The ancient legal and religious doctrine that still haunts our country

White Supremacy in the United States didn't start in 1776 or even 1619.

We are off to a good start at Georgetown as the academic year begins, with students all over campus again – which I love. Our Georgetown Center on Faith and Justice convened our first public event last week, and it was a  significant one. In the beautiful Riggs Library we launched a new book authored by my long-time friend Robert (Robby) Jones entitled: The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.

I was excited to see the room filled with a diverse audience of students, who had many questions to ask, while 700 more people watched the discussion online. The other panelists who joined Robby and I were Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and Atlantic magazine staff writer Vann Newkirk II.

You can watch the remarkable conversation about America’s past, present, and future–and how deeply connected they are in the video below.

Robby’s scholarly but very readable book takes us back before 1766, and even before 1619 when the first African slaves were brought to America, and all the way to 1493, when the Doctrine of Discovery was unveiled as a legal and religious concept that  gave all the lands of the new American continent to whichever European nation “discovered” and conquered them first. 

The lands where indigenous people already lived and had for centuries were labeled “undiscovered” and the new doctrine recognized no claim or place for their inhabitants. Military power and economic colonization were given religious backing to remove all the native peoples from their homelands by claiming that God had ordained a new country for white Europeans to take and do with as they pleased. 

But this just wasn’t a tragic history lesson. I started our discussion with a key quote from Jones’s book, which brings the 15th century story right up to date.

“The spirit of the Doctrine of Discovery continues to haunt us today. We remain torn by two mutually incompatible visions of the country. Are we a pluralistic democracy where all, regardless of race or religion, are equal citizens? Or are we a divinely ordained promised land for white European Christians?” 

News stories about the increasingly violent divisions in our nation as we approach the most important election in our lifetimes and since the civil war, flashed in my mind when I read the next thing Robby wrote, “The confounding paradoxes, constant confusions, and violent convulsions of the present are signs that we have yet to choose between these two streams of American history.”

A clear choice we have yet to make.

Recently on Morning Joe, historian Jon Meacham from Vanderbilt University said we didn’t really have a nation for everyone in it until 1965, when we finally passed voting rights, granting genuine citizenship across racial lines in America. Whether they have ever heard of the Doctrine of Discovery or not, many white people in America today are still convinced that the country mostly belongs to them. 

Meacham is deeply concerned that politics has just become “programming” that is not aligned with constitutional democracy, that the “gravity” of our institutions might not be holding, and that “just enough” voters in the next election are going to have to make critical choices – like the one Robby talked about last week at Georgetown.

Robby confessed that despite his extensive education, up to a PhD, he was never told about any of this history in his schooling. But they lived the continuation of the Doctrine of Discovery in the South where he grew up, and Robby spoke poignantly of the family Bible which he now possesses that records the names of slaves owned by his family ancestors and how much each one was worth.

Robby’s book and our conversation about it came alive last week in our forum together. I said the book is not just about 1776, or 1619, or even 1493. It is also about 2024. And I asked Robby to illuminate the meaning of a quote in his book that jumped out at me. He writes:

“The contemporary white Christian nationalist movement flows directly from a cultural stream that has run through this continent since the first Europeans arrived five centuries ago. The photographs of the insurrectionists storming the US Capital on January 6. 2021 bear an uncanny resemblance to the painting of Hernando de Soto marshaling Christian symbols to claim indigenous lands for Spain on May 1541, which still hangs prominently in the Rotunda of that same building, Seen in this light, the symbols brandished by the insurrectionists were not incidental; they were centuries old ritual implements of the Doctrine of Discovery, summoned to do the work they have always done.” 

What I call America’s Original Sin and the Doctrine of Discovery are coming to a crescendo in this next election year. The political programing and performing has already begun and the most crucial choices will have to be made–by enough of us. 

Those choices will be an ongoing conversation in this Substack space, in the book I announced last week that is coming out next Easter, (you can pre-order here: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/false-white-gospel/) and in public forums we intend to have all around the country and at Georgetown. Stay tuned.