Church & State 250: Doctrine of Discovery and America Before 1776

Can America tell the truth about itself if it starts the story in 1776? 

Mark Charles, Navajo writer, speaker, activist, and co-author of Unsettling Truths, opens Church and State 250 by arguing that America’s religious story begins with land, conquest, colonization, and theology. Charles explains the Doctrine of Discovery, the papal ideas that gave Christian Europe permission to claim land already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, and how that logic later shaped colonial charters, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Manifest Destiny, Supreme Court precedent, and modern Christian nationalism. 

He challenges familiar phrases like “Columbus discovered America,” “nation of immigrants,” and “We the People,” asking listeners to notice who was excluded from those stories. This is not an easy opening conversation. It is a necessary one, because Charles insists that the country cannot build a shared future without first creating a common memory.

Guest Bio
Mark Charles is a Navajo writer, speaker, consultant, activist, and co-author of Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery. The son of an American woman of Dutch heritage and a Navajo man, Charles teaches on the intersections of American history, race, culture, faith, land, and Christendom. He is the author of Reflections from the Hogan, co-founder of the Would Jesus Eat Frybread? college-conference series, and in 2020 ran as an independent candidate for president while advocating for a national Truth and Conciliation Commission on race, gender, and class. In this conversation, Charles helps explain why America’s religious history has to begin with Indigenous land, the Doctrine of Discovery, colonization, and the stories the country tells about itself.

Book Mentioned
Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780830845255

Relevant Links & Resources
Mark Charles Official Website
URL: https://wirelesshogan.com/about/

Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091

Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We have no common memory. And there's no point in US history that we can look back on and see healthy community across racial lines at a national level. That point does not exist in our nation's history. We were this nation was founded on a doctrine of discovery. It was built on the belief of ethnically cleansing your promised land. It was justified because of this creator-to-king narrative. I said creator is no longer a creator, creator is now a king. Who rules over empires. And we're marching towards a city of gold. And we've forgotten these things. And so I am working as hard as I can to build this kind of. I'm not trying to cancel people. I'm not even trying to shame people. I'm merely asking the questions my grandparents and other people never were given the agency to ask. And I'm saying our challenges are not partisan, they're foundational.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Hey, welcome to the first episode of Church and State 250 plus years of faith in America. Over the course of this series, we're going to be looking at the role religion has played in shaping American history, politics, law, culture, and public life. But to tell that story honestly, we can't begin in 1776, where most of the country is planning on starting when we celebrate the 4th of July. Instead, we have to start a little bit earlier. We have to start with land, conquest, colonization, theology, and the ideas that help shape what Europeans believe they had the right to do when they arrived here. And that's one of the reasons we're starting with Mark Charles. Mark is a Navajo writer, speaker, and activist whose work focuses on the intersection of faith, race, culture, and American history. He is the co-author with Sung Chan Ra of Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine Discovery, a book that challenges the way the both the church and the country have told the American story. So we're just so lucky to have Mark back with us to talk to us more about the Doctrine Discovery and so much more and how religion has played a crucial role at the forming of what we call America today. So welcome back to the show, Mark.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Will thank you. Josh, thank you. It's so good to be here with both of you. I'd like to start just by introducing myself more traditionally for those of your audience who I haven't met yet. So Yat eh, Mark Charles Yanishia, Tsin Bekedina Inishle, Dotor Highlini Bashish Chin, Tsin Bekedina dasha cheduchodini dasha nela. In our novel culture, when we introduce ourselves, we always give our four clans. We're matrilineal as a people, and our identities come from our mother's mother. My mother's mother is American of Dutch heritage, which is why I say Tsinbekedine. Loosely translated, that means I'm from the wooden shoe clan, the clumpin that the Dutch wear. My second clan, my father's mother, is Toheglini, which is the waters that flow together. My third clan, my mother's father, is also Tsinbekedinea. And my fourth clan, my father's father, is Todachitney, and that's the Bitterwater clan. It's one of the original clans of our Navajo people. I also want to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you from Washington, D.C. My family and I moved here from the Navajo Nation about 11 years ago. I am a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo Nation. And where we live now here in Washington, D.C., my people call it Washington, but this is the traditionalized the Piscado. And the Piscadoway, they're the nation that they were living here, hunting here, farming here, fishing here, raising their families here, and burying their dead here long before Columbus got lost at sea. And they're still here. And so I make it a point to honor the Piscado whenever I speak, wherever I go, as the host people of the land where I'm currently living. And I want to thank them for their stewardship of these lands and just remind myself and all of us that no matter where you are across Turtle Island, you are on indigenous lands. And there's a story, there's a history to those lands that far predates what's been written in our history books. And so I honor the Piscataway people, I honor my Navajo people, and I honor the hundreds of other native nations that have existed for hundreds, thousands of years across Turtle Island.

SPEAKER_02 4:33

I love that, Mark. And thanks for kind of setting the groundwork for that. So our our church and state series is really trying to focus and hone in on the role that religion has played in America for over 250 years. So here in a couple days, the country will be celebrating the 4th of July, Independence Day, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A lot of Americans due to, and I think you mentioned it, the history that they've been taught, believe that that was sort of like the birth of a nation, to use a really loaded term. It was sort of the start of America. But being familiar with your work and others, I understand that America's beginning has a much more like complicated story. So I'd love for you just to kind of give us a give us a preview. Like when did America's history actually start?

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Well, I mean, there are native nations who've been living on these lands, you know, for thousands, even tens of thousands of years. When we wrote our book Unsettling Truth, the first sentence of the first paragraph of that book says, you cannot discover lands that are already inhabited, right? You can conquer those lands, you can steal those lands, you can colonize lands, but you can't discover them if there's people already living there. And so at the end of our book, one of the things that we did is we listed by name as many of the both federally and state, and even some of the unrecognized tribes that we could find, and we listed them by name at the back of the book. And I actually had someone who listened to the book on Audible, and they said that they were brought to tears when they listened to that list of hundreds of names of Native nations who existed on these lands long before Columbus got lost at sea, and just to hear them read in order and to all of the Native nations who we could identify who were here in the in the research and the and the list that we tried to create and combine from other lists that we found. And so, right, that's what's so important. And there's really there's really two ways to talk about that history. If you go back to 1492, then you have to talk about what's known as the doctrine of discovery. So the doctrine of discovery, it's these series of papal bulls, edicts of the Catholic Church. They say things like invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, convert them to his and to their use and profit. The doctrine of discovery is essentially the church in Europe saying to the nations of Europe, wherever you go, whatever land you find not ruled by white European Christian rulers, those people are subhuman, and their land is yours to take. So this is the doctrine that let European nations go into Africa, colonize the continent, and enslave the people. They did not see them as human. It's the same doctrine that allowed Columbus, who was literally lost at sea, to land in this new world and claim to have discovered it. Right? You can't discover lands that are already inhabited. That's impossible. And so even the history that we tell ourselves likes to ignore that. This nation has a lot of different myths about its history. We say Columbus discovered America. And we have to note, America is not the United States. America is what the name they gave to the continent. There's North and South America. Trump, in his ignorance, was actually doing a better job of naming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, not in the narcissistic paternalistic way he was naming it as America.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

