omniharmonicDoctrine of Discovery
The Doctrine of Discovery is a set of legal and theological principles, promulgated through a series of papal bulls in the fifteenth century, that gave Christian nations explicit permission to claim lands not ruled by Christian sovereigns, to convert or eliminate their inhabitants, and to extract their resources. The theological logic was that if salvation comes only through Christ and salvation is the most important thing, then spreading Christianity is the highest possible good — and any means employed in service of this end, including conquest, enslavement, and genocide, could be justified as acts of compassion. This doctrine became the legal and moral foundation for European colonialism across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
As Benjamin Life argues in “The Christ Meme,” the Doctrine of Discovery was not an aberration or a corruption of Christianity but a crystallized expression of the imperial religion that had been shaped by Paul’s evangelistic innovations and Constantine’s co-optation across a millennium of accumulated power. The doctrine was perfectly consistent with a faith that claimed exclusive access to God, that had subordinated the feminine, that had replaced transformative practice with doctrinal submission, and that had aligned itself with imperial power at every opportunity. The accounting is vast: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the African slave trade blessed by church authorities, the residential schools where indigenous children were stripped of their languages and cultures. Anyone seeking to rehabilitate the revolutionary core of Christ’s teaching must reckon with this history not as a regrettable sidebar but as the main text. Pope Francis’s recent renunciation of the Doctrine is a start but does not constitute the institutional transformation required.
The Doctrine of Discovery connects to decolonization as one of the primary legal instruments that must be overturned and accounted for. It is an expression of the story-of-separation — the ontological premise that some peoples are inherently superior and that the living world exists to be dominated. It also connects to dominator-culture as the theological codification of conquest and extraction into the operating system of Western civilization.