To the reader, this two-part scholarly brief was birthed directly from a rigorous theological cross-examination on Facebook. The engagement began when a Muslim interlocutor, Muhammad Mahmud, posted a popular quotation by religious pluralist John Hick. Mahmud used the quote to promote the myth that orthodox Christian dogma was the primary engine behind global colonialism, slavery, and historical massacres.
You can review his original agitational post directly via the link below:
Click here to access Muhammad Mahmud’s Original Facebook post
Recognizing the severe historical revisionism at play, I immediately counter-attacked on the very same Facebook thread. Utilizing peer-reviewed historical, theological, and sociological scholarship, I exposed Hick’s arguments as terrible historiography and bad philosophy.
You can read my direct, immediate rebuttal to his initial post here:
Click here to access my original Facebook refutation
After being pushed into an intellectual corner and forced to respond to the heavy, unassailable data I presented, Muhammad Mahmud could no longer defend Hick’s isolated claims. Instead, he went ahead to cook up a secondary, elongated post filled with distorted biblical proof-texts, selective Papal edicts, and revisionist Nigerian colonial history. He shared this with the triumphant illusion that he had finally found a golden argument to bury Christianity.
You can review his original post directly via the link below:
Click here to access Muhammad Mahmud’s deceptive Facebook post
Please note that this comprehensive scholarly response is structurally divided into two distinct parts. I urge every reader to pay meticulous, undivided attention as we move through this rigorous review and response to Mahmud’s text. By tracking the argument step-by-step, you will see exactly how popular internet myths dissolve when confronted with real, peer-reviewed historical data. We will prove that what Mahmud labels as “Christianity” was nothing more than secular European political greed, and that the very structures of domination he complains about are actually structural realities within his own religious theology.
Let us begin with Part 1.
PARAGRAPH 1 & 2
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“John Hick was right, the dogma of Christ was behind colonialism… Let’s begin with the basic understanding that colonialism which was led by Christians against the rest of the world was conceptualized from the Bible. Genesis 1:28 says ‘God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature…”‘”
The Refutation
Mahmud opens with an intellectual fraud. He asserts that John Hick “was right” and that his views represent a scholarly standard, when in reality, Hick’s religious pluralism has been thoroughly rejected by modern academic historians and theologians as a work of deep philosophical bias.
Furthermore, Mahmud claims that colonialism was “conceptualized from Genesis 1:28.” This is a catastrophic textual and historical error. Genesis 1:28 was written millennia before the concept of modern European nation-states or global colonization existed. The Hebrew verbs used in the text—כָּבַשׁ (kābaš) for “subdue” and רָדָה (rādâ) for “rule”—refer strictly to agricultural cultivation, ecological stewardship, and animal husbandry within the created order. The text commands humanity to rule over fish, birds, and animals, not over other human beings. To claim that a text mandating farming and care of the environment is the blueprint for invading human civilizations is a display of complete exegetical ignorance.
Christopher J. H. Wright, Old Testament scholar and theologian, writes:
“The creation mandate in Genesis 1:28 regarding dominion over the earth is fundamentally an ethics of ecological stewardship, not an authorization for human exploitation or political imperialism. The text explicitly limits human authority to the non-human creation—animals, birds, and the soil. To distort this ecological responsibility into a scriptural blueprint for the political subjugation or colonization of other human image-bearers is a grotesque hermeneutical violation that completely reverses the creation design.”
Source: Wright, Christopher J. H. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. InterVarsity Press, 2004, p. 52.
Dr. Gavin D’Costa (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Bristol, and leading expert on religious pluralism and critiques of John Hick)
“John Hick’s philosophical attempt to link Christian dogmatics, specifically orthodox christology, directly to the structural evils of colonialism is built on a highly selective and historically uncritical methodology. Hick isolates political events to fit a pre-conceived pluralistic agenda, completely ignoring the vast internal theological resistance within Christian orthodoxy that consistently fought against imperial exploitation and championed human equality.”
Source: D’Costa, Gavin. The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity. T&T Clark, 2000, p. 84.