Are you going to get canceled for saying this, Mark?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

If I haven't been canceled yet, I definitely will be sued. Because right, because this is the Gulf of the Americas. To say America is not acknowledging both the history of how these continents got their names from Europeans, but also to not acknowledge the other nations that exist in both North and South America. So when we talk about American history and the Americas, especially when you travel outside the United States, right? People will look at you and say, What are you talking about? The United States is not America. They are the United States of America. They are a nation in the Americas, but we are not America. And we are we are Americans, but we're not the only Americans. There's millions of more Americans who live on both continents and have just as much right and claim to that name as we do. So we have to be clear when we use the term America. The other thing we like to do as a nation is we call ourselves, and politicians do this a lot, they say we're a nation of immigrants, right? You'll hear, especially Democrats, will use that term frequently to talk about our shared history and especially in this era of ice raids and all the stuff that the current administration is doing, and they'll say, don't forget we are a nation of immigrants. Well, that's partially true. But when you say we're a nation of immigrants, we're forgetting two key populations. Right? First, we're forgetting black Americans, African Americans. They're not immigrants. They were kidnapped, brought here against their will, and then enslaved to build this nation up. And second, you have the millions of indigenous peoples who've been living here long before Columbus got lost at sea. We're not immigrants either. We're indigenous to these lands. So when our nation calls itself a nation of immigrants, they are whitewashing their own history of both their history of slavery and their history of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of native nations. They're erasing their history that's based on this doctrine of discovery. And so this is where one of the points I like to start the history at is if we have to understand what this doctrine of discovery is and how that doctrine played a role and even got itself embedded into the foundations of our country.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

Yeah, I this is such an important conversation because before I met you, honestly, Mark, I had never heard of the doctrine of discovery. And I had known about the negative, at least some of the negative interactions, negative parts of the uh relationship between the colonists, the colonizers, and and the indigenous people here. I had I I've done some of my own research seeing the absolute devastation that was wrought, particularly by diseases brought. I think even in a previous conversation with you, Mark, I mentioned the 90% death rate in some of these lands, particularly Cortez, I think, had an army of a couple hundred and defeated the entire Aztec Empire would have been impossible without disease that came in and basically, you know, ravaged. It was just awful. It's like you we talk about apocalyptic scenarios, and it's like, could you imagine being there and 90% of the people that you've ever known and loved in the society is gone within a matter of a month? That's apocalyptic, that's apocalyptic at a level that we've never experienced right here in America. And so, so anyway, all that you can speak on any of that. But my question is getting into even, I'd love to go into more depth on these documents, right? These foundational 15th century papal bulls. And we have like Pope Nicholas, who wrote the one that I think you quoted, invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all sarakins? What is the saracins and pagans? What is saracens?

