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Christianity and colonialism

Christianity and colonialism are often closely associated with each other due to the service of Christianity, in its various sects (namely Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy), as the state religion of the historical European colonial powers, in which Christians likewise made up the majority.[1] Through a variety of methods, Christian missionaries acted as the "religious arms" of the imperialist powers of Europe.[2] According to Edward E. Andrews, Associate Professor of Providence College[3] Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the later half of the 20th century, missionaries were viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them",[4] colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi".[5]

In some regions, almost all of a colony's population was forcibly turned away from its traditional belief systems and forcibly turned towards the Christian faith, which colonizers used as a justification for their extermination of adherents of other faiths, their enslavement of natives, and their exploitation of lands and seas.[6][7][8][9][10]

  1. ^ Lachenicht, Susanne. "Religion and Colonization". Oxford Bibliographies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 26 June 2021. For the process of European expansion and the colonial endeavors from the late 15th century to the 19th, historians of the Atlantic world have more often than not identified the imperial states as the most powerful players: the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English (later British). From these empires' perspectives, colonization was also about converting the "heathen" to, first, Catholicism, and then, with the Reformation and the rise of different varieties of Protestantism, to other denominations as well.
  2. ^ Bevans, Steven. "Christian Complicity in Colonialism/ Globalism" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-10-27. Retrieved 2010-11-17. The modern missionary era was in many ways the 'religious arm' of colonialism, whether Portuguese and Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth Century, or British, French, German, Belgian or American colonialism in the nineteenth. This was not all bad — oftentimes missionaries were heroic defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples
  3. ^ "Edward e. Andrews".
  4. ^ Andrews, Edward (2010). "Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816". Journal of Church & State. 51 (4): 663–691. doi:10.1093/jcs/csp090.
  5. ^ Comaroff, Jean; Comaroff, John (2010) [1997]. "Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination". In Grinker, Roy R.; Lubkemann, Stephen C.; Steiner, Christopher B. (eds.). Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. p. 32. ISBN 978-1-4443-3522-4.
  6. ^ Religion in the Andes: vision and imagination in early colonial Peru, S MacCormack - 1991
  7. ^ Savage systems: Colonialism and comparative religion in Southern Africa, D Chidester - 1996
  8. ^ Hindu-Catholic encounters in Goa: Religion, colonialism, and modernity, A Henn - 2014
  9. ^ The History of Filipino Women's Writings by Riitta Vartti, An article from Firefly - Filipino Short Stories, Helsinki 2001
  10. ^ "Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM (Queer Asia)", J. Neil Garcia, ISBN 978-962-209-985-2
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