A movement called “Christian Nationalism” is called “a fundamental threat to Democracy” in a new book, The Flag and the Cross by Phillip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry. When Gorski was interviewed by Sarah Jones for the online British newspaper, The Independent, about the book defining Christian Nationalists as people who “often have a completely incorrect understanding of American history.” She asked, “Can you talk about what myths tend to be attractive to them and why?”
Gorski responded, “Because it puts people like them at the center of the American story and it puts the American story at the center of the cosmic drama. White Christians like us are the real Americans, and America is the exceptional nation, the chosen nation that is playing a special role in the battle between good and evil…I would add to this that if you think in terms of this narrative, if you’re a white Christian, it doesn’t matter when you showed up in the United States; you have a kind of a birthright. You belong. You were always here, in a sense…You’re part of the founding group.
“I always find this kind of ironic when you think about the folks who get sort of exercised about discussions of race and reject “The 1619 Project.” Why do they get so exercised about this? In part because it threatens their central place in the story and makes clear that in some sense you’re really talking about who got here first.”
Perry continues, “There is this huge identify-based motivation to believe these myths about America’s past that are factually incorrect oftentimes…A lot of people in these communities are socialized into believing it because there is an entire Christian nationalism industrial complex that is built to continue to perpetuate those myths.”
He says the goal of that “complex” is to “either provide religious leaders with that kind of ammunition or to provide religious consumers, people in the pews, with information about America’s Christian past that may or may not be factually correct. It is designed…to center white Christian Americans within that story and to tell them that this nation was founded on Christian values for Christian people…And, of course, they get to decide what that means.”
(You can read the entire interview at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/white-christian-nationalism-is-a-threat-to-democracy.html)
This movement has been a thousand years in the making. And, to the considerable discomfort (I hope) of those who promote a distortion of our history by claiming our country was founded as a Christian nation, we’re going to tell you about the ancient roots of this misguided movement. In doing so, we hope some readers will ask if the “Christian nation” of the early settlers is the kind of Christianity we should practice today, or honor in our politics and policy-making.
The beginning of the “White Christian America” myth is based on a corruption of the Great Command in the Biblical book of Matthew in which Jesus told his disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
Pope Urban II was the first to twist this command into what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery.” Urban led the Roman Church from 1088 until he died in 1099. He is credited with triggering the First Crusade by declaring war on all non-Chistian nations and promising absolution to those who fought to take Spain and the Holy Land back from the Muslims. For about four centuries, this doctrine was considered authorization by European kings to “discover” new lands and if they were considered non-Christian, to claim them
The real Doctrine of Discovery that shaped our nation and much of our national self-image came from the Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1452 by Pope Nicholas V that extended Urban’s idea to sanction war against non-Christians throughout the world. It also sanctioned conquest of those nations.
The Boston-based Upstander Project (which says, “An upstander is a person who takes action in defense of those who are targeted for systemic or individual harm or injustice. An upstander is the opposite of a bystander.”) says these decrees are based on two assertions:
“First, Christians were the only civilized peoples and thus, they had the right to treat non-Christians as uncivilized and subhuman who had no rights to any land or nation.
“Second, Christians had the God-given right to ‘capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ,’ to ‘put them into perpetual slavery’ and ‘to take all their possessions and property.’”
Portugal, a rival of Spain’s in exploration at that time, protested Nicholas’ Bull that seemed to grant exclusivity to Spain because Portugal already had seized North Africa as early as 1415 and had explored coastal Africa all the way to India. Pope Alexander, in 1493, issued a new Papal Bull forbidding Spain from establishing control over lands claimed by other “Christian lords,” effectively drawing a line between hemispheres. That wasn’t good enough for King John II of Portugal, who negotiated with Columbus’s friends Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to move the line further west with the Treaty of Tordesillas, clearing the way for the Portugese to claim Brazil.
Alexander’s division line wasn’t just in the Atlantic. It went all the way around the world. A later treaty between Spain and Portugal, The Treaty of Saragossa, gave Spain and Portugal the power to seize and control all non-Christian nations on the Earth just by stepping off a boat onto those lands.
Of course, other nations had other ideas—the French and the English in particular and in years to come, the English especially recognized no papal authority. And this is where our country’s history begins to take shape.