SPEAKER_00 12:41

So these are just the people living outside the Christian realm, right? These are these are the Muslims, these are the pagans, these are the people who do anyone who's not Christian in this Christian empire. I I'm so they're enemies of Christ, which is interesting, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Because Jesus says to love your enemies. Does he not not put them in perpetual slavery? I don't remember that one in the in the gospels when Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. So anyway, let's go into more depth on those documents and how did they, like, how did they come about? Why, what kind of precipitated these documents as much as you can tell us there? And and then how what what impact did they have? Because we're talking documents in the 15th century, right? 1400s. So then how did they last to the place where now they're even we're still like having this invoked today?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Well, go ahead. So when you talk about how these documents came about, I mean, we could go back into the history of the Catholic Church, which is what we did in our book. And I could just reiterate what we wrote into our book. But I'm actually I'm writing a second book right now, and it's called Decolonizing Faith. And so in our book on Selling Truths, we looked at the doctrine of discovery, how it was written, how it came about, and how it was, it, it was basically the church and the nation co-opting the scriptures to justify their violence against both African people and against Native peoples. And so we called out the United States for what it had done in its history. We called out the Western Church for what it had justified and the way the role it had played in that. But we didn't critique Old Testament Israel, right? We didn't critique the command in Deuteronomy and Joshua, where God tells the people to go into their promised lands and ethnically cleanse them. And people asked me, they said, why didn't you critique that? And I said, because this book was a rebuke, a public, open rebuke of Western civilization, the United States, and Western Christianity. It was not a critique of the scriptures. But since we've written that book, and as I pondered this even more, I recognized we actually need to go back and critique the scriptures themselves. Because yes, there are many ways the scriptures were co-opted to justify colonization, to justify enslavement, to justify all the horrible things that we've seen. But the scriptures themselves also advocate for these things. Right? My grandparents were boarding school survivors. They were taken from their homes and placed into these military-style boarding schools. They were part of the people that were punished for speaking their languages, they were punished for practicing their culture. They were forcibly assimilated to Western culture and to the Christian religion, the Christian faith. And my grandparents survived the boarding school by becoming Christians. They actually went on to work for the missionaries. My grandfather was a translator. He actually helped translate the Bible into the Navajo language as well as many of the hymns into the Navajo language. But he was never really free from the authoritative auspices of Western Christianity and of the Western missionary. And so as I've been in, I've been in the church all of my life. I was raised in the church. I know every Sunday school lesson. I have all the flannographs etched in my brain, right? I have all the stars of the awards I won from attendance and memorization and 12 years of Christian schooling and right. I've worked in leadership of churches. I've I've taught in seminaries. I've done many, many things in the church for my entire life. And yet, as I've wrestled with our nation's history, there's a lot of things that just didn't add up. So I remember one of the most disruptive things I've done in my life, in my faith, is about 25 years ago when my family and I moved back from Denver, Colorado, where I was pastoring a church to the Navajo Nation. I began one of the most disruptive spiritual disciplines I've ever had. Which is I began waking up every morning, moving towards the east, and greeting the sunrise with my prayers. Now that sounds peaceful, not disruptive. But the challenge is when you sit in creation and you commune with creator, you watch the sunrise, right? Most people see the sunrise two or three times a year. They see it on Easter Sunday, they see it when they have an early flight, they see it when they've stayed up too late watching something or doing something else, and right, they see it a few times a year, and it's always beautiful. But when you watch the sunrise intentionally, in a place of prayer, communing with Creator and not reading a book. And you do that day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and eventually decade after decade, it radically changes you. Radically changes who you are and even how you understand your place in this world and the creation and the creator that we know. So my grandparents, I would imagine they grew up watching the sunrise. I would imagine they grew up communing with the creator. I imagine they knew some of our prayer songs and some of our ceremonies, and they experienced those things. And they were brought then from that into the Western boarding schools. And now they were forced, they were they were given this book and said, This book is the ultimate authority about who God is. Your ceremonies are wrong, your beliefs are pagan, and you have to follow this book. And so this book I'm writing right now called Decolonizing Faith is I'm asking the questions about this book that my grandparents never had the agency to ask. My good friend Raymond Minikon, who's Aboriginal from Australia, would say, I'm interrogating my faith. I'm interrogating this book. And when you look at the book, even just as a whole, right, the book starts in a garden with a creator, and it ends in a city living in a mansion with streets paved with gold. That sounds colonial. In the garden, creator creates, and there's actually two creation stories in the book of Genesis, not one, right? Most people forget there's two very distinct creation stories where the creation order is separate and distinct in each of those stories, each making a different point. Europeans who are very separated from their history of indigenous lands and knowing who they are and where they come from have long forgotten the role of creation stories. Creation stories aren't science textbooks. It's not about a seven-day this is how God did it. It's about what is your relationship to creator and what is your relationship to creation. That's what a creation story is about. It's not a science textbook. And so when you read these creation stories in this book, right? And I can imagine my grandparents trying to understand these stories. And it makes sense, right? You have a creator who makes heavens, who makes the earth, creates humans, creates the animals and the plants. And Adam and Eve sinned. They do something wrong, they go against Creator. And they're punished, right? Okay, that's a common understanding. There's consequences for your action. They get punished, they get sent out of the garden, but they're not forgotten, right? Creator makes clothes and gives them clothes so they can they can survive out of the garden. Their children, Cain and Abel, sinned. One brother kills the other. He's punished. He's sent further out, but he's not forgotten. A mark is put on his head so he won't be forgotten. But then a few stories later, something really weird happens. Creator looks upon creation and says, in response to the sin that creator sees, screw it, I'm gonna kill everybody. Right? That's what the creator says. And tells one family to build an ark, and then puts them in the ark, shuts the door, and then makes them listen to the screams and watch the horrific death of not just their friends and family around them, but of all of humanity, of all of creation around them. It gets wiped out, just completely destroyed. And then at the end, this boat lands on the top of a mountain. And Creator in this book gives a promise to the family. And what's the promise? Do you remember what? This promise is it's a rainbow. You would never do it again. Right. No, and the the promise is that I will never do this again. That's what people think. Pointed into the sky. The promise is actually very specific, though. It's not that I will never destroy humanity again. Through a flood. I will never send a flood again. So let's imagine. Okay, let's imagine we have a room full of kids and they're misbehaving. They're hitting each other, they're causing damage to the room, they're hurting one another, and the parental figure comes in and tells them to stop and they disregard the parental figure's commands and they cause more damage. They're violently hurting each other. And so eventually the parental figure grabs a baseball bat and just goes through the room and just wails on the kids with this bat, kills many of them, spares two or three in the corner, maims and beats up and bloodies the rest of the kids. And then before that parental figure walks out of the room, they put a beautiful picture over the doorframe and says to the three remaining surviving kids, This picture is to remind me never to beat you with a bat again. Is that comforting? No, that's not comforting. That's terrifying, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

He's not pro the parental figure, he's not promising never to beat them again. He's just promising never to do it with a bat again. That's a horrifying thought. So it's the problem, isn't the bat, it's the vindictive, violent, abusive behavior of the parental figure.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Is this is this kind of what what your what your your next book is about in trying to explain like how the Bible has been used to basically just subjugate and maybe to carry on like what the uh the the papal edict said initially?

