Learning to face the doctrine of discovery

Every spring semester when I was in college, I would pray for another white friend who had headed to the farthest corners of the world to preach the good news of Jesus. Heather was going to Turkey, Steph to Uganda. In the fall, they would come back with stories, trinkets, and pictures of themselves with little black and brown children hanging off their shoulders. In those days, I didn’t know the language of colonialism, Amer­ican exceptionalism, or white supremacy. The idea of short-term missions made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t articulate why. I wish I’d had a book like Unsettling Truths.

Evangelical scholars Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, both of whom are people of color, offer a people’s history of the United States rooted in an unapologetic critique of the sins that run through American culture and go back to its founding. They focus on the doctrine of discovery, a theological justification for European exploitation of foreign lands and people that originated in a set of 15th-century papal bulls. Charles and Rah trace the evolution of this theological perversion from the era of Constantine to the white Ameri­can exceptionalism of the present. They reveal the social dysfunction that results from it, and they name it as a sin that flies in the face of what scripture says about who God is and what our relationship to the world ought to be.

This is the kind of book that sneaks up on you. The first few chapters lay out the theoretical groundwork for the authors’ arguments, and it’s easy to read them at an emotional distance. But the critiques become progressively deeper, and by the book’s midpoint they are visceral. Charles and Rah are not afraid to tear down the idols precious to right- and left-leaning American Christians: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Founding Fathers, and Abra­ham Lincoln.