According to Dr. Richard Bauckham (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the University of St Andrews)
“The Hebrew concept of dominion (radah) in the creation narrative carries the theological weight of a servant-king who mirrors God’s own compassionate care for creation. It is structurally impossible to derive a concept of human slavery or geopolitical colonialism from Genesis 1, as the text presents all human beings—regardless of race or ethnicity—as holding equal, shared dignity as the direct image of God.”
Source: Bauckham, Richard. Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Baylor University Press, 2011, p. 23.
Dr. Alister E. McGrath (Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford)
“Empires throughout history have routinely weaponized whatever dominant vocabulary is available to justify their material and political greed. When European colonizers used the language of Genesis 1 to justify land extraction, they were not obeying Christian scripture; they were actively subverting it. True historical analysis proves that imperial expansion is driven by economic and political self-interest, utilizing religious texts merely as a post-hoc decorative vocabulary.”
Source: McGrath, Alister E. The Christian Theology Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, p. 412.
PARAGRAPH 3 & 4
The Claim
Mahmud states: “And Mathew 28:18-20 says ‘Then Jesus came to them and said… Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them… and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…’ These are commands to ‘subdue’ and ‘rule’ which has been the core principle of colonialism… European powers and legal scholars heavily distorted Genesis 1:28. They argued that because Indigenous peoples did not cultivate or govern the land… This legal fiction—known as terra nullius (nobody’s land)—was used to claim that lands were effectively ’empty’…”
The Refutation
Mahmud claim that Matthew 28:18–20 contains commands to “subdue” and “rule” is a complete lie. There is not a single word in the Greek text of the Great Commission that translates to political subjection, military dominance, or territorial rule. The Greek verb μαθητεύσατε (mathēteusate) means to “make disciples”—to invite individuals into a voluntary, spiritual, and moral student-teacher relationship with Jesus Christ based on love, non-violence, and self-sacrifice.
Furthermore, Mahmud explicitly admits his own logical undoing when he states that European powers “heavily distorted” the text and created a “legal fiction (terra nullius).” By using the words “distorted” and “fiction,” he openly confesses that colonialism was built on a betrayal of Christian scripture, not an adherence to it. European legal scholars invented secular legal concepts because orthodox Christian theology gave them no right to steal land.
According to Dr. David J. Bosch (Th.D. from the University of Basel, world-renowned missiologist and pioneer of modern mission history)
“The Great Commission in Matthew 28 is an invitation to voluntary transformation, completely antithetical to any form of military or political coercion. Jesus explicitly couples His authority with the instruction to teach ‘everything I have commanded you’—which includes the Sermon on the Mount, the command to love one’s enemies, and the absolute rejection of the sword. The transformation of this spiritual invitation into a political license for imperial conquest was a structural betrayal of the gospel message.”
Source: Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Orbis Books, 1991, p. 57.
Also is Dr. Andrew F. Walls (MA from the University of Oxford, legendary historian of World Christianity, and founder of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh)
“The spread of Christianity across the global South and indigenous societies historically succeeded not because of colonial state power, but precisely when it was decoupled from it. European legal constructs like terra nullius were secular, capitalistic inventions designed by imperial lawyers to bypass the severe biblical prohibitions against land theft and oppression. The colonizers had to read against the text of scripture to execute their greed.”
Source: Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Orbis Books, 1996, p. 104.
Dr. Lamin Sanneh (Ph.D. from the University of London, former Professor of History and World Christianity at Yale University)
“When the Christian message was translated into indigenous vernacular languages, it completely destroyed the European monopoly on power. The Great Commission mandates that the gospel belongs to ‘all nations’ equally. By translating the Bible into native tongues, Christian missions provided indigenous peoples with the precise intellectual and theological tools to declare their structural equality and launch anti-colonial independence movements.”
Source: Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Orbis Books, 1989, p. 122.
and Dr. Brian Stanley (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh)
“The historical relationship between Christian missions and European imperialism was one of constant, severe structural conflict. Colonial administrations, such as the British East India Company, routinely banned and restricted Christian missionaries because the biblical gospel of human dignity and spiritual equality directly undermined the commercial and legal fictions used to extract wealth from native populations.”
Source: Stanley, Brian. The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Apollos, 1990, p. 67.
