Christian Supremacy Before White Supremacy
White Theology and White Power IV
The argument of this series depends on chronology. If modern whiteness is projected backward onto every Christian hierarchy in European history, the analysis becomes morally forceful but historically weak. Medieval Christians did not possess the nineteenth-century racial classifications that later organized Atlantic slavery and colonial rule. They did, however, inherit and develop ways of ranking religious communities, distinguishing orthodox from heretical belief, and treating Christian political order as normatively superior to the worlds beyond it. Those earlier hierarchies were not white supremacy in an unfinished form. They were a different system of ordering whose concepts, institutions, and habits could later be adapted to racial projects.[1]
I use the term Christian supremacy here in a deliberately limited sense. It describes a political and theological order in which Christianity is treated not simply as true, but as entitled to a privileged relation to law, territory, public authority, and full membership in society. That definition does not imply that all Christians sought coercion or that every medieval Christian polity treated non-Christians identically. Jewish communities, Muslims, dissident Christians, and converts experienced different legal arrangements across different centuries and regions. The point is that religious difference could carry consequences well beyond private belief because political membership and Christian belonging had become closely connected.[2]
The distinction is visible in medieval anti-Judaism. Christian theology could recognize Jews as a people whose scriptures remained indispensable to Christianity while simultaneously describing Judaism as superseded, spiritually incomplete, or stubbornly resistant to Christian truth. Popes and rulers sometimes protected Jewish communities, and theologians did not speak with one voice. Yet protection itself often assumed a hierarchical relationship in which a Christian majority determined the conditions under which a religious minority would live. Periods of relative coexistence therefore existed beside restrictions, forced disputations, expulsions, and recurrent violence. The history is too uneven to be reduced to a single line of development, but it clearly demonstrates that a society can rank populations through theology before it ranks them through modern race.[3]
Christian-Muslim relations created another set of boundaries. Centuries of trade, diplomacy, scholarship, warfare, coexistence, and cultural exchange make any simple story of civilizational conflict untenable. Nevertheless, crusading ideology could sacralize war and transform political conflict into a struggle bearing religious meaning. Once rulers, armies, territories, and religious identities were joined in this way, conquest could be narrated as defense of the faith, recovery of sacred space, or protection of Christian peoples. Again, the mechanism was not race in the modern biological sense. It was the political consequence attached to theological identity.
The Iberian Peninsula makes the transition still more complicated. Following the Christian conquest of Muslim-ruled territories and the forced conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims, ideas of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, attached social status to ancestry as well as religious profession. A convert could be Christian and still be treated with suspicion because of descent from Jewish or Muslim forebears. Scholars disagree about whether such practices should be called racial in the modern sense, and the disagreement is important. What the evidence securely establishes is that religion and ancestry were becoming entangled in ways that made inherited identity politically significant before Atlantic racial systems fully stabilized.[4]
This is where the relationship to later white power becomes analytically useful. A society accustomed to distinguishing the fully legitimate Christian polity from religious outsiders already possessed concepts of chosenness, providence, sacred territory, mission, conversion, and civilizational hierarchy. None of those concepts mechanically produced racial slavery. Christianity also contained teachings on common creation, universal sin, universal salvation, and the equal moral worth of persons that later Christians used against slavery and racial domination. Historical causation lies in the struggle over which parts of the tradition were activated under new political and economic conditions.
The crucial change was that European expansion created encounters that could not be governed by older categories alone. Portuguese voyages along the African coast, Spanish conquest in the Americas, and later northern European empires confronted societies with their own governments, laws, religious systems, commercial networks, and intellectual traditions. Religious difference remained central, but it now interacted with land acquisition, labor demand, commercial competition, and imperial law. Christian identity could become one basis for deciding who possessed legitimate sovereignty, whose land claims counted, and which forms of coercion could be morally justified.
At that point the series reaches a threshold. Christian supremacy did not become white supremacy simply because Europeans crossed an ocean. Nor did theology alone cause conquest. Monarchs sought territory, merchants sought trade, states sought strategic advantage, and colonists sought labor and land. Theology mattered because it could interpret those interests within a moral universe. It could tell conquerors whether domination was compatible with Christian duty, whether non-Christian sovereignty was equal to Christian sovereignty, and whether conversion could justify political control.
That role is more consequential than the claim that religion merely supplied pious language after decisions had already been made. Ideas can authorize some choices and prohibit others. Institutions can turn theological distinctions into legal categories. Repeated practice can make a hierarchy appear natural even when its original justification was contested. The historical question, therefore, is not whether Christianity contained a single doctrine of conquest. It is how particular Christian authorities and political actors selected from a complex tradition when they needed to explain expansion.
This chronology also changes the moral argument. If we begin with modern racism, we may assume that Christian theology was corrupted only after Europeans invented racial categories. The older history shows a deeper vulnerability: Christianity had already spent centuries negotiating the temptation to identify possession of religious truth with entitlement to political privilege. Race would make some hierarchies more durable and less reversible, but it entered a world in which sacred identity had already been used to organize public power.
The next essay turns to the place where this inheritance became explicit in the law and theology of expansion: the papal bulls later associated with the Doctrine of Discovery. They did not create white supremacy, and the modern Catholic Church has repudiated the use of those documents to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Yet the documents reveal a decisive moment when Christian claims about mission and authority were placed in direct relationship with conquest, sovereignty, and the possession of non-Christian lands.
Notes
[1] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Lindsay Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Both works caution against assuming that race is exclusively modern while also requiring careful differentiation among medieval and modern forms of hierarchy.
[2] David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Nirenberg emphasizes the local and political specificity of Christian-Jewish-Muslim violence rather than treating it as an unbroken civilizational essence.
[3] For the distinction between medieval Christian anti-Judaism and later racial antisemitism, see the relevant historiographical surveys in Oxford Bibliographies, “Medieval Anti-Judaism,” and Kaplan, Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity.
[4] Maria Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Martinez traces the growing importance of genealogy and inherited status while resisting anachronistic simplification.