Christopher Columbus, Richard Nixon and the Other Original American Sin — Part 1
Christian Nationalism and Fear of Native American Spirituality Carries Over to Today’s War on Drugs and Global Conflicts
Portugal. The Man’s new track, “Thunderdome [W.T.A.]” contends with issues of American identity and morality.
Welcome to America
I'm waiting on a miracle
All my sins American
...
My man Jesus was a Mexican
Walking on the Rio Grande
Learn to speak American
Massive cultural conflict surrounds the legacy of Christopher Columbus in the USA. His name and image mark countless American streets, squares, towns, cities, even nations (Colombia 😉.) Modern liberal sentiments question whether all this traditional veneration is kosher. Columbus’s cruelty was extreme and resulted in suffering and atrocity at unfathomable scale for Native American people, many at Columbus’s own hands and orders. Imperialism, colonialism and slavery, all the rage in 15th century Europe, have fallen severely out of fashion, for sure.
Protestors tear down a statute of Columbus and throw it into Baltimore harbor in 2020
Should we celebrate the figure behind these accomplishments which enabled the creation of our modern American nations even though many of his related actions were horribly immoral by modern standards? Columbus’s case is complicated (maybe clarified) because his cruelty was considered extreme, criminal in his own time, costing Columbus his New World governorship and a 6-week Old World imprisonment. Meanwhile, Columbus justified horrendous behavior in the name of spreading Christianity, as did the Spanish crown its American conquests. The enslavement of nations were justified in the name of Christ.
Love thy Neighbor indeed.
Medieval Catholics Gone Wild
Modern liberal perspectives are often criticized for unfairly judging the past by present standards. So I’ll attempt to flesh out some of the historical-spiritual context of Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
This daring venture over an uncharted ocean might also be viewed as a part of a flow of people and practices flowing west following the Muslim Ottoman’s sacking of Constantinople in 1453. The fall of the second Roman Empire amounted to cataclysmic instability for all mainland Europe, difficult to overstate. Invading Muslims threatened Christendom from the east and south, pushing along also a diaspora of Jews and other fleeing minorities while also making trade eastward more difficult and expensive. The push west was perhaps more desperate and fearful than greedy.
Armed with newer religion/worldview and superior military technology, the Ottomans perhaps seemed destined to conquer all of Europe. This possibility was likely feared most by the Pope and the Catholic monarchs, those tasked with defending Christendom. The survival of Christianity itself likely seemed at stake. After all, the Orthodox Christendom’s seat of power for nearly a millennium, the Hagia Sophia, was now a mosque deep in Muslim turf.
Also incredibly corrupt, 15th century Catholic leadership with mostly unchecked power often proved unconstrained by Christian morality. This combo of legitimate external threats and practically unchecked power of leadership seems a recipe for tyranny and atrocity. A generation later, Martin Luther would publish Ninety-five Theses in 1517 igniting the Protestant Reformation, highlighting the Vatican’s corrupt excesses of this era.
A generation before Columbus, Vlad Tepes the Impaler would be cheered and financed by Pope Pius II as he waged his 1462 scorched Earth campaign against the invading Ottomans. Infamously, Vlad not only burned every field and poisoned every well of his countryside to starve out the invaders. Aptly-named, the Impaler also ordered the torturous impalement of ~20,000 of his peasant subjects including women, children, even infants, creating a hellscape to terrorize Ottomans and halt their advance.
The depths of this cruelty inspired the Dracula legend, portrayed as fundamentally anti-Christian, literally bloodthirsty and evil in Bram Stoker’s 19th-century British horror fantasy. Interestingly, the chivalrous Order of the Dragon from where the name Dracula evolved was tasked with defending Christianity, or more accurately the Christian monarchs and Catholic Church. Indeed, from this Order of the Dragon emerged a real-life monster.
Also in 1492, Alexander VI (a Borgia, a prominent Spanish family notorious for amoral behavior) was elected Pope, thanks to naked bribery. Spain was not yet united, a fractured set of kingdoms. The final Muslim stronghold of Granada was vanquished this same fateful year to end Spain’s centuries-long Reconquista. With Muslim leadership expelled from the Iberian peninsula, Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella of Castille and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (the same two who sponsored Columbus) would unite Spain and revive the ugly Spanish Inquisition with the blessings of the new Borgia Pope. Officially expelling Jews from their turf, this internal tyranny would continue for three centuries: forced conversions, torture and expulsions at scale.
Pope Alexander VI later blessed Spain and Portugal’s external tyranny too, their subjugation and enslavement of the New World. Ew.
Human rights were not yet a thing. Religious freedom in insecure, medieval Christendom was definitely not happening, sadly.
