A Critical History of Christianity’s Global Expansion
From the Ruins of Europe’s Indigenous Religions to the Burning Courts of Goa
“They made a graveyard and called it peace.”
— Tacitus, Agricola, c. 98 CE
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Preface: What This Essay Is and Is Not
This essay is a sustained critical examination of Christianity’s global expansion from the vantage point of the civilizations that expansion displaced, suppressed, or destroyed. It draws on primary sources, historical scholarship, and the internal logic of the theological claims Christianity advanced in order to argue that the religion’s remarkable geographical spread cannot be understood primarily as the triumph of persuasion over error. It must be understood, in large part, as the product of power.
This is not an argument that Christianity is theologically false. The historical record neither proves nor disproves supernatural claims, and this essay makes no attempt to do so. It is an argument about mechanism: the conventional narrative of Christian expansion — in which the religion spread because it was true, because it was morally compelling, because it answered questions that indigenous traditions could not — is historically untenable. The evidence points in a different direction.
Nor is this an argument that every Christian was a conscious agent of domination, or that every missionary acted from bad faith. Individual sincerity is entirely compatible with systemic brutality. The most important historical question is rarely whether individual actors meant well. It is what the system they participated in actually did. This essay is concerned with that system: its logic, its mechanisms, its consistent patterns across five continents over five centuries, and its cumulative consequences for the civilizations it encountered.
What follows is not a comprehensive world history. It is a structured argument organized around the regions where the relationship between Christianity and imperial power is most clearly documented. The evidence presented is not manufactured to generate outrage. It is the mainstream of the historical record, available in any serious library, derived from primary sources including missionary accounts, colonial legal codes, ecclesiastical records, eyewitness testimonies, and the internal documents of the institutions responsible for what is described. The historian Peter Brown, in his foundational work on the transformation of the ancient world, has described the Christianization of Europe as among the most radical cultural revolutions in recorded history — and yet one whose revolutionary character is almost entirely obscured by the fact that the victors wrote the history.[1]
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Part I: The Erasure of Europe’s Indigenous Religions
I.1 — The Myth of Natural Christianity
Modern Europeans are taught, through architecture, calendar, law, and accumulated cultural assumption, to experience Christianity as the natural religion of their continent — as though the cathedrals of Chartres and Cologne grew from European soil the way its forests did. This impression is one of history’s most successful acts of institutional amnesia. Christianity did not arise in Europe. It arrived from the eastern Mediterranean, was adopted through a sequence of political decisions made by Roman emperors, enforced through legal and military mechanisms, and spread across the continent in ways that displaced a vast array of indigenous traditions that had shaped European civilization for centuries or millennia before a single bishop set foot north of the Alps.
To understand what was lost, one must first understand what existed. The religious diversity of pre-Christian Europe was not primitive confusion awaiting correction. It was a sophisticated plurality of traditions — each with its own theology, cosmology, ethics, and institutional structure — that had developed over centuries in response to the deepest questions human beings ask.
The Greek Tradition
The Greek religious tradition was not merely mythology in the dismissive modern sense. It was the intellectual and spiritual foundation of one of history’s most generative civilizations. The gods of Olympus were inseparable from Greek philosophy, drama, political theory, and scientific inquiry — not as constraints upon those activities but as their animating context. Walter Burkert, the foremost modern scholar of Greek religion, has demonstrated that Greek religious practice was far more varied, philosophically serious, and intellectually sophisticated than its dismissal as ‘pagan mythology’ allows.[2]
The mystery religions of Greece — the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Orphic tradition, the cult of Dionysus, the Pythagorean brotherhood — addressed, in their own idiom, precisely the questions of meaning, mortality, transformation, and transcendence that Christianity would later claim as its exclusive province. The Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated at Eleusis near Athens for approximately two thousand years before their forcible suppression by the Christian emperor Theodosius in 392 CE, offered initiates a direct experiential encounter with death and rebirth — a carefully prepared confrontation with mortality that participants consistently described as transformative beyond language. Cicero, writing in the first century BCE, stated that Athens had given humanity nothing more valuable than the Mysteries, which had taught initiates not merely how to live but how to die with hope.
The Neoplatonist tradition, which reached its apex in Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus in the centuries immediately preceding Christianity’s consolidation of power, represented one of the most sophisticated philosophical engagements with the nature of consciousness, divinity, and the structure of reality that the ancient world produced. Plotinus’s Enneads, composed in the third century CE, develop a systematic metaphysics in which consciousness is understood as the fundamental ground of existence, the physical world as an emanation from a unified divine source, and the human soul as capable of direct experiential union with that source through philosophical practice and contemplative discipline. This was not superstition awaiting correction. It was philosophy of extraordinary depth that addressed, in rigorous terms, questions about the nature of mind and the human capacity for transcendence that remain genuinely difficult by contemporary standards.[3]
Neoplatonism was not defeated by Christian theology in open philosophical argument. It was suppressed by Christian emperors who closed its schools, confiscated its institutional property, and in some cases murdered its practitioners. The murder of Hypatia of Alexandria in 415 CE — a Neoplatonist philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer dragged from her carriage by a Christian mob, stripped, and killed with sharpened shells or roof tiles — is the most famous instance of a broader pattern of violent suppression of philosophical traditions that competed with Christian authority.
The Druids and the Celtic World
The Druids of the Celtic world are among history’s most systematically misrepresented intellectual traditions. Popular imagination supplies white robes and stone circles. The historical record supplies something considerably more serious: a learned class requiring up to twenty years of training who served simultaneously as judges, historians, astronomers, theologians, and political counselors, and who maintained an oral tradition of extraordinary complexity and depth. Julius Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, acknowledged — with the authority of a conqueror who had reason to understand his enemy — that the Druids had developed sophisticated doctrines concerning the immortality of the soul, the transmigration of consciousness between lives, the structure of the natural world, and the relationship between human communities and divine forces. Caesar noted that Druidic training required memorization of an enormous quantity of verse, and that the Druids deliberately refused to commit their knowledge to writing, believing that writing weakened the capacity of memory and diminished the depth of understanding that oral transmission required.[4]
The Roman destruction of the Druidic tradition was accomplished most systematically in the assault on the island of Anglesey in 60 CE under the governor Suetonius Paulinus. Tacitus describes the scene: Druid priests standing on the shoreline, arms raised in imprecation, surrounded by women in black robes carrying torches. The Roman soldiers, initially paralyzed by the strangeness of the sight, were ordered forward. The sacred groves of Anglesey — the depositories of Druidic learning, the sites of ceremony that had accumulated meaning over centuries — were cut down and burned. What the Druids knew died with them. We possess only the hostile testimony of those who destroyed them. The knowledge system they maintained has never been recovered, and its loss is epistemically permanent.
