creatures; the Christian god was superior to all that. He transcended the Earth, which was demoted to a waiting room for paradise. The land-based, immanent relationships those heathens of Africa and the Americas had with their spirits were condemned as demonic. The land was now soulless matter, raw material for comfort, profit, and progress.

When Owning Heathens Became an Issue of Skin Color

Colonizing Christians, whether Catholics or later Protestants, assumed the covenant to find a new Promised Land on which to live the temporal phase of their destiny. It didn’t matter that this covenant was originally made with the Jews; they had forfeited their biblical inheritance by rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. As Christopher Columbus wrote of his crusading charge, Christians were “children of Abraham according to faith” if not flesh. And like Abraham, the Christians were divinely called to vanquish the new indigenous Canaanites, wherever they discovered them.

Shawnee/Lenape Indian scholar Steven T. Newcomb says in his book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, “…the Law of the Old Testament lay down specific instructions for conquering and even exterminating the non-Hebrew indigenous peoples living in the land Yahweh had promised to his chosen people.” Newcomb notes how biblical instructions like Songs 2:8, popular with Christian colonizers, threw open the gates to the new chosen ones, as the Lord had once opened them to King David: “…ask of me and I shall give to thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.”

Whatever they rejected from Catholicism, Protestants maintained the Ancient Greek and Catholic categories defining savage vs. civilized, Williams says in Savage Anxieties. He notes how a 1609 sermon by the prominent Anglican Rev. Robert Gray promoted American conquest: “The English, according to Gray, had a biblically imposed obligation to seize the earth from ‘wild beasts’ and ‘brutish savages’…by reason of ‘their godless ignorance and blasphemous idolatry.’”

Blind to their own observations that the “savage” Indians freely shared their food and lived “contentedly” in communities without private property, money, courts, and written laws, English explorers like Martin Frobisher instead were shocked by Indians’ lack of Christianity and civilization: Indians ate their food “not daintily” but like “brute beasts” without “table, stool, or table cloth.”

Savages and heathens of all kinds were subject to Christian rule and Christian use. Not until the conquest of the Americas, however, did skin color indicate who could be owned. Thousands of years of Eurasian slavery, while brutal, had been more fluid: with any luck, Ancient Greek and Roman slaves of all colors might buy or be granted their freedom, even become rich, and blend in with other freedmen, as Roman aristocrats complained.

The New World evolved a different servitude. “Why were Africans chosen?” asks Molefi Kete Asante, Temple University Professor of Africology, in Holy Hierarchy. “…The notion that Africans could be enslaved because Africans were not human, were not believers in Christ, were…heathens — that notion was a driving force in the enslavement of African people.”

It would be the English in Virginia who drew the first real color line while instituting slavery for life. Christianity’s role in slavery would change, too. Any assumption that “civilized equals Christian equals free” would wear away. The focus turned to race.

Coming in Part 2: Jamestown, Puritans, and race; how an old cultural wound drove new conquests; and how do Christian churches right these wrongs?

*meaning the Latin church, with roots in Rome, Augustine, Aquinas et al. Also the churches that emerged from the Protestant Reformation, which relied on Augustine. The Eastern Orthodox have a slightly different theology not as insistent on humans being abject spiritual train wrecks.

References:

Dum Diversas, Pope Nicholas V. 1452 (full text) http://www.tylerhistory.org/2018/08/27/1452-papal-bull-dum-diversas/

Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V. 1454 (full text) http://www.tylerhistory.org/2018/08/27/1454-papal-bull-romanus-pontifex/

Inter Caetera, Pope Alexander VI. 1493 (full text) http://www.tylerhistory.org/2018/08/27/1493-papal-bull-inter-caetera/

Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization. Robert A. Williams, Jr. St. Martin’s Press, 2012.

Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Steven T. Newcomb. Fulcrum Publishing, 2008.

Holy Hierarchy, The Religious Roots of Racism in America. Jeremiah Camara, Writer and Director. Mad Titans Production, 2018.

http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/ by Mark Charles