Our early pioneers landed and soon signed a treaty with the Crown, the indigenous Maori dwellers, moderated by the Church.
It was an agreement for mutual respect and a partnership to steward the resources. Initially the vast majority of Maori converted to Christianity
Commercial greed and military might, drove Maori out of their lands claiming a conquest and a right to occupy.
The Church was silent about this.
Is conquest theologically justifiable ?
Well, we have to differentiate between a few different things.
In the case of what happened with the Maori, if a treaty was violated without justification, that would not be moral.
In the case of another British colony, India, while the British East India Company’s encroachment was amoral, the attrocity of the Mutiny and the mass-murder of English civilians combined with corruption on the part of the Company was in my opinion justification for establishing the Raj in order to sort out the problem. However the British subsequently abused this policy and the Partition created an on-going threat to world security by creating two nuclear nations that hate each other, India and Pakistan, so that was a failure.
On the other hand some conquests might be justifiable in order to prevent persecution genocides of Christians, or to abolish horrible moral degradation.
For example, let’s say we have a hypothetical country called “Alateria.” Once a colony of a major imperial power, it became a wealthy independent first world country in the late 20th century, a modern liberal democracy. Then it elected a socialist government, which then slowly moved to dismantle the rights of religious people, in particular Christians regardless of denomination, and began imposing forced abortion and euthanasia. In such a case, the conquest of that land in order to remove its government would be morally justified to protect the Christian population from abuse. Additionally it could be justified to deny that land sovereignity until whatever social factors led to the socialist regime that I’ve described being identified and rectified were corrected.
Outside of that very specific hypothetical favor I’m not a fan of conquest; the main rationale for having governments is to maintain defensive forces to prevent conquest and most recent attempts at military expansionism have been disastrous.
The moral basis of this is based purely in Christ’s commands to treat others the way we would be treated, to turn the other cheek (but there exists no prohibtion against defending others), and to love God above all others.
Our actions must be based on this ideal without reference to Old Testament examples which were specific to the Old Covenant which was fulfilled on the Cross.
