New Publication: Sacralizing Dominion

Betty Hill (Lyons) and I have a new article out in Religions: "Sacralizing Dominion: The Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Religious Nationalist Imagination." It came out on September 21 in volume 17, issue 9.

It picks up where our 2024 article, Documenting Domination, left off. That piece traced the papal bulls from the Catholic crowns of Europe into U.S. law and on into dominion theology. This one asks a narrower question. When white Christian nationalism says it wants to restore something, what is it restoring? Our answer is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery.

Here is the abstract:

White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls' vocabulary of discovery, vacancy, and civilization did not describe a world but constituted one: a moral-legal order in which Christian identity conferred sovereignty and racialized peoples appeared as obstacles to salvation and property. That order persists as hegemonic common sense, carried by legal precedent, curricula, and popular culture, and it is re-performed today in the territorial rhetoric of the New Apostolic Reformation and white Christian nationalism. Following Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), repudiating the doctrine's documents without dismantling its embeddedness within language and cognition leaves religious nationalism's deepest resource intact. Against the discovery template, we set three counter-rhetorics—Indigenous theologies, Black theology, and womanism—and argue that desanctifying dominion requires conciliation, not reconciliation.

The debt to Steven T. Newcomb runs through the whole argument. Repudiating the documents is not the same as dismantling them. The vocabulary of discovery, vacancy, and civilization still does its work in legal precedent, in curricula, and in popular culture, whether or not anyone cites a bull.

Cite it #

Brett, Adam D. J., and Betty Hill (Lyons). 2026. "Sacralizing Dominion: The Doctrine of Christian Discovery and the Religious Nationalist Imagination." Religions 17 (9): 1105. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17091105

The article is free and open access. If you teach on Christian nationalism or the Doctrine of Discovery and put it on a syllabus, I'd love to hear how it goes in the classroom.