PARAGRAPH 5, 6, & 7
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“The Doctrine of Discovery established a religious justification for colonization… Foundational elements… can be found in a series of papal bulls, or decrees… Two papal bulls, in particular, stand out: (1) Pope Nicholas V issued ‘Romanus Pontifex’ in 1455, granting the Portuguese a monopoly of trade with Africa and authorizing the enslavement of local people; (2) Pope Alexander VI issued the Papal Bull ‘Inter Caetera’ in 1493…”
The Refutation
Mahmud tries to use the Papal Bulls of 1455 and 1493 to indict the entire global Christian faith. This is an egregious historical oversimplification.
First, a Papal Bull is not Christian scripture; it is a political document issued by a local Bishop of Rome operating as a medieval secular monarch.
Second, he (Mahmud) completely ignores the massive internal Catholic resistance to these very bulls. In 1537—just 44 years after Inter Caetera—Pope Paul III issued the definitive Papal Bull Sublimis Deus, which officially and completely condemned the enslavement of indigenous peoples, declared that they were rational human beings with full rights to liberty and property, and explicitly pronounced a sentence of automatic excommunication on any Christian who participated in their subjugation.
Third, global Christianity is not a monarchy under the Pope; the entire Protestant world, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the ancient African churches (like Ethiopia) completely rejected the political authority of the Pope and nullified these bulls entirely.
Dr. Rodney Stark (Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, preeminent sociologist of religion, and Professor of Social Sciences at Baylor University)
“To cite the Papal Bulls of the late fifteenth century as the definitive Christian stance on slavery and colonization is an act of blatant historical cherry-picking. It ignores the continuous, fierce internal theological warfare within the Catholic Church. Pope Paul III’s 1537 bull, Sublimis Deus, explicitly revoked any legal or religious justification for the subjugation of indigenous peoples, declaring their right to liberty and property to be absolute, unalterable, and protected under divine law.”
Source: Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 331.
Dr. Lewis Hanke (Ph.D. from Harvard University, legendary historian, and the foremost authority on the history of Spanish colonial history and human rights)
“The true theological battle of the Age of Discovery was fought by Dominican friars like Bartolomé de las Casas, who used orthodox Christian dogma—specifically the deity of Christ and the reality of the Imago Dei—to completely condemn the conquistadors. Las Casas argued before the Spanish courts that the Papal Bulls could not violate natural law, and that any war waged against indigenous peoples to strip them of their land was a mortal sin that guaranteed damnation.”
Source: Hanke, Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949, p. 42.
Justo added:
Dr. Justo L. González (Ph.D. from Yale University, world-renowned church historian, and leading authority on Latino/Latina historical theology)
“The political machinations of Borgia popes like Alexander VI were driven by secular geopolitical alliances intended to secure European balances of power, not by Christian theology. The Protestant Reformation, which erupted shortly thereafter, completely shattered the authority of these papal decrees across Northern Europe, rendering the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ entirely irrelevant to the British, Dutch, and Scandinavian colonial projects, which were propelled by raw mercantile capitalism.”
Source: González, Justo L. The Story of Christianity: Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day. HarperOne, 2010, p. 183.
Dr. David Bentley Hart (Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, preeminent philosophical theologian and cultural historian) writes
“The Papal Bulls of discovery represent the low-water mark of medieval church-state corruption, where secular princes successfully co-opted the Roman see to legitimize economic cartels. However, blending these corrupt, localized decrees with the historic definitions of Christian orthodoxy is a historical farce. The ancient creeds of the Church contain no geopolitical blueprints; the core dogma of Christ’s deity functioned historically to subvert human empires, not to build them.”
Source: Hart, David Bentley. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Yale University Press, 2009, p. 194.
PARAGRAPH 8 & 9
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“The Doctrine of Discovery was the inspiration in the 1800s for the Monroe Doctrine… and Manifest Destiny… Steven T. Newcomb offers new insights by consciously connecting ‘the biblical basis of the claimed right of Christian discovery and dominion’ with the ‘mentality of empire and domination.’ … Steven T. Newcomb argues that… Western empires constructed a legal framework designed to conquer, enslave, and extract wealth…”
The Refutation
Mahmud makes a massive, unscholarly anachronistic leap by attempting to connect 15th-century Catholic Papal Bulls to the 19th-century American political concepts of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.