The Norse Tradition
The Norse religious tradition produced, in the Eddas and the associated saga literature, mythological and theological material of genuine philosophical depth. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the Poetic Edda, preserved in the Codex Regius manuscript, constitute the most complete surviving record of a Northern European indigenous religious tradition. That they survived at all is itself revealing: they were preserved by Christian Icelandic scholars who recognized their literary and historical value while the living religious tradition they recorded had already been suppressed.[5]
Odin, the Allfather, hung himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days and nights, pierced by his own spear, in order to acquire the wisdom of the runes. This is not a simple story about a god gaining magical power. It is a sophisticated theological statement about the relationship between suffering, sacrifice, and the acquisition of deep knowledge — the recognition that wisdom is not given but earned through voluntary submission to ordeal. The formal parallel with the Christian crucifixion narrative is striking and has been extensively discussed by comparative religion scholars. What is less frequently noted is that the Norse version, in its own cultural context, predates the Christian one by centuries.
The figure of Loki — the trickster, the shape-changer, the necessary agent of both creation and destruction — encodes a theological sophistication about the nature of divine action that monotheism consistently struggles to accommodate: the recognition that the forces which create are also the forces which destroy, that order and chaos are not simply opposed but interdependent, that the divine cannot be reduced to the purely good without sacrificing its explanatory power. Norse cosmology ended not in eternal divine triumph but in Ragnarök — the twilight of the gods, the destruction and renewal of the world. This eschatology, in which even the divine is subject to fate and temporal limitation, is philosophically more honest about the actual structure of experienced reality than any eschatology that promises permanent victory to the correct theological team.
The Baltic Traditions
The Baltic peoples of what are now Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia maintained religious traditions so deeply rooted in their culture that they resisted Christianization longer than any other European population, surviving into the fifteenth century as the official state religion of Lithuania and persisting in folk practice for centuries beyond that. The Baltic religion centered on Dievas, the sky god, Perkunas the thunder deity, Laima the goddess of fate and fortune, and a complex of nature spirits and ancestral figures who populated a sacred landscape understood as alive and responsive to human conduct.[6]
The Latvian dainas — traditional folk songs encoding theological, cosmological, and ethical knowledge in musical form — number in the hundreds of thousands of recorded examples, making them one of the most extensive bodies of indigenous European religious literature to survive anywhere on the continent. The folklorist Krisjanis Barons compiled over 200,000 dainas in his monumental nineteenth-century collection. Each is a fragment of a religious world that the Northern Crusades spent three centuries attempting to destroy, and that survived precisely because it was encoded in song rather than stone — in the one medium that military campaigns cannot burn.[7]
The Structure of Pre-Christian Religious Plurality
These traditions — Greek, Celtic, Norse, Baltic, Germanic, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric — shared a characteristic that made them fundamentally incompatible with Christianity’s theological structure: they accepted plurality as a condition of the sacred, not as a deficiency in humanity’s understanding of it. No Druid believed that the Germanic tribes were worshipping false gods. No Norse theologian taught that the Greek Olympians were demonic entities deserving suppression. The gods of different peoples were understood as different expressions of a multiform sacred reality, not as mutually exclusive truth claims in competition with one another. Religious boundaries were porous. Theological tolerance was not a liberal virtue practiced reluctantly. It was built into the structure of how the sacred was understood.
Christianity arrived with an incompatible premise: there is one God, one path to salvation, and all alternatives are not merely different but spiritually fatal — actively dangerous to those who adhere to them. The missionary imperative this logic generates is intrinsic, not incidental, to Christian theology. If eternal salvation depends on correct belief, and if you sincerely hold that belief, then allowing others to persist in error becomes a form of moral complicity in their damnation. The urgency this creates has no real analogue in any of the traditions it displaced. This is the theological engine that drives the entire history this essay describes.
I.2 — The Mechanisms of Suppression
The Legal Architecture of Erasure
The conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 CE and the subsequent Edict of Thessalonica in 380, which made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire, transformed Christian expansion permanently. What had been a persecuted minority faith became the ideological apparatus of the most powerful military-administrative state in the Western world. The consequences for Europe’s indigenous traditions were rapid, systematic, and ultimately total.[8]
The process was legal before it was violent. The Codex Theodosianus, promulgated in 438 CE, contains dozens of edicts systematically dismantling the legal basis of non-Christian religious practice. Sacrifices were prohibited under penalty of death. Temples were ordered closed. The legal status of pagan priests was eliminated. Property held by religious institutions was subject to confiscation. Public expression of non-Christian religion was progressively criminalized, beginning with public ceremony and extending eventually to private practice. The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in his meticulous study of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, has documented the deliberate, systematic destruction of pagan cult infrastructure across the late empire: temples burned, statues deliberately smashed, sacred groves felled, libraries torched.[9]
The destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria in 391 CE is the most famous instance of this process. The Serapeum housed one of the ancient world’s greatest library complexes, containing texts accumulated over centuries of Hellenistic scholarship. It was destroyed by a Christian mob operating with the effective approval of Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria. The Alexandrian intellectual tradition — the tradition of Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Hypatia — was housed in institutions whose destruction was authorized by Christian ecclesiastical authority. The historian Edward Watts has documented how systematically the intellectual infrastructure of late antique paganism was dismantled through precisely this combination of mob action and episcopal authorization.[10]
Conversion by the Sword: Charlemagne and the Saxons
The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, promulgated by Charlemagne around 785, is a document of extraordinary historical directness. It imposed the death penalty for cremating the dead according to traditional Saxon custom, for eating meat during Lent, for refusing baptism, for practicing traditional Saxon religious rites, and — in one of history’s more revealing legal provisions — for merely pretending to be baptized while secretly maintaining ancestral practices. Apostasy, defined as returning to paganism after baptism, was punishable by death. The Saxon campaigns were not missionary expeditions requiring occasional military support. They were military campaigns requiring theological authorization. Defeat meant baptism. Continued resistance meant execution.[11]
The Massacre of Verden in 782, in which Charlemagne ordered the beheading of approximately 4,500 Saxon prisoners who had refused Christianity or reverted to paganism after baptism, is not an aberration in this story. It is its clearest expression. Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard records these events without apparent moral difficulty — evidence that the combination of religious conversion and military coercion was not experienced by contemporaries as a contradiction but as a coherent and praiseworthy policy.[12]
Scandinavia: Saint Olaf’s Methods
Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway from 995 to 1000, employed torture, mutilation, and execution to compel conversion among Norse populations, according to the sagas. Those who refused baptism were killed, mutilated, or exiled. Olaf Haraldsson — later canonized as Saint Olaf, patron saint of Norway — continued the same methods with sufficient consistency to have been killed in battle by Norwegian nobles who objected to his coercion, at the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030. The canonization of a man who used torture and execution to force religious compliance reveals something important about the institutional values of the Church doing the canonizing. The forced conversion was not a theological problem that would disqualify a candidate for sainthood. It was mission accomplished. Saint Olaf remains the patron saint of Norway.[13]
The Northern Crusades: Holy War Against the Baltic
The Northern Crusades — military campaigns against the pagan peoples of the Baltic region, authorized by a series of papal bulls beginning in 1147 — were prosecuted primarily by the Teutonic Knights, a crusading military order subsequently redirected from the Holy Land toward the conversion of Baltic and Slavic pagans. The Teutonic Knights were not defending Christians from aggression. They were attacking non-Christians for the offense of maintaining ancestral traditions. Their campaigns against the Prussians resulted in the effective extinction of the Old Prussian people and the complete destruction of their language and religious tradition by the fifteenth century. Their campaigns against the Lithuanians continued for over two hundred years before Lithuanian grand dukes accepted baptism in 1387 — accepting it, notably, not because they had been theologically persuaded, but because Christian baptism was the political price of alliance with Poland.[14]
I.3 — What Disappeared and What It Means
By the end of the fifteenth century, the ancestral religions of Europe had ceased to exist as living systems. Traditions developed over thousands of years — encoding in their myths, rituals, and priesthoods accumulated knowledge about the cosmos, the sacred, the community, and the self — were gone. Their temples were rubble or churches. Their priests were extinct or converted. Their texts, where they existed, were burned. Their oral traditions ended when the last practitioners died without successors.
