Political theology, discovery and the roots of the ‘great replacement’

Abstract

In recent years, fears of the ‘great replacement’, popularised by Renaud Camus, warning against a supposed Islamist take-over of France, have motivated White supremacist violence and resulted in mass shootings in Europe, New Zealand and the US. The author shows how this conspiracy theory can be traced back to medieval theological doctrines used to justify the conquest of Muslim lands in Al-Andalus and later refined to warrant the European subjugation of the Indigenous nations of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Through papal authority, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ bestowed a God-given right on Christian nations to take and control lands, wiping out or confining Indigenous people, to then repopulate countries at will − itself the real racial reversal of settler colonialism. The theological argument is now thoroughly secularised in law in the US. ‘A great replacement’, incorporating the Doctrine of Discovery coupled with eugenicist ideas, can be found in the works of Lothrop Stoddard, and echoes are found even today in utterances from US politicians and on Fox News.