From Christian Supremacy to White Power: The Doctrine of Discovery
White Theology and White Power Part V
In 2023, the Vatican formally addressed a phrase that has become central to Indigenous critiques of Christian colonialism: the Doctrine of Discovery. A joint statement from the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development rejected the doctrine as part of Catholic teaching and acknowledged that several fifteenth-century papal documents had been manipulated by political powers to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples, sometimes without adequate opposition from church authorities.[1]
That clarification matters. It also raises a historical question that belongs at the center of White Theology and White Power.
The papal documents associated with the Doctrine of Discovery were not written in the language of modern whiteness. Calling them straightforward expressions of white supremacy would collapse centuries of historical development. Their importance lies elsewhere. They mark a period in which European Christian authority was increasingly joined to European political power over non-European peoples.
The people empowered to sail, claim, evangelize, govern and possess were European Christians. The peoples whose sovereignty could be questioned, whose territories could become objects of European claim, and whose religious difference could diminish their standing before European authorities were increasingly African and Indigenous.
That was not yet white supremacy.
But it helped create some of the institutional relationships that white power would later inherit.
When Christian Authority Became European Authority
Three papal bulls are commonly placed at the center of the discussion: Dum Diversas of 1452, Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and Inter Caetera of 1493. They arose under different circumstances and should not be fused into a single colonial constitution drafted in advance of European expansion. Historians are right to insist on their distinctive diplomatic, military and ecclesiastical settings.[2]
Yet the documents shared a political and theological world.
Papal authority, Christian mission, European dynastic ambition and conflict with non-Christian peoples could be brought into the same moral framework.
Dum Diversas authorized the Portuguese crown, in the context of warfare against named non-Christian enemies, to conquer and subjugate them, including through perpetual servitude. Romanus Pontifex later confirmed broad Portuguese privileges along the African coast and located expansion within a language of Christian mission and papal authorization. Inter Caetera, issued after Columbus’s first voyage, granted the Spanish crown claims over lands not already under Christian rule while making evangelization a central stated purpose.[3]
Their categories were primarily religious and jurisdictional rather than modern racial ones: Christian and non-Christian, Christian sovereign and non-Christian ruler, mission and resistance, lands subject or not subject to Christian authority.
But that distinction reveals rather than resolves the problem.
European rulers already wanted land, trade routes, strategic advantage, wealth and labor. Papal theology did not create those interests. What religious authority could do was place some forms of expansion inside a moral universe in which European Christian domination could be understood as compatible with Christian responsibility.
The theological contribution was therefore more consequential than providing religious decoration after conquest had already been decided. It could help answer a prior question: What are Christians permitted to do to peoples outside the Christian political order?
Once the answer included conquest, subjugation or jurisdiction over territory, Christian supremacy had moved into a new institutional form.
It had become attached to European power.
Who Had the Power to Name?
This is where the Doctrine of Discovery connects directly to the first argument of this series.
Essay #1 asked why Black theology is called Black theology while the historically dominant Western tradition is so often called simply theology. One sign of power is the ability to name everyone else’s location while leaving one’s own unnamed.
A similar asymmetry developed in European expansion.
Who possessed the authority to call a place “discovered”?
Who determined whether another people’s sovereignty was sufficient?
Who decided which forms of landholding counted as possession?
Who determined whether religious difference affected political legitimacy?
Who could transform exploration into jurisdiction and jurisdiction into property?
Increasingly, European Christian powers answered those questions.
The significance is not that Europeans invented territorial conquest; human societies had conquered one another for millennia. The difference was the emergence of an increasingly global system in which European political actors possessed the military, ecclesiastical and eventually legal capacity to classify other peoples while rarely treating their own European Christian authority as a category equally in need of justification.
The classifier did not normally experience itself as classified.
That is a recurring feature of dominant power.
Christianity Contained Its Own Critique
The strongest objection to this argument is important: Christian Europe also produced profound critiques of conquest.
Antonio de Montesinos publicly condemned Spanish abuses in the Caribbean. Bartolomé de las Casas spent decades challenging colonial violence and defending Indigenous humanity. Francisco de Vitoria questioned the legitimacy of several Spanish claims to sovereignty and insisted that non-Christian peoples possessed forms of natural right that Christian rulers could not simply erase.[4]
Those voices prevent a deterministic history.
European Christianity did not contain one inevitable political meaning. Christian claims about creation, natural law, human dignity and moral obligation could constrain conquest as well as rationalize it.
That internal conflict actually sharpens the question.
If Christian thinkers could recognize serious moral limits on conquest while expansion was occurring, then the relationship between theology and empire cannot be dismissed as something Christians only understood retrospectively.
Alternative theological judgments were available.
The historical issue is which interpretations acquired institutional power.
From Religious Difference to European Difference
The Doctrine of Discovery occupies an important place between older Christian hierarchy and later racial hierarchy.
Earlier Christian societies primarily distinguished Christians from Jews, Muslims, pagans and heretics. Religious belonging could affect law and political membership, but conversion at least theoretically changed one’s status.