What survived did so in three forms: fragments preserved within Christianity itself, disguised as folk custom or incorporated into the liturgical calendar (Christmas trees, Easter eggs, harvest festivals, and the very names of the days of the week — Sunday, Monday, Tuesday through Saturday — encoding the sun, the moon, Tyr, Woden, Thor, Frigg, and Saturn in languages whose speakers had been forbidden to worship those figures); literary texts preserved by Christian monks who recognized cultural value while rejecting theology; and the testimony of hostile witnesses — Roman administrators and Christian missionaries who described pagan practices in order to condemn them, and whose condemnations are now our primary evidence.
Modern Europeans celebrate the intellectual and artistic achievements of the civilizations that produced these traditions with genuine enthusiasm. Greek philosophy anchors the Western intellectual tradition. Roman law structures modern legal systems across the globe. Norse mythology generates a global entertainment industry. Celtic art is recognized as one of history’s great aesthetic traditions. What is almost never explicitly acknowledged in these celebrations is that the religious traditions at the heart of these civilizations were actively and deliberately destroyed — and that the institution responsible for their destruction is the same institution whose buildings still dominate the skylines of European cities.
If a foreign religious movement arrived in contemporary Europe and over several centuries converted the population, transformed cathedrals into temples of a new faith, burned Christian libraries, killed Christian priests, and produced a civilization in which Christianity survived only in literature and museums — would Europeans describe the outcome as spiritual progress? Or as one of history’s great cultural catastrophes? The answer one gives to that question says something important about whether one is reading this history from the perspective of the victors or the vanquished.
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Part II: The Americas — Conquest as Theology
II.1 — What Was There
The Aztec Civilization
The civilizations of the Americas at the time of European contact were not, by any honest assessment, inferior to the civilizations encountering them. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, contained between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants in 1519 — larger than any city in contemporary Europe, including Constantinople. Its engineering was extraordinary: built on an island in Lake Texcoco, connected to the mainland by causeways wide enough for ten horses abreast, supplied with fresh water through a double-pipe aqueduct system that separated clean from waste water, and organized around ceremonial centers of architectural grandeur that astonished the Spanish soldiers who first encountered them.[15]
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortés’s army who later wrote the most detailed eyewitness account of the conquest, described the army’s first sight of Tenochtitlan: ‘We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.’ This was not the response of a civilization encountering a primitive settlement. It was the response of soldiers encountering something they had not imagined possible.[16]
Aztec religious thought was not primitive nature worship. It was a complex theological system that understood the universe as maintained by a precarious reciprocity between human beings and divine forces, in which ritual — including the ritual of human sacrifice, understood as the return to the gods of what the gods had given — sustained cosmic order and prevented universal catastrophe. The theological rationale for human sacrifice, whatever one thinks of the practice, was internally coherent: the sun required nourishment to continue its journey, and the most precious nourishment human beings could offer was life itself. This cosmology was not more violent than the Christian theology that replaced it, which posited the torture and crucifixion of a deity as the mechanism of universal salvation. It was differently violent, rooted in a different understanding of the relationship between human beings and divine necessity.
The Aztec educational system, notably, provided universal education to both genders — the calmecac for noble children and the telpochcalli for commoners — at a time when literacy in Europe was largely restricted to clergy. This is not the educational structure of a civilization requiring instruction from outside. It is the educational structure of a civilization that took its own intellectual inheritance seriously.
The Maya Achievement
The Maya civilization had independently developed a mathematical system incorporating the concept of zero — one of only two or three civilizations in human history to do so independently. Their calendar system tracked the solar year to an accuracy of 365.2422 days, within 0.0002 days of the modern measured value, and more accurate than the Julian calendar the Spanish brought with them. Their writing system — a fully developed logosyllabic script capable of expressing any thought in any register of language — was used to record astronomical data, ritual calendars, historical chronicles, genealogies, and theological texts in bark-paper books called codices.[17]
The Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ Maya sacred narrative preserved shortly after the conquest from a pre-conquest original, is a document of extraordinary literary and theological sophistication. Its account of the gods’ multiple attempts to create human beings — the failures with mud and with wood before the eventual success with maize — encodes a theology of humanity’s relationship to the natural world in which human beings are understood as constituted by the same substance as their primary food. We are, the text asserts, made of corn. This is a statement about ecological relationship and about the continuity between human life and the agricultural systems that sustain it that is, by any fair comparative standard, at least as philosophically serious as the claim in Genesis that human beings are made of dust.
The Inca Empire
The Inca empire at its height administered a territory of approximately 2 million square kilometers — larger than any European state of the period — through a system of roads totaling over 40,000 kilometers, relay runner stations, administrative centers, and a redistributive economic system that maintained massive storehouses of food distributed to populations in need. Inca agricultural technology, including the development of over 3,000 varieties of potato adapted to specific ecological conditions and the construction of terraced agricultural systems on Andean slopes, constituted a body of applied ecological knowledge accumulated over centuries that sustained millions of people in one of the world’s most challenging physical environments.[18]
The quipu — a system of knotted strings of different colors and materials encoding administrative, calendrical, and possibly narrative information — remains one of history’s most underappreciated intellectual achievements. Recent scholarship by Gary Urton has demonstrated that the quipu system was capable of encoding information at a complexity level suggesting it may have functioned as a full writing system. The majority of surviving quipus have not been deciphered. If this interpretation is correct, the destruction of quipus by Spanish authorities represents a textual catastrophe comparable in scale to the burning of the Maya codices.[19]
II.2 — The Requerimiento: Sacred Violence Made Legal
The Requerimiento, drafted by the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios in 1513 and subsequently read aloud to indigenous populations before Spanish military attacks, is one of the most revealing documents in the history of religious imperialism. It informed its listeners — in Spanish, which they could not understand, often from a distance at which they could not hear it, sometimes read to uninhabited coastlines before ships landed — of the existence of God, the creation of the world, the authority of the Pope, and the donation of their lands to the Spanish Crown by papal decree. It then presented a choice:[20]
If you do not do this, and maliciously delay to do so, I certify to you that with the help of God we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, or of these cavaliers who come with us.
