From “The Land is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery” by Sarah Augustine
An important premise of the Doctrine of Discovery goes like this: God made a covenant with Israel, God’s chosen people. With the coming of Jesus, God’s chosen became the church, the body of Christ. The church thus becomes the new chosen people who have a covenant with God, and who are justified and empowered to go into the promised land – that is, lands around the globe that were uninhabited by a Christian prince. As mentioned in chapter 1, this is the basis of the papal bulls that formed the foundation of the Doctrine of Discovery, the worldview of domination.
That worldview of domination was reinforced only once it hit the shores of what we now call the United States. In Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, Steven T. Newcomb explains how this paradigm or mental model of the “chosen people-promised land” story forms the imaginative foundation for the implementation of the Doctrine of Discovery in the United States, a foundation largely invisible to the people and culture that live within this worldview.
The idea that America was a “chosen nation” called to a special destiny by God was part of the idea of the United States from the beginning. The New England Puritans in particular believed themselves to be the new chosen people entering the new promised land. As Donald M. Scott, professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York writes:
John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. “On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630,” Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed and “errand into the wilderness” which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that “America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny.” Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate. “Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into Covenant with him for this work, we have taken out a commission,” he declared, adding “if the Lord shall please to hear us and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed out Commission and will expect a strict performance of the Articles contained in it.”