The Doctrine of Discovery

Monday, August 11, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! Recently, I read a special issue of Cross Currents dedicated to the Doctrine of Discovery. With apologies to my fellow theological, historical, and legal nerds for some generalizations, the doctrine is the amalgamation of three papal bulls (proclamations from the pope that once carried the weight of law in Catholic countries) and other religious teachings and secular legal decisions regarding two major parts of the European colonial project specifically in the Americas, but extended globally as well. First, the doctrine held (one could argue that the present tense is more appropriate) that any unoccupied or “vacant” land found by a Christian kingdom could be claimed by that kingdom unless another Christian kingdom had already claimed it. Second, assuming it was impossible to reason that the land was unoccupied, as was the case when the Spanish encountered the sophisticated kingdom of the Aztecs and the French and English “discovered” the Iroquois (among many other examples where Europeans found themselves dealing with developed nation-states rather than nomadic “savages”), the Europeans were permitted to regard the people, constructed using Christian supremacist and racist ideas, as, to use a statistical term, a null set. They could literally regard whole populations as legally and theologically nonexistent in order to claim the land for their country because, if the native inhabitants didn’t exist, then under the first part of the doctrine, the land was free to become part of a kingdom’s territorial holdings.

It doesn’t take a deep knowledge of history or critical theory to understand what these arguments led to particularly in the Americas. With the strokes of pens several popes, European rulers, and an assortment of scholars created a system that continues to plague former colonies and BIPOC communities today. If the land was vacant, then it was open to colonization. If the land was occupied by some of the largest cities on earth at the time, as was the case with the Aztecs, then it could still become a project of colonization, because non-Christian brown bodies[1] weren’t legally or theologically “real.” And if these bodies weren’t real then they could be enslaved, abused, and killed without moral or ethical concern.

I imagine that many of us have a fairly pastoral image of the pre-colonial continents which became North America and South America. We imagine landscapes devoid of development with vast forests teaming with animal life and Disney’s Pocahontas singing “The Color of the Wind.” That was the history taught to us in school, through whitewashed history books, and via cultural artifacts from the peaceful natives “welcoming” Columbus and his men to their land to the communal sharing of the first “Thanksgiving” to depictions of the “noble savage” giving up their “wild” ways to embrace Christianity and Western standards of living. Yet several nations of Native Americans were already living with developed legal systems which were closer to the ideal of what Europeans called “democracy” long before Columbus got lost and wound up in the Caribbean. The Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations were as developed as any European civilization (in many cases more developed) with thriving cities and scientific and engineering knowledge and projects which often was well beyond that of the Europeans. Lest you think, “But their weapons weren’t as advanced;” imagine living in societies where war was not a major driver of innovation.

Though the terms have changed and the Doctrine of Discovery has lost much of its religious, particularly Catholic, foundation it nevertheless continues to influence geopolitics and the exploitation of civilizations and their resources. We see this dynamic most blatantly in the extraction of natural and mineral resources from countries in Africa and more recently Ukraine as well. The Global North-driven economy and telecommunications empire require rare earth minerals found most abundantly in Africa, especially in countries with long histories of colonial interference and exploitation.

Where have you learned about the Doctrine of Discovery? Has the Doctrine of Discovery impacted your life or your culture?

Let us pray: Dear God, we confess our complicity in the historical, generational, and current suffering of our siblings because of the legacy and lived realities of the Doctrine of Discovery. We mourn the legal and theological arguments which have judged your sacred creation as open to exploitation and your people as null, nonexistent, and less than human. Empower us, God, to dismantle this doctrine and remove it from our laws and court decisions permanently. May we restore our relationship with our siblings and with the interconnected web of life which includes us. We ask this in the name of your son, our liberator, Jesus. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

[1] There are plenty of examples and evidence to say that the color of the bodies had more to do with constructing their existence than their religious identity, but that goes beyond the scope of this essay.