On Thursday night’s The Reid Out on MSNBC, guest host Jonathan Capehart aired a pre-recorded interview host Joy Reid gave to Public Religion Research Institute founder and president Robert Jones who wrote a book smearing Christianity with the thesis being that the religion was brought to the Americas in the 1400s with the purpose to justify enslaving and killing Native Americans and African Americans. Of course, since Reid is a vile racist bigot, she loved this discussion.
Attempting to smear an entire religion, Jones sneered: “It’s a set of 15th-century Christian doctrines that were designed to answer the problem of what do we do with all these people we just encountered in these lands that we didn’t know about, in the 1400s. And so who do the Christian princes and queens and kings appeal to but the head of the Christian church.”
Jones continued:
It says the defining characteristic is whether or not these people are Christian or not. If they are not Christian and if they are not already subjugated by a Christian power, then they essentially have no human rights. And it goes on to explicitly spell out that they have the right to occupy, conquer, kill, steal their goods, and then this phrase like is like literally in the document, something that still rings in my head, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. This is in the document from the highest power of the Christian church in the late 1400s.
Reid then jumped in and backed him up. “So this is what gives license in their minds to European colonizers to try to enslave indigenous people, to wipe them out if they resist in any way, and to enslave Africans. That’s how they do it and still in their minds advance the interests of Christianity.”
Jones agreed and went a step further and insisted this type of Christianity is still in America today:
“It’s worth remembering this is the version of Christianity that lands on these shores and in fact, motivates the landing on these shores, and I think one of the things I’ve become convinced of and one of the reasons why—at the heart of this new book is that this idea that this country is intended by God to be a promise land for European Christians is very much still with us.”
This smear of the dominant religion in the United States was made possible thanks to the endorsement of Liberty Mutual.
The transcript is below:
MSNBC’s The ReidOut9/7/20237:48:04 p.m. Eastern
ROBERT P. JONES: Well, I should say that this is something actually fairly new to me. I have a Ph.D. in religion, I studied a lot of American religious history, and this idea of the Doctrine of Discovery was fairly new. So what it is, it’s a set of 15th-century Christian doctrines that were designed to answer the problem of what do we do with all these people we just encountered in these lands that we didn’t know about, in the 1400s. And so who do the Christian princes and queens and kings appeal to but the head of the Christian church? And this, I should say it is a Catholic doctrine, but this is before the Catholic-Protestant split, so it is a Christian doctrine for all of Western Europe here. So they appeal to the religious authority, the Pope, and they get a decision about what their responsibilities are. And it basically runs like this. It says the defining characteristic is whether or not these people are Christian or not. If they are not Christian and if they are not already subjugated by a Christian power, then they essentially have no human rights. And it goes on to explicitly spell out that they have the right to occupy, conquer, kill, steal their goods, and then this phrase like is like literally in the document, something that still rings in my head, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. This is in the document from the highest power of the Christian church in the late 1400s.
JOY REID: And so this is what gives license in their minds to European colonizers to try to enslave indigenous people, to wipe them out if they resist in any way, and to enslave Africans. That’s how they do it and still in their minds advance the interests of Christianity.
JONES: That’s exactly right. It’s worth remembering this is the version of Christianity that lands on these shores and in fact, motivates the landing on these shores, and I think one of the things I’ve become convinced of and one of the reasons why—at the heart of this new book is that this idea that this country is intended by God to be a promise land for European Christians is very much still with us.
