Speaker Daniel Hawk spoke to the Honors Program about the history of Christian colonists.

The lecture was titled “We Are the Saints: How Christian Colonists Justified Taking Indigenous Land,” Hawk is the Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Ashland Theological Seminary.

The main issue discussed was the Christian justification for violence, through the colonial lens, how this idea works.

The goal of the lecture was to answer the question: by what right do immigrant people have to? take land from the people who lived there beforehand?

Hawk began by answering the question: How does God make room for a people to dwell?

His answers were lawful war, moves on the hearts to sell, and vacancy.

The primary focus was on the vacancy part.

Where there is a vacant place, there is a right to claim the land because Christians fulfill the mandate God gave to Adam and Eve at the very beginning of the Christian narrative.

Pope Nicholas gave the authority to subdue, enslave and possess to the Portuguese.

Pope Alexander, likewise, gave the authority over to the Spanish, saying that if there was discovered land, it was free to take over.

The popes sent out these because they were the authoritative representative of God OnGodon Earth. This authority was passed on through the laying on of hands and could be traced back to the Apostle Peter.

The Protestant Reformation created Christian powers that do not respect the authority of the pope.

However this practice continued, by using the ægis of saying that they were Christian affiliates, such as the English saying, “I am a Christian monarch.”

Indigenous people saw the land as a resource for life.

The puritans saw land as a commodity, a resource for wealth, and in need of replenishment. They saw it as fallen without their replenishment and saw the people of the land as therefore fallen and sinful. They saw the replenished earth to look like England.

Meanwhile the indigenous people used controlled burning, and great agricultural techniques to improve the land. The Puritans, because of the lack of improvement according to their definition, then concluded that the land was vacant and free for the taking. There was then an amount of trickery that was used to continue taking the land.

The settler structure of colonialism continued to be used throughout the course of US history. It was these beliefs that allowed our country to be created. These ideas were moved to encompass not only the indigenous people, but spread to all non-settler people.

Hawk then moved on to discuss why this matters to modern society. He mentioned the war on woke and the new shift in society. He connected these settler ideas to our modern efforts and our realization of these ideas.