Beyond Chosen Peoples: Can Humanity Outgrow Religious Supremacy?
Part 2: What Has Supremacy Cost Us?
Part One named the fallacies. Now we look at what those fallacies produce when they gain power. This is not a comfortable accounting. We examine colonial genocide, holy war, slavery sanctified by scripture, the persecution of internal dissenters and the atrocities continuing in real time. We examine multiple traditions because this is a structural problem, not one tradition’s pathology.
Colonial Christianity and the Burning of Civilizations
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans,” and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended this to conquered lands. Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 Inter Caetera then divided the entire non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal as if it were uninhabited—because without Christianity, the millions already living there lacked full human standing in the Church’s theology.
What followed was one of history’s largest population collapses. Conservative estimates place the pre-contact Americas at 50 million people. By 1600, perhaps 10 million remained. European colonizers read this as divine providence: God clearing land for Christian settlement. Some deliberately spread smallpox-infected blankets. All of it was done with explicit theological justification. We are saving souls. We are bringing truth.
And so the codices burned. Not just in Maní. Across the continent. Spanish priests destroyed Aztec manuscripts, smashed sacred stones, prosecuted Indigenous people for the crime of maintaining their own spiritual practices. We lost civilizations’ worth of knowledge: astronomical systems, agricultural science developed across millennia, medicinal formulas, cosmological philosophy, all in the name of a 2,000 year old carpenter, but in actuality for a hegemonic ego. Centuries of accumulation reduced to ash because one tradition claimed it held the only legitimate map of reality.
The logic extended into the 19th and 20th centuries through residential schools—institutions in North America and Australia designed to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Children were torn from families, beaten for speaking their languages, prohibited from their ceremonies and systematically abused. Mass graves continue to be discovered. The churches that administered these schools genuinely believed they were doing God’s redemptive work. That is the precise horror: not monsters knowing they are monstrous, but believers certain they are righteous.
Competing Supremacies and the Logic of Holy War
If colonial genocide shows what supremacy does to populations it holds power over, the Crusades show what happens when two supremacies collide. In 1095, Pope Urban II called for a military campaign to retake Jerusalem, promising that Muslim blood purchased remission of sins—a heaven-ticket on the blade. When Crusaders breached Jerusalem’s walls in 1099, they massacred the population. Muslim, Jewish, Eastern Christian. Contemporary accounts describe blood ankle-deep in the streets. The Crusaders gave thanks to God.
From the Islamic side, this was a defensive war against Christian invasion of sacred territory. Both sides held divine mandate. Both framed the conflict in cosmic terms. When two traditions each claim God’s exclusive authorization, there is no neutral ground for negotiation. Compromise becomes apostasy. Coexistence becomes unacceptable. The only exits are conversion, subjugation or…annihilation. The love of the “one true god” knows no end.
The pattern crosses every tradition. Hindu rulers demolished Buddhist and Jain temples. Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar have driven genocide against the Rohingya under the explicit theology of protecting Buddhist civilization—monks at the vanguard of ethnic cleansing. The Western stereotype of Buddhism as inherently peaceful deserves to be retired permanently—if not for the sake of urgency, for the sake of historical accuracy. The structure of supremacy, not the nominal tradition, is the variable that predicts violence.
Scripture as Weapon: Slavery and Its Theological Defenses
American chattel slavery was not conducted despite Christianity. It was conducted with Christianity’s explicit theological blessing. Churches owned slaves. Pastors built elaborate biblical justifications from the “Curse of Ham” (🐷) in Genesis through the Pauline epistles. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 specifically to defend slaveholders’ rights. This was not a fringe position. It was mainstream theology in the American South, preached from respectable pulpits to respectable congregations.
The same scriptures used to defend slavery were later used by abolitionists to condemn it. This does not mean texts are neutral. It means that when a tradition claims its interpretation is inerrant divine truth, it can sanctify any power structure it wishes to preserve—then sanctify its opposite when power shifts. The problem is not the text. It is the epistemological claim that one reading transcends all critique whenever it is convenient to do so.
Gaza: The Lie That Supremacy Is Ancient History
Perhaps nothing exposes the delusion of “religious violence is a relic” more clearly than the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians since October 2023, the vast majority of them non-combatants, with entire family lines erased and the majority of Gaza’s infrastructure deliberately destroyed.
We are told by Western media to understand this as a complex geopolitical conflict involving security concerns and terrorism, which is true in several regards. But the theological infrastructure of Israeli settler-colonialism and the Greater Israel project is not hidden.
It is explicit.
Religious Zionism holds that the land of “Erets Yisrael”—Greater Israel, encompassing the West Bank, Gaza and by some accounts Lebanon, Jordan and Syria—was given by God to the Jewish people. Palestinian Arabs, being outside this covenant, have no legitimate claim to it. Settlement expansion, forced displacement, and military domination of the civilian Palestinian population are not unfortunate side effects of security policy. They are the implementation of a theological premise: We are the chosen people. This land is our divine inheritance. The others are obstacles or threats, not fully equal stakeholders in the same territory.
Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and the broader Religious Zionist party within the Israeli governing coalition do not conceal this theology.
They articulate it openly.
Smotrich has stated explicitly that there are no Palestinian people. Ben Gvir has called for the expulsion of Arab Israelis. The legal infrastructure of settlements, military checkpoints and differential rights for Jewish and Palestinian residents in the West Bank is the daily administrative expression of a chosen-people theology.
I invoke this not to take a side in a geopolitical dispute, but to demonstrate that religious supremacy is not a medieval relic requiring archaeological excavation. It is structurally active, state-funded and producing mass civilian death right now. The same logic that burned the Mayan codices—”we have the truth. They are not fully human in the same way we are. Therefore our claims supersede theirs”—is operational in 2025.
This is precisely why the series you are reading is not academic. The stakes are not historical. They are current.
Supremacy Turns Inward: Heresy, Schism and Sectarian War
Supremacy does not only attack outsiders. It must constantly police its own borders. The Spanish Inquisition lasted from 1478 to 1834, burning and torturing not only Jews and Muslims but Christians who held the wrong doctrinal positions. Questioning transubstantiation was heresy. Owning a vernacular Bible was heresy. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) killed approximately 8 million people, reducing some Central European regions’ populations by half—fought between Catholic and Protestant Christians, each convinced their version was the exclusively legitimate one. Both read the same Gospels about loving enemies. Both killed.
The Sunni-Shia split, beginning with succession disputes after Muhammad’s death, has generated 1,400 years of periodic violence. Both groups worship the same God, revere the same Prophet and follow the same Quran. The differences are matters of interpretation and authority. Combined with claims to exclusive legitimacy, they have produced the Iran-Iraq War, the Yemen conflict and decades of sectarian violence across the Middle East.
The pattern is clear: Supremacy requires certainty. Certainty requires policing. Policing requires force. The targets are first outsiders, then internal dissenters, then the merely insufficiently orthodox. The machine does not stop. It turns on whoever is nearest.
Next: Part Three — “The Occult Alternative”
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