European expansion complicated those categories.
A European Christian encountering an African or Indigenous American was not operating with the fully developed racial classifications of the nineteenth century. Yet religion was now interacting with geography, ancestry, civilization, land, labor and political sovereignty.
The older distinction between Christian and non-Christian increasingly overlapped with another distinction: European and non-European.
Later Atlantic societies would add increasingly rigid categories of white, Black and Indigenous.
These categories did not replace one another neatly. They accumulated, overlapped and changed.
That historical progression matters. White supremacy did not simply appear when Europeans suddenly decided that skin color determined human worth. It developed within institutions that had already accumulated experience assigning unequal political consequences to difference.
When the Theology Faded but the Power Remained
The legal afterlife of discovery demonstrates the durability of that structure.
European Protestant empires rejected papal authority, but they did not necessarily reject the underlying assumption that European Christian societies possessed superior authority to evaluate Indigenous sovereignty, landholding and political organization.
English Protestant colonists could condemn Rome while developing their own languages of providence, covenant, improvement, civilization and possession.
The theological institution changed.
The hierarchy could survive.
By the nineteenth century, that process could become even more secular.
In Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823, Chief Justice John Marshall described European discovery as creating rights among European powers while diminishing the sovereignty of Indigenous occupants. Indigenous peoples retained a right of occupancy, but their ability to dispose of land had been restricted by the superior claim generated through European discovery.[5]
Marshall was not simply enforcing a fifteenth-century papal bull.
That is precisely why the case matters.
A framework that had developed within a European Christian world had migrated into American property law. The explicitly theological language had weakened, but the asymmetry of power remained: European-derived sovereignty occupied the superior legal position, while Indigenous sovereignty had been diminished.
By this point, the beneficiaries of the settler state increasingly understood themselves not merely as Christians or Europeans but as members of a racialized white political order.
Theology could disappear from the legal rule while institutions retained consequences that theology had once helped make imaginable.
This is one of the central lessons of white power: a hierarchy does not require its original theological explanation to remain in place once law, property and institutions have absorbed it.
Theology, Law and Political Economy
That interaction is more useful than any single-cause explanation of colonialism.
Theology could provide moral authorization.
Law could convert authority into jurisdiction and title.
Political power could enforce the claim.
Economic systems could reward acquisition of land, labor and resources.
None operated alone.
That is why the Doctrine of Discovery should not be reduced either to theology or to economics. European rulers did not conquer simply because popes issued documents, and merchants did not become imperialists simply because missionaries preached.
Conquest became durable when moral permission, legal authority, state power and material advantage reinforced one another.
White power would later operate through the same institutional interaction.
Why Repudiation Is Not the End of the Story
The 2023 Vatican statement rightly recognizes the dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples and acknowledges the harmful uses made of historical papal documents. But repudiating a theological justification does not automatically undo the political and material systems constructed during the centuries when that justification exercised influence.
That is why Indigenous scholars and communities continue to ask questions about land, archives, wealth, sovereignty and institutional responsibility.
Repentance is relatively easy when it concerns a belief that can simply be renounced.
Repair is harder when the consequences have become property.
The Doctrine of Discovery was therefore never principally about Europeans privately disliking Indigenous peoples. It concerned power: the authority to define legitimate sovereignty, determine who could possess land, classify religious and civilizational difference, and translate conquest into law.
That is why it belongs in a series on white theology and white power.
The papal bulls were not yet documents of modern white supremacy. They belong to an earlier moment when Christian supremacy was becoming increasingly identified with European political authority.
But the direction of movement is now visible.
Christian/non-Christian.
European/non-European.
Colonizer/colonized.
And, as the Atlantic world developed, increasingly white/Black/Indigenous.
Those categories were neither identical nor inevitable. Each emerged under different historical circumstances.
But they became connected.
The next essay follows one of the most consequential of those connections. In seventeenth-century Virginia and other Atlantic colonies, Christian societies confronted a destabilizing question: if an enslaved African became Christian, should Christian belonging alter that person’s civil status?
The answer increasingly became no.
Baptism could change the soul without changing bondage. Law made slavery hereditary through the mother. African ancestry became increasingly attached to permanent servitude.
At that point, an older Christian hierarchy was becoming something more durable.
It was becoming racial power.
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Notes
[1] Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, “Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery,” March 30, 2023. The Vatican states that the so-called Doctrine of Discovery is not part of Catholic teaching and acknowledges that historical papal documents were manipulated by political authorities to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples.
[2] Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[3] Dum Diversas (1452); Romanus Pontifex (1455); Inter Caetera (1493). These documents arose in different political and diplomatic settings and should not be treated as a single timeless legal code. Their importance here is the relationship they established among Christian mission, papal authority, European expansion and non-Christian political communities.
[4] Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); see also scholarship on Antonio de Montesinos, Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria concerning Christian and natural-law critiques of Spanish conquest.
[5] Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823); Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
