Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 6: Christianity Was a Weapon of Conquest

So first, let's look at the charter.

Conquest needs a story it can tell itself.

No people sees itself as the villain, and the European powers that spent five centuries seizing the land and bodies of others were no exceptions.

So before the taking, there had to be a reason the taking was righteous, and the Church wrote it.

And when I say the Church, I do not mean one institution.

I mean Western Christianity in its established forms, the Catholic papacy, the Protestant crowns, the reformed churches, because the most damning thing here is not that a single body did this.

It is that the pattern repeats across all of them.

The papacy wrote the charter.

Protestant England sailed the slave ships.

The Dutch Reformed Church blessed apartheid.

Not one church, but the whole of Christiandom, wherever it held power.

It wrote it at the start almost literally.

Between 1452 and 1493, three papal decrees, what the church calls bulls, set the terms of the age of conquest.

The first, Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, granted the Portuguese crown the right to reduce to perpetual slavery any Saracens, pagans, and other non-believers it encountered.

The second, the Romanus Pontifex, three years later extended that right down to the length of the African coast.

The third, Inter Caetera, issued by Alexander VI in 1493, the year after Columbus drew a line through the unmapped world and granted Spain dominion over the lands beyond it, territories that the pope had never seen, and whose people he was learning of as he gave them away.

Together, these decrees became what later lawyers would call the doctrine of discovery, the principle that a Christian nation took title to any land not already held by Christians simply by arriving on it because the people already living there who were not Christians did not count as owners.

It is not a relic.

The United States Supreme Court wrote the doctrine into American property law in 1823, and it has never fully been removed.

The defenders of the church will object, and fairly so, that the record is not all one way, and they are right that it is not.

In 1537, Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, declaring the indigenous people of the Americas to be rational beings with souls and rights who must not be enslaved or robbed of their property, and calling the contrary view the work of the devil.

Three centuries later, in 1839, Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade.

These documents are real, and they absolutely matter, and they do not rescue the institutions for three reasons.

One, they were largely ignored, contradicted within a few years by the Crown and the colonists, and never enforced against them.

Second, they were selective.