The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who heard the Requerimiento read in practice, wrote that he did not know whether to laugh or weep. But the document was not a joke. It was a sincere attempt to solve a genuine theological problem: how to conduct aggressive war against people who had done nothing to provoke it, within a religious and legal framework that nominally prohibited unprovoked aggression. The solution was elegant in its brutality: by informing indigenous peoples of Christian truth and offering the opportunity to accept it, the document transformed their refusal into offense. Those who resisted were no longer victims of aggression. They were rebels against God’s appointed authority. The violence that followed was, in the document’s own terms, their fault. This is not a perversion of Christian exclusivism. It is its logical application.[21]
II.3 — Dogs, Destruction, and the Testimony of Las Casas
The Destruction of the Taíno
Bartolomé de las Casas arrived in the New World in 1502 as a colonist and, initially, a slaveholder. He received an encomienda — a grant of indigenous labor — and participated in the conquest of Cuba in 1511. What he witnessed converted him into one of history’s first systematic human rights advocates. His A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542 and addressed to Prince Philip of Spain, is a primary source document of devastating and specific clarity, written by an eyewitness who spoke the language, interviewed survivors, and understood from the inside the system he was describing.[22]
The Taíno population of Hispaniola, the island Columbus reached in 1492, has been estimated by scholars at between 250,000 and one million people at the time of contact. By 1548 — within a single human lifetime — the Taíno as a distinct people had been effectively destroyed. Las Casas documents the mechanisms: forced labor in gold mines under conditions that killed workers within months, systematic disruption of food production that produced famine, massacre of resistant communities, and the use of war dogs against the population.[23]
The Spanish practice of aperreamiento — the setting of trained war dogs upon indigenous people — was not a battlefield expedient. It was a deliberate, sustained instrument of terror and control that Columbus himself introduced and that his successors institutionalized. Las Casas records that Spanish colonists used dogs to hunt down indigenous people who fled or resisted, that the dogs were trained and rewarded with human flesh, and that the killing of indigenous people by dogs was conducted as entertainment, as punishment, and as public spectacle designed to terrorize surrounding communities. He records specific instances: infants thrown to the dogs when their mothers, driven on forced marches, could not keep pace. Captives publicly fed to dogs as warnings to other villages. He describes the mastiffs and greyhounds used for this purpose, notes that their handlers were paid by the colonial administration, and makes clear that the practice was not hidden but administered.[24]
Columbus’s own journals describe the Taíno as ‘very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal.’ He recorded their generosity, their lack of weapons, and their willingness to share whatever they had. He also noted that fifty Spaniards could subjugate the entire population. He then, across subsequent voyages, proceeded to demonstrate this calculation. On his second voyage he brought seventeen ships and approximately 1,200 men — not explorers but colonists and soldiers. The colonial enterprise was explicit from the beginning. Columbus is celebrated in the United States with a federal holiday.[25]
Las Casas describes groups of indigenous people herded into buildings and burned alive when transporting them was inconvenient. He describes the practice of cutting off the hands of indigenous people who failed to meet gold quotas and hanging those hands around their necks as they were sent back to their villages. He describes the killing of children in front of their parents as a method of breaking communal resistance, the systematic mutilation of captives as standard administrative tools of colonial control, and the killing of indigenous leaders by burning or hanging — calculated by the Spanish overseers to produce the maximum psychological effect on the surrounding population.
Las Casas was a Catholic priest. His account was addressed to the heir to the Spanish throne. He was not a hostile foreign critic working from rumor. He was a participant-turned-witness writing from direct observation, and he was writing to the institution with the power and — in his view — the moral obligation to stop what he was describing. That the Spanish Crown received his account, convened debates in response (the Valladolid Controversy of 1550–1551), and ultimately continued the colonial enterprise with modifications too minor to alter its fundamental character is itself a fact requiring historical accounting.
The Capture and Execution of Atahualpa
Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire was accomplished through epidemic disease, which had preceded the Spanish and already devastated the population, military technology that indigenous armies could not match, and the capture of the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in November 1532. Pizarro had 168 men. Atahualpa had an army of approximately 80,000. The Spanish captured Atahualpa in a surprise attack on his unarmed retinue, killing between 2,000 and 7,000 Inca attendants in the process while suffering no Spanish deaths.[26]
Atahualpa offered to fill a room measuring approximately 6.7 by 5.2 meters to a height of 2.4 meters with gold, and two similar rooms with silver — a ransom he subsequently paid. He was executed anyway. The Spanish offered him a choice: to be burned alive as a pagan, or to be garrotted after baptism. He accepted baptism and was strangled. The friar Vicente de Valverde, who performed the baptism, later reported this as a spiritual success: the emperor had died a Christian. That he had accepted baptism under immediate threat of a more painful death was not considered to complicate this assessment.[27]
II.4 — The Burning of Memory
Diego de Landa and the Maya Codices
Diego de Landa, the Franciscan bishop of Yucatán, conducted an auto-da-fé at Maní on July 12, 1562, that stands as one of history’s most significant acts of deliberate cultural destruction. He destroyed an estimated 5,000 Maya religious objects and burned twenty-seven Maya hieroglyphic codices — bark-paper books containing astronomical data, ritual calendars, historical records, medical knowledge, and theological texts representing the accumulated intellectual heritage of a civilization. He also subjected approximately 4,500 Maya people to physical examination and torture during the investigation that preceded the burning, producing 157 deaths and numerous permanent injuries by his own records.[28]
De Landa’s own account of the burning, from his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, captures the episode with chilling casualness:
We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.
That the Maya experienced ‘much affliction’ at the destruction of their intellectual heritage is recorded as a curious observation, not a moral problem. The burning was authorized. The suffering was collateral.
The irony that defines de Landa’s historical position is precise: the same man who burned twenty-seven Maya codices subsequently wrote the most detailed account of Maya civilization to survive the conquest. His Relación became the primary source through which modern scholars have attempted to reconstruct what he destroyed. He preserved enough to make partial reconstruction possible while having personally ensured that full reconstruction would be impossible forever.[29]
Only four Maya codices survived the conquest: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the fragmentary Grolier Codex. The Dresden Codex alone contains Venus tables and eclipse prediction tables of a mathematical precision that astonished Western scholars when first deciphered in the nineteenth century. What the other twenty-seven codices burned at Maní contained — plus whatever additional quantity was destroyed elsewhere — we will never know. The loss is epistemically permanent, as permanent as the destruction of the Druidic oral tradition, as permanent as the burning of the Alexandrian library.
