Religious Left Laments America’s Discovery

by Mark D. Tooley
May 31st, 2012

Excerpt:
In early May, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori was there at the UN in New York to join in the mournful gabfest over the ostensibly lamentable “Doctrine of Discovery.” The international bureaucrats were focused on “Discovery’s” enduring “impact on indigenous peoples and the right to redress for past conquests.” The main sin for which redress is apparently needed is Western Civilization’s global reach.

Evidently Bishop Schori could not deliver all her thoughts at the UN session, so she later issued her own “Pastoral Letter on the Doctrine of Discovery and Indigenous Peoples.” Perhaps small numbers of elderly Episcopalians, if still awake in their pews, will listen to at least part of it.

Schori gloomily recalled centuries of brutal global conquest by Europeans professing to be Christian. Armed with “religious warrants, papal bulls which permitted and even encouraged the subjugation and permanent enslavement of any non-Christian peoples they encountered,” these savage conquerors achieved “wholesale slaughter, rape, and enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas, as well as in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific, and the African slave trade was based on these same principles.” In their wake followed “death, dispossession, and enslavement,” then “rapid depopulation [from]…epidemic disease.”

Of course, neither Bishop Schori nor the United Nations bureaucrats are interested in merely a history lesson. They want justice and redress. After all, the “ongoing dispossession of indigenous peoples” results from oppressive “legal systems” in the “’developed world,’” as Bishop Schori carefully put in quotations, that base land ownership on “religious warrants for colonial occupation from half a millennium ago.”

So essentially, Bishop Schori would like to undo the last 500 years of land ownership and wealth accumulation in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere tainted by Western imperialism. After all, the “dispossession of First Peoples continues to wreak havoc on basic human dignity.” These mystical First Peoples are still “grieving their loss of identity, lifeways, and territory.” And “all humanity should be grieving” with them. Without irony, Schori cited Old Testament prophetic justice, which came from the ancient Hebrew conquerors of the Canaanites and other “First Peoples.”

Of course, Schori focused on grievous sins against the First Peoples of the United States, emphasizing the Episcopal Church’s long solidarity with them, while briefly citing her predecessor’s apology in 1997 for the “enormities that began with the colony in Jamestown.” She emphasized: “Today our understanding of mission has changed.” Indeed. Unlike the old missionaries, today’s Episcopal elites stress “healing” among people, and with the earth, while “reversing structural and systemic injustice,” of which there is so much. She even cited Episcopal Church support for the “Violence Against Women Act” currently before Congress. the rest