False Perception of Superiority

The Catholic doctrine Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the Church there is no salvation”) received one of its strongest formulations at the Council of Florence, in the bull Cantate Domino (1442): “none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the ‘eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels’, unless before death they are joined with Her”.

Five centuries later, the Second Vatican Council softened this considerably. Lumen Gentium (section 16, 1964) says that “Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God”, and Nostra Aetate (section 2, 1965) says that “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions.” Yet the ranking remains: in 2000, Dominus Iesus (section 22) stated that followers of other religions, “objectively speaking”, are “in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” This is also an example of disguised revision: the teaching changed a great deal, but the old formula was never retracted.

The Quran states: “Whoever seeks a way other than Islam, it will never be accepted from them, and in the Hereafter they will be among the losers” (3:85). The internal tension: another verse says “Indeed, the believers, Jews, Christians, and Sabians — whoever truly believes in Allah and the Last Day and does good will have their reward with their Lord” (2:62). Muslim scholars have long debated how to reconcile the two, and some classical commentators held that the more exclusive verse abrogates the more inclusive one.

In the founding account of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith asks God which church to join, and is told “that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt” (Joseph Smith–History 1:19). Here the claim is not only that one’s own church is right, but that every other Christian church is corrupt.

The Torah says: “the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6). Some later texts go much further. The Tanya, the foundational work of Chabad Hasidism, teaches that Jews and non-Jews have different kinds of souls: “The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatsoever” (chapter 1).

The Hebrew Bible itself pushes back. The prophet Amos says in God’s name: “Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?” (Amos 9:7), and presents chosenness as greater accountability, not greater worth: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). The Mishnah teaches that humanity began with a single person “so that one person will not say to another: My father is greater than your father” (Sanhedrin 4:5). Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by Mordecai Kaplan, rejected the doctrine of chosenness altogether, as implying “the superiority of the elect community and the rejection of others”.

Supersessionism is the Christian teaching that the Church replaced the Jewish people as God’s chosen people, since the Jews rejected Jesus. For centuries this fed contempt for Jews as a people “rejected” or “accursed” by God. Nostra Aetate (section 4, 1965) reversed course, declaring that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God”. Here one group’s claim to be chosen was built on declaring another group un-chosen.

The Purusha Sukta hymn in the Rigveda (10.90) describes the four varnas (classes) as born from the body of the cosmic being: the Brahmins (priests) from its mouth, the warriors from its arms, the merchants from its thighs, and the Shudras (laborers) from its feet. Later law books such as the Manusmriti turned this into a detailed hierarchy, for example barring Shudras from studying the Vedas and assigning them to serve the higher classes. Below all four were the “untouchables”, considered ritually polluting. In 1927, the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar publicly burned the Manusmriti in protest, and the Indian constitution he later helped draft abolished untouchability (Article 17). Caste discrimination, however, persists.

In Genesis, Noah curses his grandson: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9:25). Although the text says nothing about skin color, and the curse falls on Canaan rather than Ham, the “curse of Ham” was widely read as a divine sentence on Black Africans, and was used to justify slavery in the Americas (see Dogma).

From the 1850s until 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints barred men of Black African descent from the priesthood, and Black members from temple ordinances. Leaders such as Brigham Young justified this with the curse of Cain and of Ham. In 2013, the Church’s essay “Race and the Priesthood” stated: “Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.”

Papal bulls such as Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Inter caetera (1493) granted Portugal and Spain the right to claim lands not ruled by Christians, so that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread”. This became the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, which the US Supreme Court cited in 1823 (Johnson v. M’Intosh) to deny Native Americans ownership of their own land. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine, stating that it is “not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church” and that the bulls “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith”.

The Quran commands to fight those “from among those who were given the Scripture” who do not embrace Islam, “until they pay the tax, willingly submitting, fully humbled” (9:29). Classical Islamic law gave Jews, Christians, and others the status of dhimmi (“protected person”): they could practice their religion, but paid a special poll tax (the jizya), and under rules such as the Pact of Umar could be forbidden to build new places of worship, required to wear distinctive clothing, and barred from testifying against Muslims in court. In the Ottoman Empire, the system was formally abolished only by the Reform Edict of 1856.

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) decreed (canon 68) “That Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.” This led to the Jewish badge and pointed hats imposed across Europe, alongside centuries of exclusion from professions, confinement to ghettos, and expulsions.