From “Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice” by L. Daniel Hawk
These alternative narratives often indict Christian complicity in the colonial project. Christian theologians constructed the ideological infrastructure that rendered colonization and dispossession as a divinely ordained mandate. Christian religious leaders cast the theft of Indigenous land as expansions of Christendom and as victories of Christian light over pagan darkness. Christian potentates claimed Indigenous lands in the name of God. Christian settlers committed atrocities against Indigenous people who occupied land they wanted. Christian leaders endorsed military operations to exterminate and remove resistant peoples. Christian missionary and educational programs demonized Indigenous cultures and attempted to erase Indigenous identities in warped attempts to civilize and Christianize Indigenous people. Christian settlers of European origin and descent, in short, participated with colonial powers in the construction, implementation, and perpetuation of colonial structures, and benefited by them. The whole operation was and is configured, in the American settler mind, by a conflation of Christianity and Euro-American civilization so thorough as to be inseparable.
I have written this book because I believe that settler Christians like myself have an obligation to dismantle the sinful structure that our Christian forebears established and that persists to the present day.