The brutal conquest of the New World likewise cannot possibly be justified by Christ’s teachings. It can however in terms of Christian Nationalism, so long as one ignores the teaching of Christ. If self-interest and the spreading of one’s religion (by forcing it on subjects) are paramount, then rape, slaughter and enslavement on a grand scale in the name of Christ makes perfect sense. 🙃
That said, looking down one’s nose at the hard power, realpolitik approach is easy, especially from the comforts of modern Western lifestyles. But it is unwise to ignore it. Others certainly won’t. Morals and spirituality are fundamental but don’t mean much if one’s enslaved and family slaughtered. Ironically, Christian ideology would vehemently disagree — eternal salvation is paramount in that perspective, a profound reason to ‘turn the other cheek’ rather than risk offending God harming another of his children and subsequent damnation. But still, here on Earth, if subjugated, one’s values are unlikely to be perpetuated in what amounts to the grand spiritual-cultural survival of fittest worldviews.
Had Vlad been an extreme Cheek Turner rather than an extreme Impaler, Christendom would almost certainly have lost more turf. It is unclear, however, whether Vlad’s countless impalements were entirely necessary. Similarly questionable are Columbus’s brutality and greed, torturing natives for gold, allowing trade of native children for sexual slavery, and the brutal slaughter and enslavement of untold masses to enrich himself, the Spanish crown and Catholic Church.
But the results also speak for themselves from a certain perspective. The Ottoman’s advance was repelled, albeit at great human cost. Columbus and Spain’s conquest of the New World led to the native masses in central and south America adopting Catholicism, albeit horribly forcefully, and incompletely. Still, this connection is so deep today, it hides in plain sight. The ‘Latin’ of Latin America and the term ‘Latino’ are nods to Catholicism (aka Latin Christianity) and this history.
Columbus’s Christian nationalism served this purpose, for better or worse. Funny, we don’t remember Vlad very kindly at all despite his accomplishments for Christian nationalism like we do Columbus, even though both were notoriously cruel for their time. Yes, Vlad’s cruelty was more extreme. Still, seems to me Vlad was more appropriately made an anti-Christian horror myth while Columbus oppositely was lionized as a hero of early American colonial mythology.
Cancelling the Maya
Until recently, few non-Native Americans recognized the mirror image of the ‘miraculous,’ continental-scale Christian conversion was an immoral atrocity — genocide — destroying cultures, religions, myths, legends, histories and related wisdom.
One event seems particularly senseless. On July 12, 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa would kick off his New World Inquisition by burning thousands of Mayan items and codices, all of the known documents from that civilization in order cement the forced conversion of the recently conquered people.
The great Mayan cities were apparently abandoned before the arrival of the Spanish. Early European explorers (except Landa ironically) blew off that natives had constructed such grand structures, attributing instead the ancient ruins to the lost tribes of Israel, or Atlantis or other Euro-friendly BS.
Over the past decade, however, the advanced nature and scale of the Mayan civilization has become clearer thanks to newfangled lidar imaging technology and its ability to pierce the jungle. Indeed, researchers using this tech announced discovery of an unknown Mayan city in the southern Yucatan just last month. A 2018 review of such research estimated the total Mayan population peaked at over 10 million, a multiple of previous estimates, around 600-800AD. Another recent lidar survey in northern Guatemala of an older site found a city-state 10 times the scale previously understood. The pre-classical Maya, from 1000BC, were far more advanced and interconnected than Humankind had collectively remembered. The lead researcher cites “a whole volume of human history that we’ve never known.” These findings clearly indicate the Maya were among the great ancient civilizations.
The winners really do write the history books … and often burn competing ones. Winners most often don’t like to look like a-holes. Bishop Landa’s accounts represent the bulk of information we knew about the Maya until recently, his writings being practically the only surviving primary source on the topic:
We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which [the Maya] regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
Zealous conquerors like Landa were so concerned with religious conversion, they were more than a little biased in justifying cruel atrocities. To seal conversion, prevent religious hybridization and backsliding, these conquerors erased untold histories, priceless ancient art and wisdom on top of the slaughter, rape and enslavement. Now, consequently, they look like a-holes.
More recent decoding of Mayan language has brought a peek of what we’re missing in the few remaining Mayan books, only 4 known. For example, Mayan knowledge of astronomical motions is astoundingly accurate, some only 1 decimal less precise than ours today. These required a mathematical system more sophisticated than the one the Romans conjured, the Mayans being first known to use zeros as placeholders. An elite, educated priesthood would safeguard and employ these secrets, directing agricultural and religious practices. Wielding knowledge of the ‘will of the Gods’ to predict eclipses, solstices and equinoxes, the Mayan elite priesthood would justify their power and privilege in a highly structured and religious society.
According to Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, Spanish conquistadors encountered ecstatic Native American rituals involving psychedelic plants. Honorific names like ‘Flesh of the Gods’ demonstrate these plants importance in spirituality, perhaps a means to commune with the divine. Pollan convincingly argues that for Catholic leaders, this must have appeared suspiciously similar to the notion of Jesus’s Holy Sacrament: the blood and body of Christ, bread and wine, but foreign and strange of course. The holy Eucharist of the Catholic Church was, of course, metered out exclusively by its priesthood, justifying their power and privilege in a highly structured and religious society.