SPEAKER_00 23:58

Well, so it goes on, right? Later we get introduced to Abraham. Abraham is chosen by God, leaves his people, goes to another land. God again looks down, sees these two cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, sees the sin in those cities, and says, Screw it, I'm gonna kill everybody. Now, no, or Abraham has family there. Lot lives in those cities. So he's like, Oh, hold on, God, let's think about this for a moment, right? And so he he bargains. If if I can find 50 righteous people, will you save the city? Yes. If I can find 20, right? He bargains all the way down to what? Down to 10. Why? He knows the size of Lot's family. Okay, I've got down to 10. We've saved the city. The angels go in, they find Lot's family, he invites them into their home. The men of the city see what happened. They go up to Lot's door, knock on the door, said, Hey, we saw you bring these men into your house, send them out. We want to have sex with them. Lot says, No, don't do that. That's not righteous. That's evil. Does he end there? No, he says, Here, better yet, take my daughters. And then to entice them, he says, They're virgent. Lot pimps out his daughters. The next day, God decides to destroy the city, and as they're leaving, God tells them not to look back. Lot's family, Lot's wife turns around. What happens to her? It turns into a pillar of salt. We have a God in this book who is more concerned about a woman who turns around than a man who pimps out his daughters. Abraham has so much faith that God becomes known as the God of Abraham. God trusts Abraham. Why? Because God even said to Abraham, kill your own son, and Abraham demonstrated he was absolutely willing to do that. Later, the God of Abraham becomes known as the God of Israel. The God of Israel has people in Egypt. They're being enslaved there. He hears the cries from his people, from the people, and sends Moses. Moses goes in and causes these plagues, performs these plagues, culminating in killing the firstborn child of every family in Egypt. Finally, Pharaoh relents, lets the people out. They go out, they go up, they go to Mount Sinai, they're at Mount Sinai. Moses is up in the mountain talking with God, getting the Ten Commandments, and the people are waiting, and he's there a long time. And as they're waiting, now the people get impatient. And so they say to Aaron, Hey, we don't know if Moses is going to come back, build us a golden calf. So Aaron builds him a calf. They start worshiping the calf. God sees that and says to Moses, Okay, you have the commandments, depart from me. I'm going to destroy my people now. Your people, I think he actually says. And Moses, just like Abraham, begins bargaining. Whoa, hold on, God. But what's fascinating is Moses doesn't bargain with God as a creator. He doesn't say, These are your people, you made them in your image, right? You love these people. How can you do this to them? No, he appeals to God's ego. He says, if you destroy these people, the nations who saw you bring them out of Egypt with a heavy hand will think it was with evil intent just to wipe them out in the wilderness. You're going to look really bad if you do this, God. And the text says, and God repented and did not bring on the destruction of Israel as God had intended. That should be terrifying to people because the God of Israel repents because he might look bad and doesn't destroy his people. They go on, right? They cross the river, they destroy the people. God destroys the people in the river, are in the Nile, and then they they cross over and they're at the land of Canaan. Now God says to the people, okay, now it's your turn. I want you to kill everybody. And that's what Israel does. They go into Canaan and they wipe out all the people. There's a great book written about the doctrine of discovery by a brilliant author. His name is Stephen Newcombe. It's called Pagans in the Promised Land. Because what happens when you're a pagan living in the promised land of God's people? You get destroyed. You get wiped out. That's what happens. Now, I could go through all those stories. There's a lot of horrific things that happen there. There's there's there's there's child sacrifice at Jericho over I, and there's other things going on. But eventually they have a kingdom and they establish their kingdom. And the people of Israel, they're being led by judges and prophets now. And Samuel's overseeing the people. And the people come to Samuel and say, We want a king. We want to be like the other nations, we want a king. And Samuel goes to God and laments and says, They rejected me as their prophet, they want a king. And God responds to Samuel. I think this is in 1 Samuel chapter 12. And God says, They have not rejected you as their prophet, they have rejected me as their king. So this book that starts with creator, transforms God into a God known as the God of Abraham, the God of a man, transforms that identity into the God of a nation, the God of Israel. And ultimately that God identifies God's self in that book as king. And the further the character of God gets from creator, and the closer the character of God gets to king, the more violent, the more vindictive, the more abusive, the more nationalistic, and the more genocidal that God becomes. And this most of that story takes place in the first five books of the Bible, which three major religions claim those books as scripture. Christians, Jews, and Muslims. So in today, today's world, both in Gaza and in Iran, we have wars going on, right? In Gaza, there's three participants in this war. We have Israel, we have Hamas, and we have the United States. God's identity goes from creator and ends up as king, which, if you ask me, sounds like a demotion.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Yeah, I hear, you know, there's quite a bit I'd I'd push back on, Mark, and some of the stuff you're saying. And I I wanna, but I uh what I think would be good is to have you on to talk about that book in particular and to go through some of these more in depth because what you what you're saying is very challenging to me, but it's good. I like being challenged and I have quite a bit of thoughts on it, but I want to think about the like if I can get us back on the doctrine of discovery to think about this. And I know this is definitely relating to that and the way that the scriptures are used, and essentially, you know, taking it in in, you know, it relates to it because if there's this sense that, hey, it's actually exactly what the book is commanding, and they're just living it out correctly, then it brings a lot more question on what this book is, and how do we use this book, and how do we treat this book, and all and also meaning the Bible, all sorts of things. But if I'm thinking about like the doctor, doctrine of discovery, and and and and all of that, so we have this right so setting that conversation aside just for a moment. And again, we can we'll I'd love to have another podcast to talk about that. The impact on our own foundations, right? The the the United States foundations, the founding documents, things like that. What was the impact of the doctrine of discovery on the US foundations, the the parts that actually write the start of our country here in 1960?

