With God On Their Side: The Christian Genocide Rulebook
“All the mischief and damage that we can”
The European conquerors used Christian theology as the basis of their rulebook for the exploitation of the New World.
The leading spokesman for this narrative was eminent Spanish scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who explained that the Indians of the New World were intended by God “to be placed under the authority of civilized and virtuous princes or nations, so that they may learn, from the might, wisdom, and law of their conquerors, to practice better morals, worthier customs and a more civilized way of life.” To ensure legal and theological validation for their plunder, the Spanish went through a bizarre process each time they encountered an indigenous community. They would read a statement to the Indians ordering them to swear allegiance to the Pope and the Spanish crown. If the Indians didn’t do as commanded (unlikely since they wouldn’t have understood a word), the statement went on:
I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses.
We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.
With this proclamation, known as the requerimiento, the Spanish considered the pillaging of the New World to be legally and morally justified.
The “beneficial order of Providence”
Even the diseases the Europeans brought with them were widely believed to be a demonstration of God’s support. An influential Spanish priest, Father Domingo de Betanzos, proclaimed in the early days of the conquest that God had condemned the entire Indian race to perish because of their sinful paganism.
This laid the foundation for a viewpoint embraced wholeheartedly by later generations, so that in 1843, respected American historian W. H. Prescott could write: “[I]t was beneficially ordered by Providence that the land should be delivered over to another race, who would rescue it from the brutish superstitions that daily extended wider and wider.” There are innumerable British accounts claiming God as an active participant in the gruesome massacres of the indigenous people. In describing a British attack on the Pequot Indians in 1636, Captain John Mason echoes the more bloodthirsty passages of the Old Testament:
And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished… [And] God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven… Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies!
Like the Spanish, the British were certain that the diseases they brought with them were God’s vehicle for clearing their path to conquest. This attitude became so ingrained that even Benjamin Franklin, known for his otherwise tolerant values, gladly justified the slaughter of the Indians, writing of “the design of Providence to extirpate those savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.”