The effects from these native sacraments seem far more dramatic than wine, threatening indeed to the Catholic hierarchy. Sacramental wine, the blood of Christ, containing alcohol, is soothing and able to alter consciousness dramatically. Still it seems somewhat lacking juxtaposed to these psychedelic substances and the new internal worlds they open.
Who would wholeheartedly convert when the blood of the new God is less interesting, less compelling, less powerful than the flesh of the current ones?
So, naturally, Spanish leadership would brutally suppress use of these plants and any record or knowledge of them as witchcraft or similar bullshit. However, caches of ancient magic mushroom sculptures would remain hidden among ancient ruins, some three millennia old, only to be exhumed recently. Ritual use of the sacred plants would similarly remain underground, hidden from the invading conquerors and their laws.
Evolving American Impulses
Half a millennium after Columbus’s fateful mission, today, American society has reached a critical moment, a reckoning in the evolution of our morality and mythology. The myths glorifying Columbus’s atrocity under an older worldview, Christian Nationalism, are clearly conflicting with our newer, more inclusive Liberal impulses.
We cannot cheer for the brutal conqueror and still respect the conquered. And yet America embodies both identities.
Evolving out of Martin Luther’s Reformation and ensuing Enlightenment philosophy, Liberalism demands religious freedom first and foremost, to escape from the likes of the medieval Catholic Church, Spanish Crown and their spiritual repression. Embracing more closely the morality of Christ’s teachings, Liberalism is founded upon the essential worth of each human, entitling individuals to inalienable rights and political/legal equality.
These two philosophical-spiritual impulses, Christian Nationalism vs Liberalism, perpetually in conflict, underlie so much of our US history. The older Euro-Christian nationalistic worldview would edge out newer Liberal philosophy on issues like slavery and racial equality for much of our history. Perhaps a more accurate framing is that while both philosophies co-evolve, Liberalism has fairly consistently advanced and overtaken older Christian nationalistic worldview for the past 300 years or so in our culture and law.
For the past 50 years, however, the War on Drugs has defied this trend, perhaps as American Christendom feels its worldview is existentially threatened in a quickly changing society undergoing ground-shaking revolutions in technology and knowledge. As such, that declaration of war might be conceptualized as a reactionary impulse to subjugate worldviews in competition with Christian nationalism, instigated by the Nixon administration and continuing today.
Yet today, after half a millennium of suppression, many psychedelic drugs and plants finally are being recognized as useful, powerful medicines, achieving regulatory approval as agents to assist in intensive psychotherapy. It is no coincidence that the disorders these drugs are now proven to help treat have traditionally been associated with spirituality and the soul under a Christian worldview: anxiety, depression, PTSD and addiction. These are all debilitating ailments of the mind and ego, which all may blunt or distort individuals will.
So, ironically and unfortunately, in its attempts to contain SCARY SATANIC EVIL DRUGS, this impulse has buried critical tools now proven helpful to individuals to escape life-sucking spiritual ailments like substance addiction. Ironically, the ‘blood of Christ’, aka wine, quite oppositely is very addictive and extremely unlikely to help one shake one’s bad habits, more likely to have the opposite effect.
New Christian Saviors?
Finally, today, disturbing global political conflict centers around these same ideological clashes of Christian Nationalism vs Liberalism, two conflicting worldviews. Once again, like the Borgia Pope and Spanish monarchs, not exactly white knights upholding decent Christian values, but rather amoral goons have taken up the mantle of Christian Nationalism. They frame this struggle as an existential spiritual battle against evil Liberal ideology and its excesses - including Putin, Trump, the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian Christofascist Alexander Dugin and American Christofascist Michael Flynn among others. Even notoriously amoral political operative Roger Stone is leaning on his ‘newfound love for Jesus.’
Liberals and left wing Americans, many today dismissive of Christianity and religion in general, would be wise to take these goons and their declarations of spiritual war seriously. They are reading from the same play book at the very least, be they Russian, American or otherwise. The power of the church to unify and inspire is not small. Linked by more than just their cynical use of religion as a tool of reactionary politics, these ideological allies seem to scratch each other’s backs also, like with interference/collusion in the 2016/2020 US elections. Are we prepared for them to collude again in 2024 with the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and Trump’s candidacy/prosecution?
Right wing Americans hopefully see past these cynical anti-Christians masquerading as the real deal. Trump is no messiah, although he seems to be hard selling that impression with his recent declaration: “I am being indicted for you” (. . . and your sins.)
Up Next:
Part 2 tracks psychedelic American plants rediscovery by Western mass consciousness. Mescaline from peyote cactus first escaped containment inspiring powerful spiritual epiphanies . . . just as fascism seized Europe.
Great insights!
Fascinating article. History, warts and all, needs to be taught. Columbus might have “discovered “ the Americas, however his treatment of the natives needs to be taught.
I also liked the comparison of the Eucharist and the psychedelic religious practices in the native cultures. If you believe in a god, I'd imagine you'd get closer via psychedelic insight. Looking forward to part 2.