SPEAKER_00 33:01

So that's why understanding this is so important, right? This is why this narrative is so important because it's exactly what happened here. So in 1616 to 1619, we had what's known as the Great Dying, right? After the discovery of these lands by white European Christian men, we had the Great Dying in 1616 to 1619, where because of the disease brought over by these European colonists, entire segments of the Northeast were wiped out. Villages were depopulated in like a year. There were bodies strewn all over, people were dying so quickly from this plague, these diseases that were coming in from this great dying, and entire villages were left uninhabited. In 1620, King George, or King James, I'm sorry, gave the New England Land Charter. This is the charter that gave claim to the lands of New England under the crown. And in the land charter, I'm just going to read a few lines from this charter. It says, Within these late years, there hath by God's visitation reigned a wonderful plague amongst the savages and brutish people there, heretofor inhabiting in a manner to the utter destruction, devastation, and depopulation of that whole territory, so that there is not left any that do claim or challenge any kind of interest therein to make claim hereunto. Whereby we in our judgment are persuaded and satisfied that the appointed time is come in which Almighty God, in his great goodness and bounty towards us and our people, hath thought fit and determined that these large and goodly territories, deserted as they were by their natural inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by our people, and hereafter shall by his mercy and favor and by his wonderful arm be directed and conducted hither, tither. So they see this devastation of the people who were they were, who they didn't view as human, destroyed by diseases they brought. And their response is not one of compassion, it's not one of humanity, it's not one of, oh, we should help these people, it's celebration and thanking God for destroying them so they could have the land. That's in 1620. In 1621, in the villa in Plymouth, the colony of Plymouth, right, which was probably occupied because it was uninhabited by the native peoples through the Great Dying, they celebrate the first Thanksgiving. We have to wonder what they were actually celebrating, knowing the theology that went into their land charter, knowing the view they had of the people who were living here, knowing the understanding they had not only of themselves as being God's chosen people, but even of the role of their scriptures and what it looked like to be a chosen person of God. So then in 1630, nine years later, John Winthrop was in the Boston Harbor. It's now called the Boston Harbor. He was there with a group of people, colonists to plant the Boston colony. And on board that ship, he preached a sermon titled A Model of Christian Charity. In this sermon, he refers to the colonists he's with as a city upon a hill. John Winthrop goes on to exhort the people to, in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality, they should rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together. They should keep the unity of the Spirit within their bonds of peace. Just your basic Protestant Christian exhortations. End of his sermon, he does what many Christian pastors do, which is he tried to compel his congregants to heed his exhortations by bringing out the threats of God in the Old Testament. And so John Winthrop quotes from Deuteronomy chapter 30. This is the passage where the people of Israel are sitting at the, they're standing on the banks of the Jordan River, ready to cross over and take possession of their promised lands. And God's reiterating the threats and promises of the land covenant. If you do these things for me, if you obey me, I'll do these things for you, if you disobey me, I'll do these things to you. End of this passage it says, But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, and we worship other gods, we shall surely perish out of the good land, whether we pass over this river to possess it. Now Deuteronomy 30 says river, but John Winthrop changes that phrase into vast sea. Now, why does he use that? Well, because they didn't cross a river, they crossed an ocean. So what's he implying? Based on the Old Testament Israel, based on Jesus teaching the Sermon on the Mount, they are standing, they are God's chosen people standing on the shores of their promised land, ready to go and take possession of it. And just to be clear, in Deuteronomy chapter 20, God tells his people how to take possession of their lands. When God says, However, in the cities of the nations, the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them as the Lord your God has commanded you. I call that sermon the birth of the myth of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is not just the belief that, and I say Americans, that U.S. citizens, white Europeans, I should say rather, are better at things than the rest of the world. It's that they have a different relationship with God than the rest of the world. So that idea percolates. This is 1630, about a hundred years. Mid-1700s, we begin expanding a bit westward. End of the 1700s, we have the second great awakening. There's this growth in churches, these renewals within denominations. There's now this religious fervor as we're moving further and further west. Early 1800s, the term manifest destiny is coined. The belief that this white European Christian nation had the God-given right to occupy this continent from sea to shining sea. And so, yeah, this is the challenge we have. And so, in the midst of this, right, in 1763, King George now draws a line down the Appalachian Mountains. And he says to the colonists that were here that they no longer had the right of discovery of the empty Indian lands west of Appalachia. This upset the colonists. They wanted access to the land. They didn't just want to go there, they wanted the sovereign right to those lands for themselves. And so they wrote a letter of protest. In their letter, they accused King George of raising the conditions of new appropriations of land. And they went on to state, you have excited domestic insurrections amongst us and have endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages. They signed their letter on July 4th, 1776. Literally 30 lines below the statement, all men are created equal. The Declaration of Independence refers to natives as merciless Indian savages. And the colonists are lamenting the fact that King George has taken away the right of their right of discovery and reserve that right only for the crown. This is one of two of the reasons why they were declaring independence. So even though this declaration starts with this great language, right? The only reason they use these inclusive terms is because they had a very narrow definition of who was actually human. That was supported not only by their political worldview, but supported even by their scriptures. That's wild. And this is the mentality that feeds into the notion of manifest destiny. This is the mentality that feeds into the ethnic cleansing of this continent. This is the mentality that goes into the constitution, right? So a few years later, they write the constitution. Most people have not read the constitution. Most people know the preamble, right? We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union. Let me let me bring that up, I want to make sure I get it right. In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America. So they start again inclusive. We the people. However, Article 1, Section 2, the section of the Constitution that determines who is and who is not part of the Union, who isn't and who is and who is not covered by this constitution, Article 1, Section 2 never mentions women, which is important because if you read the entire Constitution, there are 51 gender-specific male pronouns. 51 he, him, and his. Who can run for office, who can hold office, even who's protected by the document. Not a single female pronoun in the entire constitution. Even the amendment that gave women the right to vote, the 19th Amendment, the 20th Amendment immediately again uses a male pronoun to refer to the president. And the 25th Amendment is littered with he's and his. So never mentions women. Article 1, Section 2 also specifically excludes natives. And third accounts Africans is three-fifths of a person. So 17A7, you take away women, you take away natives, and you take away black people. Who's left? Who's the we the people? It's white men, and technically to vote you had to be a landowner. I ran for president in 2020. The goal of my campaign, I had this outlandish, crazy idea of what if we built a nation where for the very first time we the people actually meant all the people. My campaign went nowhere. Second, in this constitution, this preamble, they state we want to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity. Now, liberty is the state of being free within society, or the scope, or the power to Act as one pleases. That's what liberty is. So they want to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, right? The room is white landowning Christian men. And to our posterity. Now you can use posterity in two ways. We can say, we are working, and we're not actually doing this, we are working to save the environment for posterity, right? For all of the generations, all of humanity, all the people who come after us, we are working to save the environment for posterity. Or you can say, after the SpaceX IPO, the security of Elon Musk's posterity is secure probably for eternity. Well, not eternity, for the rest of their lives here on this earth. He's now a trillionaire. So posterity, if you use just posterity, it refers to everybody. If you put a marker before it, it's his posterity, our posterity, your posterity, their posterity, so on and so forth. It's a direct descendant of the person that's coming next. So they are fighting for the blessings of liberty for themselves, white landowning Christian men, and for their pro posterity. They're not doing this for the good of humankind. They're not doing this for women, they're not doing it for black people, they're not doing this for native people, they're not doing this for anyone other than themselves and their direct dependence.

SPEAKER_02 45:33

Yeah. Mark, can can can I ask you a question though? The you know, what when when you think about the doctrine of discovery, most people only think about it kind of in historical terms. But I know in in past conversations we've had and just the research you've done, that's that's not necessarily the the case, right? Like there are Supreme Court cases that have mentioned it, maybe even some prominent Supreme Court justices that have even referenced what the Doctrine of Discovery is. I'd love for you to just unpack what the Doctrine Discovery's modern-day manifestations look like.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

