A Colonial God: Biblical Roots of 'Christian Discovery'

‘Christian discovery’ doctrine in US law starts with Johnson v. McIntosh. But the tap root of ‘Christian discovery’ is the colonial God of the Bible.

Aug 27, 2023

15th century papal decrees that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread…and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself”
15th - 16th - 17th century monarchical charters “to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands”
19th - 20th - 21st century US Supreme Court decisions that Christian “discoverers” automatically acquired “title to the lands occupied by Indians”

But there is a longer arc and the Virginia Company, England’s first colony in the ‘New World’, provides a good example to see it.

In 1609, James I licensed a group of “adventurers” — investors and settlers — for the First Settlement of Virginia:

“…to deduce a colony …into that part of America commonly called Virginia, and other parts and territories in America… which are not now actually possessed by any christian prince or people….”

The Charter included an explicit missionary purpose:

“…propagating of Christian religion to such people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God, and … in time bring the infidels and savages, living in those parts, to human civility….”

In 1609, James issued a second charter that extended Virginia‘s borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific ( 🤯 ) and emphasized the Christian mission:

“…the principal effect, which we can desire or expect of this action, is the conversion and reduction of the people in those parts unto the true worship of God and Christian religion….”

Also in 1609, the Company itself published A true and sincere declaration of the purpose and ends of the plantation begun in Virginia, asserting that:

“The Principall and Maine Ends … weare first to preach, & baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospell, to recover out of the armes of the Divell, a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt upp unto death, in almost invincible ignorance….”

Sermons Promoted the Virginia Company With the Bible:

R. Pierce Beaver, in Church, State, and the American Indians (1966), said “sermons by eminent divines” preached at meetings of the Company from 1609 - 1624 encouraged investors and settlers to join the colonizing effort.

The first [sermon] … preached by William Symonds of St. Saviour’s [in 1609]…. set the tone …based on God’s command to Abraham in Genesis 12…:

Genesis 12:1, 6-7, “The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.’ …At that time the Canaanites were in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

Symonds responded sharply to those who questioned this colonial project:

“The countrey, they say, is possessed by owners, that rule, and governe it in their own right: then with what conscience, and equitie can we offer to thrust them, by violence out of their inheritances?”

He answered:

“If these objectors had any braines in their head, but those which are sick, they could easily finde a difference between a bloudy invasion and the planting of a peaceable Colony, in a waste country, where the people do live but like Deere in heards….”

Beaver quoted another sermon, by Robert Gray, which “admonished the settlers to do…their divine right, namely, to ‘caste out the Canaanites.’ God gave them this Virginia; let them take it.”

Gray’s reference was to:

Joshua 17: 14-18, “Go … clear land for yourselves …in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaites. …Though the Canaanites …are strong, you can drive them out.”

Gray, like Symonds, responded to critics of the Company:

“[Some might question] by what right or warrant we can enter into the land of these savages, take away their rightful inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by them.”

Like Symonds’, Gray said that the effort would be “peaceable”:

“Devastation and depopulation ought to be the last thing which Christians should put in practice.”

But he added:

“Yet …we are warranted by …Joshua to destroy willful and convicted idolaters, rather than to let them live, if by no other means they can be reclaimed.”

In her 2012 book, The Baptism of Early Virginia, history professor Rebecca Anne Goetz described the Virginia Company sermons as part of “a seventeenth-century media blitz . . . to craft a theological justification for the Virginia enterprise.”

For our purposes here, the key point is that the justifications for Christian colonization used the Bible itself. The ministers called on the claims of God and the Prophets — rather than the intermediate claims of Popes and Monarchs — to justify the Virginia Company.

The Bible’s Colonization Project

God’s words in Genesis were not simply a promise — ”I will give this land”; they were a command — “Go from your country”.

God’s wrath enforced the command when His ‘chosen people’ failed to take the ‘promised lands’:

Numbers 32:10–11, 13, “The Lord’s anger was aroused that day and he swore this oath: ‘Because they have not followed me wholeheartedly, not one of those who were twenty years old or more when they came up out of Egypt will see the land I promised on oath….’ The Lord’s anger burned against Israel and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
Judges 2: 1-3: “The angel of the Lord …said, ‘I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land I swore to give to your ancestors. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land, but you shall break down their altars.’ Yet you have disobeyed me.”