The Physical Overwriting of Sacred Space
The systematic demolition of indigenous temples and the construction of Christian churches upon their foundations was both a practical and a theological act. The great Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City was built upon the ruins of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, using stones removed from the demolished temple as building material. In Cholula — home to the largest pyramid by volume in the ancient world — the Spanish built a church on its summit. In Cuzco, the walls of the Coricancha, the most sacred temple of the Inca religious system, were incorporated into the foundations of the Church of Santo Domingo, which still stands on them today. The sacred geography of indigenous life was literally overwritten. The message encoded in these architectural decisions was explicit: the old sacred order had been not merely replaced but physically incorporated into its replacement.[30]
II.5 — North America: The Slow Erasure
The Civilizing Mission and Its Bad Faith
The pattern of treaty-making and treaty-breaking between the American government and indigenous nations is among the most extensively documented cases of systematic institutional bad faith in recorded history. Between 1778 and 1871, the United States entered into over 370 ratified treaties with indigenous nations. The legal scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. has documented how this treaty system functioned as a mechanism of progressive expropriation: agreements were made and then renegotiated under conditions of increasing pressure, boundaries were drawn and then moved when settler expansion demanded it, guarantees were made and then violated when their maintenance became inconvenient.[31]
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears carry within them a specific irony that deserves sustained attention. The Five Civilized Tribes — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole — had, in a conscious effort to satisfy the civilization argument advanced against them, adopted written constitutions, Christianity, European-style agriculture, plantation farming, written legal codes, and in the Cherokee case a written syllabary invented by Sequoyah and a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. They had done everything that the proponents of assimilation demanded. They were removed anyway. The Cherokee removal in the winter of 1838 to 1839, conducted under military guard in conditions that produced mass illness, starvation, and exposure, killed between 4,000 and 8,000 people from a total population of approximately 16,000. The survivors called the route Nunna daul Tsuny: the trail where they cried.[32]
The removal of peoples who had converted to Christianity and adopted European institutions — and who were expelled regardless — is the clearest possible demonstration that the civilizing mission, including its Christian component, was never a sincere offer. It was a temporizing strategy that delayed expropriation without preventing it. The goal was not the conversion or civilization of indigenous peoples. The goal was their land. Christianity provided the moral language in which that goal could be pursued without being plainly named.
The Boarding School System
The Indian boarding school system, established in the United States in the 1870s and operating through the mid-twentieth century, pursued cultural destruction through pedagogical means. The founding philosophy was stated with unusual candor by Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in a speech to a Baptist missionary conference in 1892: ‘A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one… I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.’ This was not metaphor. It was institutional policy.[33]
Children as young as four were removed from families, transported to distant schools from which escape was punished, forbidden to speak indigenous languages, given Christian names, dressed in European clothing, and subjected to compulsory Christian religious instruction. Those who spoke their own languages were physically punished. The explicit goal was the termination of cultural transmission: if children could be prevented from receiving their heritage during the years when such transmission occurs, that heritage would die with their grandparents.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, in its 2015 Final Report, documented the deaths of at least 4,100 children in church-run residential schools over the course of the system’s operation. The Commission concluded that the system constituted cultural genocide. The churches responsible for operating the schools included the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the United Church of Canada, and the Presbyterian Church — the major institutional representatives of Christianity in Canada.[34]
The intergenerational consequences are measurable and persist into the present. The interruption of cultural transmission produces damage that does not end when the schools close. It propagates forward through every generation that inherits the fracture: the loss of language, the loss of ceremony, the loss of the relational and cosmological frameworks that gave communities coherence and individuals identity. When a civilization’s capacity to perpetuate itself is deliberately severed, the wound does not heal by itself, and it does not heal quickly.
* * *
Part III: Australia, Africa, India, and the Goa Inquisition
III.1 — Australia: The Oldest Living Cultures on Earth
Before British colonization, Australia was inhabited by hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations whose spiritual traditions represented the oldest continuously practiced religious cultures in recorded human history. Archaeological evidence places continuous human habitation in Australia at 65,000 years or more — a timespan that renders all of recorded Western history, from the earliest Sumerian texts to the present, a fraction of the period across which these traditions had been maintained, refined, and transmitted.[35]
The Songlines — networks of sacred paths crossing the continent, each connected to specific ancestral narratives, ceremonial obligations, and geographical features — constituted a civilization-scale knowledge infrastructure of remarkable sophistication. By following the melodic contours of an ancestral song, a person could navigate thousands of kilometers through unfamiliar territory, because the song described the landscape through which the ancestor had traveled at the moment of creation. The songs simultaneously encoded navigational information, historical memory, ecological knowledge, astronomical data, and theological relationship to specific places. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described Aboriginal religious traditions as representing ‘a metaphysic of nature’ — a complete philosophical system for understanding the relationship between consciousness, community, place, and the structure of reality.[36]
British colonization proceeded on the legal doctrine of terra nullius — the claim that Australia was effectively unoccupied before European arrival, because Aboriginal peoples did not hold land in a form that European law recognized. This doctrine was not merely a legal convenience. It was a philosophical claim: that the Aboriginal relationship to land — spiritual, custodial, encoded in ceremony and song across 65,000 years — was not a real relationship in any legally cognizable sense. The doctrine was not overturned by Australian courts until the Mabo decision of 1992, more than two centuries after colonization began.
The Stolen Generations — the policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families and placing them in church-run institutions — operated with explicit cultural-destruction intent. The 1937 national conference of Commonwealth and state authorities adopted a policy of ‘absorption’ explicitly aimed at eliminating Aboriginal cultural identity within a generation. The 1997 report Bringing Them Home documented the systematic nature of the removals and their multigenerational consequences, and concluded that they constituted genocide under the United Nations definition.[37]
III.2 — The Goa Inquisition: Christianity’s Asian Terror
The Goa Inquisition, established in 1560 under Portuguese colonial authority and operating until 1812 — a span of 252 years — represents one of the most extensively documented cases of Christianity functioning as an instrument of judicial terror outside Europe. It is almost entirely absent from popular accounts of Christian missionary activity in Asia, an absence that is itself evidence of the selective memory through which the history of Christian expansion is conventionally narrated.[38]
Francis Xavier’s Role
Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary later canonized as the patron saint of all foreign missions, worked in Goa from 1542 to 1545. He is celebrated as a heroic evangelist who baptized, by his own estimate, tens of thousands of people across Asia. What is less frequently noted is that he wrote directly to King João III of Portugal, in a letter of May 16, 1545, explicitly requesting an Inquisition for Goa, arguing that where preaching and persuasion had not been sufficient to prevent converts from reverting to prior practices, judicial investigation with penal authority would be necessary. The Inquisition Xavier requested was established fifteen years after his death, in 1560. Xavier is described in his hagiography as a man of extraordinary personal charity. Both characterizations may be true. They are compatible with the historical fact that he advocated for a judicial torture institution as an instrument of missionary policy.[39]
Targets, Procedures, and Scale