Yeah. So the first appeared in the Supreme Court in 1823. There was a case before the Supreme Court. There was two white men of European descent. They're litigating over a single piece of land. One of them got the land from a native tribe, the other one claimed to have gotten the same land from a native from the U.S. government, and they want to know who owned it. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, right? This is the John Marshall Court. And they had to determine the legal precedent for land titles. Who had the right to sell the land, the native nation or the U.S. government? They ruled that it was discovery that gave title to the land. And that and that that was the way discover, that was the way it worked. Discovery is what gave title to the land. Now, because that might lead one to believe natives had some sovereign rights to land since we were here first, they went on in that court case to, in that opinion, to clarify, and they said, but the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages whose occupation was war and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness. So because natives aren't human, we're merely occupants of the land. Whereas white European Christian colonists are the discoverers of the land, they're the people who are here, therefore they have the true title to the land. That case, along with a few others in the 1820s and 30s, create the legal precedent for land titles. That precedent and the doctrine of discovery are referenced by the Supreme Court by name in 1954, 1985, and most recently in 2005. I have a TEDx talk online. It's called We the People, the Three Most Misunderstood Words in U.S. history. I go through some of these court cases and I look specifically at the 2005 case. In the 2005 case, we have the United Indian Nation, which used to occupy lands in central state New York. They were removed from those lands, and they came back and went to Oklahoma and they came back in the 1990s and they attempted to purchase some of their own lands on the open market. They paid full price for them. And they wanted to reestablish their sovereignty over these lands. The city of Cheryl in New York, which is the city where the lands were, didn't want that to happen because they wanted the tax revenue from those lands, so they sued the United Indian Nation in Federal District Court. The court ruled in favor of the United States, so they appealed to the Court of Appeals, and they ruled in their favor again, so they appealed to the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court, in their reversal of the lower court's decision, in the first footnote of the case, they referenced by name the doctrine of discovery. They go on to state that given the long-standing, distinctly non-Indian character of the area and its inhabitants and the regulatory authority constantly exercised by New York State and the United's long delay in seeking judicial relief, we hold that the tribe cannot unilaterally revive its ancient sovereignty. They then go on to reference another case that said it is impossible to rescind the cession and restore the Indians to their former rights because the lands have been open to settlement, which again was white settlement, and large portions of them are now in the possession of innumerable innocent purchasers. They often they go on to say, moreover, the properties here involved have greatly increased in value since the United States sold them 200 years ago. It was not until lately that the United States regain ancient sovereignty over land converted from wilderness to become parts of a city like Cheryl. Now, if that argument sounds familiar, it's because it's almost verbatim what John Marshall wrote in 1823. Just doesn't use the word savage. The same logic. We've civilized it, and now it's ours. Exact same logic, just doesn't use the word savage. And so they conclude that we reject the unification theory of the United Court, of the lower courts, and hold that standards of federal Indian law, again, footnote one, doctrine of discovery, and federal equity practice preclude the tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold. This is one of the most white supremacy, Supreme Court of Paint, written in my lifetime. And it was written and delivered by Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. And that shocks people because her legacy is she was an advocate for the marginalized fighting for their rights, which she was and which she did. But when it came down to land titles and who had control over these lands, she had to rule with the white supremacists or risk losing the lands of this nation. See, we think that the left and the right, right, it it's it's a battle between they're disagreeing on so many things. No, they agree on a lot of things, including racism, sexism, and white supremacy. When push comes to shove, the the liberals, the Democrats will fight for it just as hard as the conservative Republicans will. This is the whole challenge we have as a nation, which is we think we're fighting a partisan battle. We are not. And they will agree with it. One of the things I when I was when I ran for president in 2020, I remember that there was you remember what happened with George Floyd, right? And that the horrific things that happened there. And please excuse me, just a minute, I want to make sure I have something here because I want I want to give you the right quote here. But there was this public lynching in front of the country, and there were people protesting all over the country. And there were protests in D.C., there were protests in Minneapolis, there were protests in Chicago, Los Angeles, all over the country. And one of the places we protested, people protested in Washington, D.C., was in a park right across the street from the White House. And on June 20th of that year, or June 1st of 2020, law enforcement came in and aggressively cleared that park. A few hours later, Donald Trump walked out, walked across the park, went to St. John's Church across the street, stood in front of it with his Bible, held it upside down at first, turned it around, and took a photo, said almost nothing, and then walked back. And he was immediately called out for what he was doing, which is he was giving a dog whistle to white Christian nationalists. Now, in that campaign, Joe Biden was running to be the anti-Trump. He was not going to do his his foreign policy over Twitter. He was going to bring respectability back to the White House. He was going to speak in complete and coherent sentences. Right? He was he was going to be the anti-Trump. And during his campaign, he he promised that he would bring respectability back to the White House. And after he was elected and then was put into office, there was a horrific terrorist attack on the airport in Afghanistan. And several U.S. service members lost their lives. Now, because that attack was so horrific, Joe Biden had to make a statement about it. And so, in his statement, this is what he said to our nation, to the world. He said, To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this. We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command. Now, Vladimir Putin said something like this a few years ago when he was concerned that NATO might put boots on the ground in Russia. And he said, if any boots get put on the ground in my country, I will defend my land with every measure at my command. And we were appalled as a nation. How dare you talk that way, President Putin? We said, you are a nuclear power, how dare you threaten nuclear warfare. And yet our presidents talk this way all the time. It's just how we speak. And if I didn't tell people Biden said that, everyone would have thought Trump said it because they both speak the same. All of our presidents speak that way. He went on in his statement to say, I want to thank the Secretary of Defense and the military leadership of the Pentagon and all the commanders in the field. There has been complete unanimity from every commander on the objectives of this mission and the best ways to achieve those objectives. Those who have served through the ages, he went on to say, have drawn inspiration from the book of Isaiah when the Lord says, Whom shall I send? Who shall go for us? And the American military has been answering for a long time. Here am I, Lord, send me, here I am, send me. So our president, our democratic mild manner, respectable representable president, just threatened nuclear warfare on a global scale for anyone who did us harm. And in the very same speech, he said, our military is the army of the Lord responding to a prophetic call on par with that of Isaiah the prophet. If you think, if anyone thinks Christian nationalism is a partisan problem, the Republicans have it and the Democrats are better, they are absolutely wrong. Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism is a bipartisan value. It's theologically, racially, politically embedded in the foundations of our nation. It's how we understand who we are as a country. It's not a partisan problem. In his first state of the union, Joe Biden used the word sacred twice. He talked about the capital as a sacred space to have that speech. He went on to talk about it was our sacred duty to take better care of our veterans. I don't disagree. We have an absolute moral duty to take better care of people who fight wars in our behalf. But he used the word sacred. Why bring the divine into that? Because Joe Biden believes he is the commander in chief of the army of the Lord. That's responding to a prophetic call in part with that of Isaiah the prophet.

