Columbus Day celebrates an ongoing threat to American democracy
Of the 12 federal holidays, Columbus Day is one of only three celebrating a person. Among that trinity, which includes the celebrations of the births of George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr., it remains peculiar. Unlike the first president of the nation and the 20th-century century civil rights leader, Christopher Columbus has only a tenuous connection to what became the United States. Although many of us were erroneously taught that “Columbus discovered America,” he never set foot on soil within our national borders and famously didn’t comprehend that he had encountered lands unknown to Europeans until his third voyage in 1498.
But by tethering their story to Columbus, early leaders of the United States magically endowed the fledgling nation with a 300-year pedigree, a genesis story whose “in the beginning” implied its birth was the outworking of Providence. They invented a past that gave their present holdings, and their rapacious ambitions, the veneer of divine inevitability.
The sweeping power of this narrative strategy, however, lay not just in the epic voyages of Columbus, but in a religious doctrine he relied upon and indeed helped crystallize: the Christian Doctrine of Discovery. As Spain and Portugal ramped up their exploration and colonization efforts in the latter half of the 15th century, the self-described Christian kings and queens sought a moral mandate that would simultaneously address their obligations to newly discovered peoples and mitigate bloodshed between themselves.
They turned to the closest thing to international law that existed at the time, the Roman Catholic Church. In a series of papal proclamations between 1452 and 1493 (the last precipitated by Columbus’ return from his first voyage to the Americas), a new theology crystalized for the new world. While the theological constructions of the Doctrine of Discovery were complex, their logic was straightforward.
more...[div class="excerpt"
= new reply since forum marked as read