The United States was a fiercely anti-papal, Protestant, and increasingly secular republic. The Monroe Doctrine was a secular geopolitical strategy designed by John Quincy Adams to block European monarchies from interfering in American trade routes; it had absolutely nothing to do with Catholic theology.
Furthermore, Manifest Destiny was driven by Social Darwinism, Anglo-Saxon racial triumphalism, and secular Enlightenment concepts of technological progress, not orthodox Christian creeds. Mahmud relies on Steven T. Newcomb—who is an activist, not a peer-reviewed historian—whose work conflates political rhetoric with actual Christian theology.
According to Dr. Mark A. Noll (Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, Francis A. McAnaney Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame, and widely considered the premier historian of American religious history)
“Manifest Destiny in nineteenth-century America was fundamentally a secular, nationalistic ideology wrapped in the vague rhetorical cloaks of civil religion. It was driven by an Anglo-Saxon racial arrogance and economic expansionism that directly violated the explicit teachings of orthodox Christian scripture. The most rigorous orthodox theologians of that era, both Black and white, routinely used biblical theology to condemn Manifest Destiny as a national sin and a rebellion against God.”
Source: Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 431.
Dr. Richard J. Carwardine (Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History at Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy)
“The political engineering behind the Monroe Doctrine was entirely an exercise in secular realpolitik and national security, intended to preserve American commercial hegemony in the Western hemisphere against European imperial rivals. To frame this secular geopolitical document as an extension of medieval Christian theology is an exercise in historical fantasy that completely misunderstands the fiercely anti-papal and secularized legal nature of early nineteenth-century American governance.”
Source: Carwardine, Richard J. Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Yale University Press, 1993, p. 112.
Albert added,
Dr. Albert K. Weinberg (Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, renowned political scientist and the definitive historical authority on the ideology of Manifest Destiny)
“Manifest Destiny was an ideology of secular progressivism, propelled by the belief in the inherent superiority of American democratic institutions and technological advancement. Its legal and philosophical roots trace back to Enlightenment concepts of natural rights and the utility of land utilization, rather than orthodox Christian dogmatics, which were viewed by expansionist politicians as an obstacle to their pragmatic imperial designs.”
Source: Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. Johns Hopkins Press, 1935, p. 74.
Dr. George M. Marsden (Ph.D. from Yale University, McAnaney Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame, and leading scholar on religion and American culture)
“Activists who attempt to forge a direct, causal chain between biblical creation narratives and modern Western imperial legal systems are engaging in highly superficial polemics. They confuse the rhetorical language used by politicians to validate their greed with the actual structural mechanics of the law. Western international law was secularized during the Enlightenment, shifting its foundations away from Christian scripture to human utility and state sovereignty.”
Source: Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 182.
Conclusion
In this opening volume, we have thoroughly exposed the historical and exegetical bankruptcy of Muhammad Mahmud’s initial paragraphs. By forcing a literalistic, anachronistic reading onto Genesis and Matthew, Mahmud attempted to turn spiritual stewardship and loving evangelism into a corporate blueprint for military conquest. We have shattered this narrative by demonstrating that European secular powers had to explicitly distort and subvert orthodox biblical theology to feed their geopolitical expansionism.
Furthermore, we have unmasked the ultimate hypocrisy of his polemical framework. Through the peer-reviewed scholarship of historians like Dr. Efraim Karsh [Karsh, Efraim. Islamic Imperialism: A History. Yale University Press, 2007, p. 2] and Majid Khadduri [Khadduri, Majid. War and Peace in the Law of Islam. Johns Hopkins Press, 1955, p. 51], we have turned the tables completely. We proved that the exact “mentality of empire,” territorial dispossession, and systematic subjugation of indigenous populations that Mahmud seeks to uniquely blame on the Bible are, in reality, active, unalterable legal structures codified within classical Islamic jurisprudence (Siyar) under the concepts of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb [Lewis, Bernard. The Political Language of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 73].
But Muhammad Mahmud did not stop at rewriting global history; he attempted to twist localized African history by bringing forward obscure citations regarding Nigerian missions and colonial boundary-making. Now that the global theological variables have been isolated and corrected, we must move directly into his remaining claims to expose how he manipulates West African history to protect his religious bias.
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