The primary targets of the Goa Inquisition were newly converted Christians of Hindu or Jewish origin suspected of continuing to practice their original traditions in private; Old Christians suspected of heresy; Muslims; and practitioners of any non-Christian religious tradition within Portuguese-controlled territory. The offenses prosecuted included practicing Hindu rituals in private, possessing Sanskrit religious texts, observing traditional dietary customs, consulting traditional Brahmin priests or astrologers, using traditional medicines associated with non-Christian ritual, and naming children with Hindu or Muslim names.[40]
The procedures followed those established by the medieval Inquisition: arrest, imprisonment, examination under torture, trial before an inquisitorial tribunal, sentencing, and in cases of non-reconciliation, execution at a public auto-da-fé. The surviving records document 16,202 persons tried between 1560 and 1774. Of these, 57 were burned in person and 64 were burned in effigy. The historian A.K. Priolkar, who conducted the most comprehensive scholarly examination of the surviving records, estimated that the actual numbers were considerably higher, as many documents were destroyed when the Inquisition was abolished.[41]
The French physician Charles Dellon, arrested by the Goa Inquisition in 1673 and imprisoned for nearly two years before being sentenced at an auto-da-fé, published an account of his experience upon returning to Europe. His Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa, published in 1687, describes the underground prison conditions, the process of examination under torture, and the spectacle of the auto-da-fé at which prisoners were publicly displayed in penitential garments, sentenced, and in some cases burned. It was translated into multiple European languages and widely read. Dellon’s account is the primary eyewitness document of what the Goa Inquisition looked like in practice.[42]
The Destruction of Hindu Sacred Space in Goa
A decree of 1540 ordered the demolition of all Hindu temples in the districts of Bardez and Salcete, then under firm Portuguese control. By 1567, the 350 temples that had existed in Goa’s Old Conquests territory had been demolished, their stones in some cases used to build churches on the same sites. The sacred geography of the region — the network of temples, sacred tanks, and ritual sites that structured Hindu religious and social life — was physically eliminated within Portuguese-controlled territory.[43]
Hindus who wished to maintain their traditions were required to relocate outside Portuguese territory, carrying their deity images with them to villages beyond the reach of colonial authority. The temple deities of Goa’s Old Conquests survive today in temples across the border in Goa’s New Conquests territory or in neighboring Karnataka and Maharashtra — carried to safety by communities that understood, with historical clarity, that Portuguese authority meant the destruction of their sacred institutions. The displacement of a civilization’s sacred objects to safe territory is a form of refugee experience that has been almost entirely ignored in conventional accounts of the Goa Inquisition.
What makes the Goa Inquisition particularly significant for the argument this essay advances is its chronological scope, its geographical reach, and its institutional character. It operated for 252 years — longer than the United States has existed as a nation. It operated in Asia, demonstrating that the mechanisms of religious coercion followed Christian institutional authority wherever that authority extended. And it operated with the simultaneous full support of the Catholic Church and the Portuguese Crown — the cross and the sword in the most literal possible configuration, for two and a half unbroken centuries.
III.3 — Africa: The Hierarchy of Souls
What Existed Before
Africa’s pre-colonial religious landscape was one of the most diverse on earth. The Yoruba theological system of West Africa, centered on the relationship between human beings and the orishas — divine forces or principles embodying specific aspects of reality and human experience — developed over centuries into a remarkably sophisticated framework for understanding the sacred. The Ifa divination system, through which a trained babalawo reads the patterns of the cosmos in response to specific human questions, organizes its knowledge in a corpus of 256 chapters called Odu, each containing hundreds of narratives encoding theological, medical, agricultural, and psychological knowledge. UNESCO recognized the Ifa system as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005.[44]
The Egyptian theological tradition, among the oldest organized religious systems in the world, had produced two thousand years of philosophical and theological reflection before Christianity existed. The concept of Ma’at — cosmic order, justice, truth, and balance — as the fundamental principle structuring both the cosmos and the ethical life of human beings within it, represents a philosophical achievement that influenced Greek philosophy through the connections between Egypt and the Hellenistic world, and that predated Christian ethics by millennia. The last functioning temple of the ancient Egyptian religious system — the temple of Isis at Philae — was forcibly closed by the Emperor Justinian in approximately 537 CE.[45]
The Vocabulary of Condescension
The vocabulary through which African religious traditions were characterized in missionary literature reveals the evaluative framework with which this encounter was conducted. ‘Fetishism,’ the term most commonly applied to African religious practices by nineteenth-century missionaries and ethnographers, was not an analytical category. It was a civilizational verdict that designated what European observers interpreted as the worship of material objects, without recognizing that those objects were, within the traditions being observed, not the objects of worship but the vessels through which contact with specific spiritual forces was maintained. The category represented a fundamental misreading of what it claimed to describe, elevated into a scholarly framework through which the entirety of African religious life could be dismissed as primitive materialism.[46]
If African religious traditions were not merely different from Christianity but categorically below the threshold of serious theological consideration — not alternative theologies but primitive confusions awaiting correction — then the goal of missionary activity could not be dialogue or mutual engagement. It could only be replacement. And replacement, unlike dialogue, does not require taking seriously what it replaces. It requires only the power to substitute.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his landmark essay collection Decolonising the Mind, identified the deepest mechanism of colonial domination: not the occupation of territory but the occupation of consciousness — the installation within the colonized of the colonizer’s values, aesthetics, and epistemological standards as the measure by which the colonized evaluates itself and finds itself wanting. Christianity, in the African colonial context, was one of the primary instruments through which this occupation of consciousness was accomplished. African converts were taught to measure their traditions, their practices, their aesthetic sensibilities, and their intellectual frameworks against standards designed elsewhere and calibrated to find Africa deficient. The damage this produced was not the introduction of monotheism. The damage was the systematic teaching of civilizational self-contempt to peoples who had built systems of knowledge, governance, and spiritual understanding of genuine depth.[47]
III.4 — India: Philosophy Confronting Condescension
The Intellectual Tradition That Was Encountered
When Portuguese missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, and British missionaries followed in increasing numbers through the eighteenth and nineteenth, they encountered a civilization whose philosophical traditions had been developing continuously for approximately three thousand years. The Upanishads, composed between approximately 800 and 200 BCE, contain some of the most profound philosophical engagements with consciousness, identity, reality, and the nature of the divine that any civilization has produced. The Mandukya Upanishad’s analysis of the four states of consciousness — waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the witness consciousness that underlies all three — is a phenomenological analysis of mind that anticipates by two millennia arguments Western philosophy did not arrive at until the phenomenological tradition of the twentieth century.[48]
Pāṇini’s Ashtadhyāyī, the formal grammar of Sanskrit composed in the fourth century BCE, is by the consensus of contemporary linguists the most sophisticated grammatical analysis produced by any civilization before the twentieth century. Its approximately 4,000 rules describe the entire morphological and syntactic structure of Sanskrit with a precision and economy that influenced the development of modern formal linguistics. Frits Staal, the Dutch-American linguist and philosopher, has argued that Pāṇini’s grammar represents the first formal system in human intellectual history — predating both Euclid’s axiomatics and Aristotle’s formal logic.[49]
The Indian mathematical tradition had, by the sixth century CE, developed the concept of zero as a number, the decimal place-value system that the entire modern world now uses, and techniques of calculation that reached Europe only in the medieval period via Arab transmission. Brahmagupta, working in the seventh century CE, provided the first systematic treatment of arithmetic operations involving zero and negative numbers. Madhava of Sangamagrama, working in the fourteenth century CE, developed infinite series expansions for trigonometric functions that would not be independently developed in Europe until Newton and Leibniz three centuries later.[50]
