Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 7: Christianity Was a Weapon of Conquest
Chapter 7 turns to the church itself, tracing how Christianity became both the moral machinery of white terrorism—from the Doctrine of Discovery through Georgetown's 1838 slave sale to apartheid theology—and, in the hands of the enslaved, a language of freedom. It weighs the church's belated reckonings, from the Vatican's unrescinded 2023 repudiation to Pope Leo XIV's 2026 apology for the slave trade. The episode closes by asking a converted Africa, now home to the faith's demographic center, what it owes to a religion handed to it at gunpoint.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
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Show Notes
In Chapter 7 of the series, Chisom turns to the institution that blessed all of it, the church. The claim is that Christianity was not incidental to white terrorism but its moral machinery and a material instrument of conquest, the apparatus that turned terror into salvation so the people carrying it out believed they were doing the work of God, while the same faith, in the hands of the people it was used against, became the language of their freedom. It traces the charter from the papal bulls and the Doctrine of Discovery to the suspected graves at the church-run schools, the slave ship named the Jesus, the Jesuits of Georgetown who sold two hundred and seventy-two people in 1838, and the theology of apartheid, weighs the church’s own late and unenforced condemnations of slavery, and reads the reckoning now arriving, from the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation that left the bulls unrescinded to Pope Leo the Fourteenth’s first papal apology for the slave trade in May 2026. It closes by turning the Three Clarities on the converted, on an Africa that now holds the centre of the faith it was once handed at gunpoint, and asks whose religion it is now, how it arrived, and what is theirs to do with it.