SPEAKER_01 57:39

I mean, all this is so like, all this is so well, well, it's disturbing one, obviously. And then it's it's all kind of like shocking, right, to people. And people who have here, they're gonna be like kind of maybe feel a bit disoriented, right? Because there's a lot been thrown at them, right, within this, within this conversation. And my question for us to kind of bring it to a nice point, let's put a bow on it. And if you can, I mean, it's gonna be right. It's a it's a it's a it's a difficult conversation, but it's an important one. We're at obviously we're doing this whole series because it's church and state, 250 plus years of faith in America. And as we're coming up to this 250 anniversary, obviously, I know the as you've explained, and and and even I think do think people need to look more into the declaration and the context around the declaration of independence, because it just like you said, we the people probably didn't mean the way we think about it now. That was we've now expanded we and the people and what that means, at least in many people's minds. Obviously, there are people that would uh still want to subjugate or still want to keep certain voices out for sure. But we've kind of expanded that, and yet at the time when Jefferson was writing it, he was probably he was not thinking of the people we are thinking of when we think we the people. I think that's pretty demonstrable historically. And so, but but all that, given all that, we're coming up on 250 years in this country that we're all a part of, right? You're a citizen of the Navajo Nation and the United States. We're citizens of the United States on this on this call. What does this mean to you, this this 250th anniversary? And and what do you hope Christians understand about land, about this nation, about our founding as we come not just Christians, American Christians, but all Americans. But what what do you hope that we how how do we how should we think about this as we approach it, in your in your in your opinion?

SPEAKER_00 59:49

So the challenge we face as a country, and my co-author Sing Chan Ra and I actually dealt with this in chapters nine and ten of our book, which is the the adage that says the victors write the history. Right? No one disagrees with that. The victors do write the history. You win a war, you have won the right to write about that war. Now, in that book, we in that those chapters, we speculate. Okay, knowing that adage is true, the victors write the history, imagine, let's imagine for a moment, if Nazi Germany won World War II, how would their historians have portrayed Hitler? Well, he'd be their greatest leader ever, right? Brought them from global obscurity, the global dominant. Given that the victors write the history, how would Nazi historians have talked about the Holocaust? Well, we have Holocaust tonight today. Imagine if they won the war, right? What Holocaust? There was no Holocaust. When the Victors write the history, they create mythology and they frame the injustices of the war they won in the best possible terms, justifying it for all these reasons, and even at times claiming God's divine blessing or ordinance over those things. Now, what makes chapters nine, and so that isn't a challenge in and of a I mean it is, but it's not challenging to the core. But what makes those two chapters, nine and ten in our book, are the most challenging chapters in all of Unselling Truths, because we then take that adage and that understanding and we imply we apply that to the person our nation believes at a bipartisan level is our greatest president, which is Abraham Lincoln. Especially in the last 15 to 20 years, as our nation has gotten more and more politically divided, especially over issues of race and gender, Abraham Lincoln's stock has only risen. His monument is one of the most visited monuments in the country. Republicans love to remind the country that they are the party of Lincoln. When our nation's first black president was put into office, he had his hand on the Lincoln Bible. Right? People love Lincoln. But people don't know Lincoln. Lincoln was a blatant, unapologetic, self-proclaimed white supremacist. When he was running for Senate in 1858 against Judge Steve Lyndon Douglas, he had to introduce himself to the nation. He was a new politician. And he said in his speech, I have no intentions of making voters or jurors of Negroes or allowing them to hold office or to intermarry with white people. There's a physical difference, he said, between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living on terms of social and political equality. And as long as they must remain together, there has to be the distinction between superior and inferior. And I, as much as any other man, wrote Abraham Lincoln, believe that the superior position belongs to the white race. Abraham Lincoln was a blatant, unapologetic, self-proclaimed white supremacist. Until the day he died, most people think the greatest part of his legacy, the cornerstone of his legacy, which was the 13th Amendment, they think it actually abolishes slavery. It doesn't. What it says is neither slavery servitude except as a punishment for crime, whereas the party has been duly convicted shall exist within the United States. The 13th Amendment doesn't abolish slavery, it redefines and codifies it under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system. The very same justice system that has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world that incarcerates people of color at three to five times the rate we incarcerate white people. Mass incarceration was the brainchild of Abraham Lincoln of how to strip the civil rights away from people of color who he didn't want to be held as chapel slaves anymore, but did not believe they were equal and did not want them to be free and did not want them to participate in our society. And nobody knows that. We know Lincoln, we love Lincoln, and we know enough about Lincoln to know we don't want to read those debates. This is why we misquote the the 13th Amendment all the time and say it abolishes slavery, it doesn't abolish slavery. Right? We have these myths. And not only did he do that with enslavement, but Abraham Lincoln went on. And in 1862, when he became president, he signed two bills. He signed the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act. The Railway Act gave the land and the resources to complete Manifest Destiny, the Transcontinental Railway. And the Homestead Act allowed allocated 160 acres of anyone willing to go west in Homestead for five years. He signed those in the spring and summer of 1862. Immediately after that, we have a string of massacres. We have the removal of the Dakota and Winnebago and the hang of the Dakota 38 in Minnesota in 1862. We have the Bear River Massacre, which was the massacre of the Shoshone in northern Utah and southern Idaho in early 1863. We have the Long Walk of my people, the Navajo and Mescaloro Apache from the southwest, where they took our people and brought us down to Bosgordondo, which was for all intents and purposes a death camp. And then we have the Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyenne and In eastern Colorado in 1864. When you put those massacres on a map and you look at them, you can see that, again, this is two and a half years in the two and a half years after he signed the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act, that Abraham Lincoln is literally ethnically cleansing the northern, central, and southern proposed routes of the Transcontinental Railway. In fact, the Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone takes place a stone's throw from where the golden spike was eventually laid. The treaty my people were compelled to sign to bring us back from Bosque Redondo stated explicitly that we would not oppose the building of a railway through our land lines. Abraham Lincoln knew exactly what he was doing. He was ethnically cleansing these lands. And twice in the middle of these massacres that he is overseeing as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, he pauses and calls for a national day of Thanksgiving. And in his Thanksgiving Day proclamation, he thanks God for the land that the U.S. is acquiring. This is no different from King James. We tell each other myths. We tell each other, we create lies. Because we don't know, we don't understand our history, and so we never deal with it. Right? Because the US government has won virtually every war it's ever fought. Technically, we pulled out of Vietnam and Afghanistan, didn't lose any land. The Korean War is still not over, right? We just called it truce. We've won every major military conflict we've ever been in, meaning this country has had the ability to write its own history for 250 plus years. Meaning we never have to wrestle with the atrocities we've actually committed and the things we've actually done. And we're creating these myths about who we are, what we've done, and why we did those things. One of the goals of my work, the thing that I'm working the hardest for, is I'm working to build what some people have called common memory. When he was writing about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions up in Canada, Georges Erasmus used a quote. The quote he used said, where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. If you want to build community, the quote says, you must start by creating a common memory. I love that quote because I think it gets to the heart of our nation and the challenges we had, especially regarding race, which is we do not have a common memory. We have a white majority that remembers this mythological history of discovery, expansion, opportunity, and exceptionalism. We have communities of color that have the lived experience of stolen lands and broken treaties, of enslavement and Jim Crow laws, of Indian massacres, of internment camps, of segregation, of mass incarcerations, families being ripped apart at our borders. We have no common memory. And there's no point in U.S. history that we can look back on and see healthy community across racial lines at a national level. That point does not exist in our nation's history. We were this nation was founded on a doctrine of discovery. It was built on the belief of ethnically cleansing your promised land. It was justified because of this creator-to-king narrative that said creator is no longer a creator, creator is now a king who rules over empires. And we're marching towards a city of gold. And we've forgotten these things. And so I am working as hard as I can to build this. I'm not trying to cancel people, I'm not even trying to shame people. I'm merely asking the questions my grandparents and other people never were given the agency to ask. And I'm saying our challenges are not partisan, they're foundational. People love to believe that the United States of America is racist and sexist and white supremacist in spite of our foundations. And that's not true. We are racist and sexist as a nation because of our foundations. People like to think Christian nationalism and racism and things like that are partisan problems. And if we could just get vote this leader out of office or have this party be in control, everything would be better. That is not true. Donald Trump and the horrible things he's doing with immigration is aspiring, aspiring to the deportation numbers of President Obama. For all of the challenges with tariffs, right? We forget about the tariffs that Jimmy Carter leveled on the oil embargo against the wishes of his own party. These are bipartisan problems. These are foundational issues. And just look at this from my perspective, as a native man who has seen missionaries come to our lands for hundreds of years and seen his people put into boarding schools and dealt with that history since then. We have Christians from the left and the right, conservative, progressive, coming in, all saying they have the true interpretation of the scripture. I've been baptized three times virtually because one church doesn't recognize the baptism of the other church. No, you have to do it again. I was first baptized by sprinkling as an infant. When I got married in a Baptist church, they didn't recognize that baptism, so they made me get immersed in water as an adult because they didn't recognize, right? And we see this, we see these people coming in, and they all say this book contains the absolute truth, and our interpretation is correct, and the other people's interpretation is wrong. You said earlier, Josh, that there were some things you wanted to push back on on my Old Testament. The reason I'm bringing this up is because all I'm trying to do with writing this book on decolonizing faith is get people to say, can't we at least examine the book to see if that's a part of the problem? I'm not saying throw the book out, but I'm saying can't the problem is if you have a book that is divinely inspired and by some measures infallible in people's minds, and you're not allowed to question it, you're in a cult. Right? That's the definition of a cult. And so what I'm trying to do, and even when I'm writing this book on decolonizing faith, the goal of that book is to cause a crisis of faith in the church by asking questions that my grandparents were never allowed to ask. And as I started this interview with, right, over the past 25 years, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, now decade after decade, I've been rising on a regular basis, going outside and greeting the sunrise with my prayers. And the thing I've noticed is no matter what I've done in the past 24 hours, no matter what my world's done, no matter what my leaders have done, no matter what the nations have done, no matter what the church has done, no matter what bombs we've dropped, what genocides we've overseen, what aid we've pulled, what narcissistic, compassionist leaders we've elected, every morning the sun rises. Every morning we have another chance to walk in harmony, to walk in beauty, to realign our steps with creator, with humanity, and with creation. And so when I read these scriptures that say God was gonna kill everybody and destroy these people and call for the death, I'm like, that's not a creator, that's a king. That's not a creator. And so my challenge to people, I I when I ran for president, I my one of my planks on my platform was a national dialogue on race, gender, and class, a truth and conciliation commission. I didn't want to call it truth and reconciliation because reconciliation is a misnomer. It implies racially that we had harmony that's never existed. So I called for truth and conciliation. I'm not even advocating for that today, because you can't have truth and conciliation while you're actively committing harm. Yeah. And we are actively committing harm. The majority of American voters voted for Donald Trump and his politicians, even though he was explicitly clear what he believed and what he was going to do. And the majority of US voters voted for that. So we cannot have truth and conciliation right now. We cannot have healing right now because we are actively committing harm. The best we can do is stop committing harm.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:51