The concepts of these papal statements influenced the sentiments of European settlement of what is now the United States and laid the groundwork for the erroneous attitude that Christianity should be the motivation behind public policy.
It is the Doctrine of Discovery that enabled European settlers to look upon well-organized Native American socieities as inferior because they were not “Christian” regardless of how those societies interpreted God or what they called God. Since they were inferior, they had no right to the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years if Christians wanted it.
It didn’t take long for the presumptuous, righteous, Europeans to push things too far. King Phillip’s war broke out in New England in 1675 between the son of Massasoit—the friend of the Pilgrims—who resisted colonists’ grab of his land. The war lasted until 1678 when it ended with the Treaty of Casco Bay. But the settlers did not stop doing the things that led to the war. Another treaty in 1703 also was violated by the settlers.
And so it went, decade by decade, treaty by broken treaty, as the Christian Europeans seized the heathen lands they wanted.
The Louisiana Purchase represents the Doctrine of Discovery for we Missourians. France had taken “ownership” of that territory from Spain and sold it to the United States. But Fance and Spain only “claimed” the land under the doctrine. They did not own it. The United States really bought “preemptive rights” to obtain the land within that territy from the tribes, either by treaty or by conquest.
Missouri? Harvard University’s first tenured professor of American Indian history, Phillip deLoria, told interviewer David Rubenstein in 2020 that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established requirements for western territories to become states: “Sixty-thousand free people. What that means is if you’re a territory and you want to become a state, youneed to get your Indian people out fo there so that you can bring in more settlers. What that leads to is either removal—making them leave the state—or moving them onto reservation territories where they’re contained and compressed.” Missouri is a perfect example.*
Historian Greg Olson has written that it took 22 treaties with 13 Native American nations before the United States had clear title to all of the land in Missouri, a process that was finally concluded in 1837, sixteen years after we became a state, with the Platte Purchase that gave us our northwest corner. .
The national attitude was encapsulated in an 1823 U. S. Supreme Court unanimous ruling that the Age of Discovery had given the Christian nations of Europe “ultimate dominion” over all of North America, that Native Americans no longer had any right to “complete sovereignty, as independent nations” and were only entitled to occupy their lands. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion said that when this country became an independent nation, it kept Britain’s right of discovery and gained Britain’s power of “dominion.”
The Doctrine of Discovery was carried out until European Christians’ North American empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific based on papal bulls declaring Christians are the only civilized peoples and therefore have a God-given right to “capture, vanquish, and subdue….enemies of Christ” and to put them into “perpetual slavery” and to “take all their possessions and property.”
The papal bulls of the Popes were Americanized in an editorial in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review editorial of July/August, 1845 calling for an end to opposition, especially from England and France, to the annexation of Texas.
” Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
(Emanuel Leutze, “Westward, the Course of Empire”)
It is disputed whether editor John O’Sullivan or staff member Jane Cazneau wrote that editorial. The phrase showed up in a December issue of the New York Morning News, also edited by O’Sullivan, advocating American annexation of the Oregon Territory.
Mainfest Destiny, America’s version of Europe’s sanctified Christian Naionalism, proclaimed it was ordained by God that this nation had a right to displace non-European residents so the “yearly multiplying millions” had land and livelihood of their own. It led to the Mexican War that added all or parts of Arizona, Californa, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming to our country’s map. With the addition of those new territories, the concept also raised the issue of expansion of slavery into these new areas, an issue that ultimately led to civil war.
Those are things the nationalists prefer we not know, teach, or learn because—going back to the top of this entry, Christians are the only civilized people and as such they can treat others “as uncivilized and subhuman” with no rights to any land or nation.
White Christian Nationalism is not new and it is not unique to our country, nor is it unique to Christians. Its advocates prefer that neither our school children nor their parents know where it came from and what it has done here and in other parts of the world.
Sadly, there are too many Christians who think White Christian Nationalists will go away. They won’t. They’ve been here for more than four centuries and they’re louder than ever, it seems.
So we are presented with a choice: What would you rather be, a Christian living in a free country or someone living in a Christian country—where history tells us we might not be considered a citizen at all?
*David M. Rubenstein, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2021.
Greg Olson, “White Man’s Paper Trail: Extinguishing Indigenous Land Claims in Missouri, Missouri Historical Review, July, 2021