From “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: and the Path to a Shared American Future” by Robert P. Jones
The return of Columbus in 1943 also precipitated the culmination of one of the most fateful but unacknowledged theological developments in the history of the western Christian Church: the Doctrine of Discovery. Established in a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls (official edits 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 justice 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.
Robert J. Miller, professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, summarized the Doctrine’s purpose as follows:
In essence, the Doctrine provided that newly arrived Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights over the inhabitants without knowledge or consent of the Indigenous peoples. When English explorers and other Europeans planted their national flags and religious symbols in “newly discovered” lands, as many paintings depict, they were not just thanking God for safe voyage. Instead they were undertaking a well-recognized legal procedure and ritual mandated by international law and designed to create their country’s legal claim over the “newly discovered” lands and peoples.
The Doctrine of Discovery, in short, merged the interests of European imperialism, including the African slave trade with Christian missionary zeal. Dum Diversas, the initial edict that laid the theological and political foundations for the Doctrine, was issued by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452. It explicitly granted Portuguese king Alfonso V the following rights:
To invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [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.