And so, and so what I'm doing now, if you Google the definition of the word nature, you will get this definition. This comes from the Oxford Dictionary. It says nature, the phenomenon of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations. Western culture defines itself as separate from the natural world. They do not see themselves as part of the food chain. They do not see themselves as part of the natural world. It is separate from them and the things that they create. That makes no sense to an Indigenous man. No sense whatsoever. Now I was raised. I've been a Christian my entire life. I was raised in the church. I know all of the stories, I know all I've taught in ceremonies, I've lectured, I've gone on mission trips, I've overseen, I've done everything. And the most transformative spiritual discipline of my life is when I started waking up, going towards the east and watching the sunrise, greeting the sunrise with my prayers, and not taking my book with me. I'm not saying the book can't help us define who God is, who creator is. But when you put a book above sitting in creation as the ultimate authority in defining who God is, you're gonna get problems. Especially when your book sheds the character of creator and embraces a character of King. And so my challenge to people don't give up your Bibles. But for five minutes a day, three to five times a week, sit in nature, sit by a river, go to a field, watch a flower, sit in the forest, watch the sunrise, watch the sunset, watch a waterfall, watch the ocean come in, watch the tides. Do something consistently on a regular basis, three to five times a week. Put yourself in commune with nature without your book for three to five minutes a day, three to five times a week. And less talk in 25 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:31

I love that. Mark, I can't thank you enough. Excuse me, for coming on a show and just helping us kind of really wrestle with um this really, really difficult topic. I mean, it's it's heavy, it's necessary, and I I just really hope that our audience goes out and buy your book and keep an eye out for your upcoming book because I think it's gonna be really, really exciting. So thank thank you so much, Mark, for for coming on our show and and uh kicking us off on our first episode of Church and State 250.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:04

Well, Josh, it's been an honor to be with you. I appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you for the honest conversations, and yeah, I hope this series goes well and I'm honored to be a part of it. So I have my relatives. Walk in beauty, and may we all learn how to walk in beauty together. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:20

And uh to our audience, hey, thanks again for stopping by. Make sure you check out the rest of our episodes. This was episode one of 16. There's a lot more coming. And if you like it, make sure you share. We're a small operation with pretty big mission, and we rely on all of you to help us uh get the word out. So, as always, make sure you keep your conversations not right or left, but up, and we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye.