The Doctrine of Discovery

Years ago I read that how a congregation gets established lives on throughout its history long after those who started it have ceased to be a part of its life. On a larger scale, I think that to be true of nations.

Up until recently I had never heard of the Doctrine of Discovery. I don’t remember it being mentioned in my various history classes. If it was, missing it has left an important gap in my understanding of things then and things now.

In his introduction to his new book, The Hidden Roots pf White Supremacy, Robert P. Jones lays out the content and historical basis of this doctrine.

”Established in a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls (official edicts that carry the full weight of church and papal authority), the Doctrine claims that European civilization and Western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races, and religions. From this premise, it follows that domination and colonial conquest were merely the means of improving, if not the temporal, then the eternal lot of Indigenous peoples. So conceived, no atrocities could possibly tilt the scales of justices against these immeasurable goods. With its fiction of previously ‘undiscovered’ lands and peoples, the Doctrine fulfilled European rulers’ request for an unequivocal theological and moral justification for their new global political and economic exploits.”

One can sense almost immediately how such a mindset with its governmental and religious backing could set a course for a dark future for at least some of those who would become involved, one underwritten by a sense of entitlement, one giving license for all sorts of inhuman actions. Yes, there are already people living here, people who have been here for centuries, but we need their land, and we are entitled to it because of who we are. Yes, we are enslaving people, but we need someone to clear the land and work it for our benefit. And after all, in some way, we are helping them to be better (which meant “be almost like us”).

What we have here, it seems to me, is an example of a rationalized ethnocentrism, which is essentially a belief that it is all about us. It had be true because people wanted it to be true. People needed it to be true. They were desperate for it to be true. Anyway, the doctrine indicated that they were more special than those people (if they even viewed them as people at all). Indeed, one of the necessary first steps was to dehumanize those different from them so they could more easily justify their mistreatment. (That has not changed by the way.)

It’s not just a question of race. Status often enters into the equation. I must be favored, look at all that I have. People like me should be in charge. We are entitled.

In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson writes:

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

So from the beginning, there was an underlying principle at work which steered the early history of not only this nation but others. We continue to live and struggle with its effects today. Sadly, it continues to impact not only the lives of people perceived as different from us, but the health of our very souls.