Colonial legal denial of Native land rights was grounded in Protestant religious supremacy.

Evidence

Puritans interpreted Native Americans’ religions as evil or no religion at all. Either interpretation confirmed their belief that the Native peoples were uncivilized savages. Governor John Harvey of colonial Virginia, for example, declared the Native peoples were savages with “only a general residency there, as wild beasts in the forest.” Similarly, Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony cited Genesis 1:28 to tell his constituency they were justified in taking the land: the Natives had failed to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.” Land theft, criminalization of Native American religious ceremonies, and forced conversion … Therein can be found the genesis of White Christian supremacy in the United States. Nearly two centuries later, the US Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh validated this reasoning when it ruled that Native Americans did not have property rights unless and until they had fully assimilated into White Christian society. Notably, prior to the mid-twentieth century, references to Christianity implied Protestantism. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader thesis of The Racial Muslim that religious-racial classification undergirds US legal exclusion — echoes how earlier chapters trace this logic through Islam specifically. — connects to: The Old Testament’s wilderness image authorized Protestant dominion over nature and land. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 555
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘On Sacrifice’ by showing how colonial charters and courts weaponized Christianity to justify dispossession, an adjacent mechanism of religious-racial hierarchy formation.