The philosophical schools of classical India — the six orthodox Astika schools and the heterodox Nastika schools including Buddhism, Jainism, and the materialist Cārvāka tradition — represented centuries of rigorous epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical inquiry conducted through a tradition of formal debate and textual commentary whose intellectual seriousness rivaled anything the Western philosophical tradition produced. The Buddhist philosopher Dignāga, working in the fifth century CE, developed a formal theory of perception and inference whose logical sophistication is comparable to Aristotle’s Organon. Dharmakīrti, working in the seventh century CE, refined Dignāga’s system into an epistemological framework that contemporary philosophers of mind engage seriously as a contribution to ongoing debates about perception and conceptual thought.[51]
The Missionary Response: Condescension as Policy
The response of British missionaries and colonial administrators to this intellectual inheritance was, with isolated exceptions, condescension so profound as to constitute a form of willed ignorance. William Wilberforce — who deserves his reputation as a heroic opponent of the Atlantic slave trade — described Hinduism in a speech to the House of Commons in 1813 as a religion of ‘enormous wickedness’ produced by ‘the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind.’ This characterization was delivered in support of legislation opening British India to missionary activity. Wilberforce had not studied the tradition he was describing.[52]
James Mill’s History of British India, published in 1817 and for decades the most influential English-language account of Indian civilization, was written by a man who had never visited India, could not read any Indian language, and who described Indian civilization as uniformly backward, irrational, and morally deficient across every dimension. This characterization shaped British colonial policy for a generation and was assigned as required reading at Haileybury College, where East India Company employees were trained. The administrators who governed India read Mill. They did not read the Upanishads.[53]
Thomas Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835, which redirected colonial educational resources from Sanskrit and Arabic instruction toward English-language education, included the famous dismissal: ‘I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves, and I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’ Macaulay had not read Pāṇini. He had not read Brahmagupta. He had not studied the Nyāya or Navya-Nyāya logical traditions. He was making a judgment about a civilization’s intellectual traditions from a position of absolute ignorance about those traditions, backed by the power to implement that judgment as colonial policy.[54]
The Indian Intellectual Response
The Indian intellectual response to Christian missionary activity was sophisticated, historically informed, and ultimately devastating to the premises on which that activity was based. Ram Mohan Roy, the Bengali reformer often called the father of modern India, engaged Christian missionaries in detailed theological debate and consistently found their arguments less coherent than they claimed. In his Precepts of Jesus and subsequent exchanges with Baptist missionaries, Roy argued that the ethical teachings of Jesus were valuable but that the theological superstructure — the Trinity, the atonement, the exclusive claims to salvation — was philosophically incoherent and inferior to the philosophical monotheism already present in the Upanishads.[55]
Swami Vivekananda’s address to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in September 1893 argued for religious pluralism on philosophical grounds, criticized the exclusivism he identified as the source of religious violence, and presented the Vedantic tradition as a framework for understanding the validity of multiple religious paths that was philosophically superior to any tradition claiming exclusive access to truth. His opening words — ‘Sisters and brothers of America’ — received a standing ovation before he had said anything else, the audience responding to a mode of address that assumed universal human fellowship rather than the hierarchy of civilizations that characterized the conference’s organizing assumptions.[56]
B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution and the twentieth century’s most important theorist of caste oppression, examined Christianity’s record on social equality with characteristic precision and found it inadequate. He noted that the Christian churches in India had reproduced caste distinctions within their own institutions, maintaining separate seating, separate communion, and separate cemeteries for Dalit converts. He ultimately converted to Buddhism in 1956, along with approximately 600,000 followers, explicitly rejecting Christianity — among other reasons — for its failure to practice the equality it preached.[57]
III.5 — The Pattern and What It Means
The accumulation of evidence across these regions — Europe, the Americas, Australia, Africa, India — reveals a pattern too consistent to be regional, too global to be coincidental, and too systematic to be explained by the bad faith of individual actors. In every case examined, Christianity expanded within structures of power that favored its growth while actively undermining competing traditions. In every case, indigenous religions lost status as European political and military dominance consolidated. In every case, the mechanisms of conversion — missions, schools, legal prohibitions, economic incentives, social pressures, and when necessary direct violence and judicial terror — were available to Christian institutions precisely because they were extensions of colonial authority.
This pattern has a name in political theory: structural power. It refers to the capacity to shape the conditions under which choices are made, so that one option is systematically advantaged without the disadvantaging of alternatives needing to be explicitly intended by individual actors. Christianity did not need to coerce every individual conversion in order to benefit from structural power. It needed only to control the conditions — the schools, the legal systems, the social hierarchies, the definitions of legitimate authority — within which individuals made their religious choices. Under those conditions, conversion to Christianity became rational independent of theological persuasion, because it was the path of access to education, employment, social acceptance, legal protection, and participation in the structures through which power flowed.
The standard apologetic response — that good missionaries existed, that some missionaries opposed colonial abuses, that Christianity also brought hospitals and schools and opposition to slavery — does not engage with the structural argument at all. It argues that the individual components of the system included benevolent actors, which is true and insufficient. A system can include benevolent actors while producing, structurally and systematically, outcomes those actors did not intend and would not endorse. The question is not whether individual missionaries meant well. The question is what the system they participated in actually accomplished.
What it accomplished, in aggregate, is not in serious historical dispute. Across Europe, the indigenous religious traditions of an entire continent were eliminated as living systems within a few centuries of Christianity’s acquisition of state power. Across the Americas, civilizations of extraordinary sophistication were shattered, their populations devastated, their intellectual heritage burned, their sacred sites demolished and overwritten. In Australia, the oldest continuous religious cultures in human history were targeted for termination through the deliberate interruption of cultural transmission. In Africa, religious traditions of genuine depth were systematically dismissed as primitive, and their adherents were taught to measure themselves against standards calibrated to find them deficient. In India, one of the world’s most sophisticated philosophical traditions was encountered with condescension and subjected to institutional pressure toward replacement.
* * *
Conclusion: Power, Truth, and the Question That Remains
There is a thought experiment worth conducting before closing. Imagine Christianity stripped of every advantage that imperial power provided. No state adoption by Constantine. No Codex Theodosianus. No Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae. No Northern Crusades. No Requerimiento. No aperreamiento. No Goa Inquisition. No boarding schools. No terra nullius. No colonial educational systems. No economic incentives for conversion embedded in colonial employment and social structures. No missionaries backed by the authority of empires that controlled the land, the labor, the courts, and the schools of the territories in which they worked.
In this counterfactual — Christianity competing on equal terms, through the persuasive power of its ideas and the example of its practice, against traditions that retained their institutional infrastructure, their sacred sites, their priesthoods, their social prestige, and their capacity to perpetuate themselves through normal cultural transmission — would Christianity have achieved anything approaching its current global scale?