The New Testament followed this original Old Testament pattern, promoting a new baptismal explanation for Christian imperialism:

Matthew 28:16-20 commanded the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

The theme was depicted in the 1629 seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which showed an image of an Indigenous person saying, “Come over and help us”, an echo of Acts 16: 9–10:

“Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ …We got ready at once…, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”

1629 Massachusetts Bay Company seal. (Massachusetts Archives)

The Actual Mechanisms of Christian Imperialism

The seeds of Christian Imperialism were sown in the fourth-century Roman empire when Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christian practices and adopted Christianity to serve his military purposes.

The story goes that Constantine, on his way to a crucial battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312 that would end a civil war and determine his emperorship, had a vision of a cross in the sky and the Greek words Ἐν Τούτῳ Νίκα (Latin, in hoc signo, vinces; English, “in this sign, conquer”). He ordered the cross adorn the shields of his soldiers. His subsequent victory tied Christianity to the Roman Empire.

The growth of Christendom from those roots persisted despite efforts by Emperor Julian (361–363) to reinstate the pagan gods. As the Roman Empire collapsed in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christendom continued under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome (the pope, the Holy See).

In his 1997 book, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, the medieval historian Richard Fletcher recounted the Christianization of Europe.

Fletcher explained that “conversion” was the church’s mechanism to maintain control over the rural population on whose labor the imperial establishment rested. It included destruction of pagan temples and sacred sites and violent disruption of pagan ceremonies.

The purpose of ‘conversion’ was to break ‘heathen’ ties to the land and substitute allegiance to the church.

My book greatly expands this analysis.

The methods of conversion, as Fletcher describes them, became a blueprint for centuries of Christian imperialism. Charlemagne’s invasion of the Saxons, for example, in a war lasting from 772-804, aimed to:

“…destabilize and dislocate the social texture of Saxon life at the most intimate levels of family existence, touching birth, marriage and death.”

The goal was to create a Christian empire—an Imperium Christianum.

900 years later, 17th century Puritans in the “New World” aimed at the same intimate destruction. They established "Praying Towns"—Indian reservations—to ‘concentrate’ and convert Natives.

John Eliot, though a Calvinist, followed the Roman Church in viewing religious conversion as a matter of “total cultural transformation," as Jean O’Brien explains in Dispossession by Degrees (1997).

Praying Towns map, *Our Beloved Kin* (Lisa Brooks)

In exchange for adopting Puritan ways, Natives were guaranteed ‘protection’ from Puritan violence.

The Puritan aim was—either through conversion or violence—to break the bonds between Native peoples and their leaders, between Native peoples and their lands, between Native peoples and their histories: the same aims that motivated Christianization centuries earlier at its Roman start.

‘Conversion’

In his 1973 manifesto, God Is Red, Vine Deloria, Jr., pointed out the significance of ‘conversion’ for Tribal societies:

“Christianity served to transform . . . a tribal chief (dux) into a king (rex). Once converted to Christianity, the king no longer represented only the deities of his tribe: he represented, in addition, a universal deity whose authority extended to all tribes. . . .
“As stated in the laws of Ethelred (about 1000 A.D.), ‘A Christian king is Christ’s deputy among Christian people and he must avenge with utmost diligence offenses against Christ.’”

Successful ‘conversion’ meant that Tribal leaders no longer needed to (or could) rely on power that arose from below and around themselves, but that they might (and must) assume a stance descending from above. With this, the colonial conversion was accomplished and the path to imperial resource extraction opened.

A law dictionary defines the word ‘conversion’ as: “taking another person’s property without any cause or permission.” It is an unlawful action.

“Itching in the Tongues and Pens”

The fact that we are revealing the Biblical domination framework runs afoul of a 1610 royal proclamation …by James I, deploring the “unsatiable curiosity in many men's spirits,” the “itching in the tongues and pens” that led them to speculate on the “very highest mysteries in the Godhead” and to “wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or state of kings.”

The target of James’ wrath was a law dictionary. He ordered that all copies were to be burned by the public hangman.

In 1616, James told the Star Chamber:

“I commend vnto your speciall care…to blunt the sharpe edge and vaine popular humour of some Lawyers….
“The mysterie of the Kings power is not lawfull to be disputed; for that is to wade into the weaknesse of Princes, and to take away the mysticall reuerence….
“It is Athiesme and blasphemie to dispute what God can doe: good Christians content themselues with his will reuealed in his word, so, it is presumption and high contempt in a Subiect, to dispute what a King can doe….”

So.