10/09/2026
JOIN US for our next Community Call with Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery on Indigenous Peoples’ Day as we explore the connections between the Palestinian decolonial struggle with that of Indigenous Peoples in the so-called United States.
🗓️ Monday, October 12
đź•— 8:00 p.m. ET / 5:00 p.m. PT
đź’» Register for the call in bio
A lie was told by European Christians in the 15th century to justify the colonization of lands under the pretext that no one was there, or at least no one who really counted.
That lie has a name in the American story: the Doctrine of Discovery, a Christian framework written into U.S. law that gave settlers the moral and legal power to seize Indigenous land and enslave people. It shaped this country, and its “logic” never went away.
In Palestine, the same lie was told by British Christians in the 19th century to justify Christian Zionism as a political project.
The lie took the shape of the infamous slogan, “A land without a people, for a people without a land,” which came from Christian Zionists and politicians who believed Jews must relocate to Palestine to fulfill an apocalyptic Christian prophecy.
They described a land already full of Palestinians as empty. This lie was enacted when, in 1917, Britain’s Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes, further enacting the violent logic of the Doctrine of Discovery, which still persists today.
We will be digging deeper into this with the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, a group of people of faith working to undo the harm done in the name of Christ through the Doctrine of Discovery.
