Source: Doctrine of Discovery: A conversation with Mark Charles — Faiths4Future

Doctrine of Discovery: A conversation with Mark Charles

Mar 5 Written By Richenda Fairhurst

In February, we were joined by Mark Charles for a robust Climate Cafe Multifaith conversation that touched deeply on the themes of the Climate Justice movement. Mark Charles is co-author with Soong-Chan Rah of the book Unsettled Truths, the Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, as well as a public speaker, consultant, and cultural conversant through platforms such as youtube, twitter, and Patreon. He grew up in the Christian Reformed Church tradition, but as a person of both Navajo and Dutch heritage, he learned to ask big questions of himself, his community, his nation, and the Creator.

Mark Charles brings big questions to his work. It is work that has taken him from sunrise to sunrise across the country. As a speaker and leader he offers up the invitation for others to join him in engaging the big questions of colonization, environmental stewardship, and our stories of creation. He challenges us to bring a spirit of goodwill and a heart ready to be moved as the conversation unfolds both personally and in community. For our cafe, he further brought that big discussion together with the crisis we face in climate change.

At the core of his conversation and teaching at the cafe was Charles’s observation that “Western Christianity has lost its own understanding of creator.” Charles asserts that as people in the West lost connection to their indigenous roots, they searched for stories to fill that gap—stories that were not necessarily their own. Christianity, then, changed the religious landscape of Europe at the same time as Europe experienced a growing aspiration for wealth and power. What resulted was a Christianity not as salvation for the poor but as dominion for an empire. And when Christianity married conquest in the west, it anointed itself with a genocidal law: the Doctrine of Discovery.

What is the Doctrine of Discovery? Charles shares that it was his father who first invited him to learn the answer to that question. What he learned horrified him. Says Charles, “The Doctrine of Discovery is essentially the church in Europe saying to the nations of Europe, wherever you go, whatever land you find not ruled by white, European Christian rulers, those people are subhuman and their land is yours to take.” This Doctrine, issued and signed by two Catholic Popes in the 1400s, gave permission—in the name of ‘Christendom’—to monarchs to enslave, capture, and dispossess other human beings for profit, land and power.