No one can answer this with certainty. But the question’s force is not diminished by its unanswearability. It functions as a diagnostic that isolates the variable. If Christian theology alone — stripped of imperial support, legal authority, economic incentive, and structural power — would not have produced Christianity’s current global scale, then the explanation of that scale cannot be primarily theological. It must be primarily historical and political.
The historical record supports exactly this conclusion. Christianity spread where Christian empires spread. It receded or stagnated where those empires were absent or weak. The most rapid Christian expansion in history occurred in the colonial period, when European military and economic power created conditions under which conversion was rational independent of theological persuasion. The regions where Christianity is currently growing fastest are regions where the institutional infrastructure of colonial Christianity — schools, hospitals, social networks, economic associations — remains available and where Christianity continues to offer access to resources unavailable through other channels.
The philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge — the recognition that systems of knowledge and systems of power are not separate domains but mutually constituting ones, that what counts as truth is inseparable from who has the power to define it — is directly applicable to this history. Christianity did not merely use power to spread. It used power to define the conditions under which its own claims would be evaluated: destroying the intellectual infrastructure of competing traditions, controlling the educational systems through which the next generation would learn to think, and installing its own theological framework as the default against which other frameworks were measured and found wanting. In region after region, across century after century, the Church did not win a debate. It controlled the conditions under which debates occurred.[58]
The philosopher and historian of religion Tomoko Masuzawa has shown that the very framework through which we discuss ‘world religions’ was constructed by a civilization that had spent three centuries using military and political power to spread one of them. The classification of Christianity as one ‘world religion’ among others was a product of nineteenth-century European imperial scholarship — a framework designed to manage the encounter with religious diversity that colonialism had made unavoidable, and that systematically positioned Christianity as the most evolved and universal of the options being classified.[59]
This analysis does not lead to the conclusion that Christian theology is false, or that the personal experiences of faith reported by hundreds of millions of people across the world are invalid, or that nothing of value has been produced by the Christian tradition. These are separate questions, and this essay makes no attempt to answer them. What it argues is that they must be separated — cleanly and rigorously — from the historical question of how Christianity achieved its current global scale.
The conflation of these questions is the central evasion of apologetic history. It works by treating the global spread of Christianity as evidence of its truth — implying that so many people, across so many cultures, could not have come to hold these beliefs unless the beliefs were compelling in some fundamental sense. The historical record reveals this inference to be invalid. People came to hold Christian beliefs under conditions that included conquest, colonization, demographic catastrophe, the destruction of competing intellectual infrastructure, institutional incentives for conversion, and the multigenerational teaching of civilizational self-contempt to peoples whose traditions were characterized as primitive. Under these conditions, the spread of Christianity is fully explicable without reference to the persuasive power of its theology.
The Aztec astronomers who tracked Venus to within a fraction of a degree of its actual period, and whose observatory was demolished to provide building material for a cathedral, deserved an honest accounting of what happened to them.
The Maya mathematicians who independently discovered zero and whose codices were burned in a single afternoon in Maní deserved an honest accounting.
The Druid scholars who maintained twenty years of training worth of knowledge in unwritten memory, and whose tradition ended when Paulinus’s soldiers cut down the sacred groves of Anglesey, deserved an honest accounting.
The Songline keepers whose 65,000-year tradition of encoded knowledge was targeted for termination by institutions bearing Christian names deserved an honest accounting.
The Yoruba theologians whose Ifa system UNESCO would eventually recognize as a heritage of all humanity, and who were told by missionaries that their tradition was devil worship, deserved an honest accounting.
The Upanishadic philosophers whose analysis of consciousness anticipated phenomenology by two millennia, and who were governed by administrators who had never read a word they wrote, deserved an honest accounting.
The Taíno people whose infants were fed to war dogs trained on human flesh, whose civilization Columbus described as gentle and generous in his journals before proceeding to destroy it, deserved an honest accounting.
The 4,500 Maya people tortured by Diego de Landa in the investigation preceding the burning of their civilization’s books deserved an honest accounting.
The practitioners brought before the Goa Inquisition for the offense of practicing their ancestral traditions in private, in a territory their ancestors had occupied for centuries before a Portuguese ship arrived, deserved an honest accounting.
This essay is an attempt at that accounting. It is not complete — no single essay could be. But it is honest. And honesty, on this subject, is where any serious reckoning must begin.
Did Christianity spread because it was true? Or did it come to seem true, to the descendants of the conquered and the colonized, because it was installed with sufficient force and for sufficient generations that it eventually came to feel not like an imposition but like a fact about the world?
The second interpretation does not require that Christianity is false. It requires only that power and truth be distinguished from one another — that the institutional force of a civilization carrying a religion be evaluated separately from the persuasive force of that religion’s ideas.
That distinction, rigorously maintained and honestly applied to the evidence, is what this history demands.
* * *
Notes and Citations
1. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, AD 200–1000 (Blackwell, 1996; 2nd ed. 2003). For the revolutionary character of Christianization, see especially Chapters 1–3.
2. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Harvard University Press, 1985). The standard scholarly account of ancient Greek religious traditions in English.
3. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Penguin Classics, 1991). For suppression of Neoplatonism under Christian imperial authority, see Polymnia Athanassiadi, Mutations of Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ashgate, 2015); Edward Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2017).
4. Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, Book VI, Chapters 13–14, trans. H.J. Edwards (Loeb Classical Library, 1917). For the Anglesey massacre, see Tacitus, Annals, Book XIV, Chapter 30. For scholarly analysis of the Druids, see Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale University Press, 2009).
5. Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Jesse Byock (Penguin Classics, 2005); The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford University Press, 2014, rev. ed.). For Norse religious thought, see John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. Marija Gimbutas, The Balts (Thames and Hudson, 1963); Algirdas Julien Greimas, Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology, trans. Milda Newman (Indiana University Press, 1992).
7. Krisjanis Barons, Latvju Dainas, 6 vols. (1894–1915). For the dainas as religious literature, see Vaira Vikis-Freibergs, ed., Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).
8. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 1993); for the Edict of Thessalonica, see Codex Theodosianus 16.1.2 (380 CE).
9. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, AD 100–400 (Yale University Press, 1984); MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (Yale University Press, 1997). Codex Theodosianus, ed. Clyde Pharr (Princeton University Press, 1952).
10. Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (University of California Press, 2006); Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
11. Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (c. 785), in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges II, ed. G.H. Pertz (Hannover, 1837). For analysis, see Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (University of California Press, 1999), Chapter 7.
12. Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Classics, 1969), Chapter 7. For the Massacre of Verden, see Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, trans. Allan Cameron (University of California Press, 2004).
13. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, trans. Lee M. Hollander (University of Texas Press, 1964). For conversion methods of Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson, see Chapters on ‘Olaf Tryggvason’s Saga’ and ‘Saint Olaf’s Saga.’
14. Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (Penguin, 1997); Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades 1147–1254 (Brill, 2007). For Lithuania’s Christianization, see S.C. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire Within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
15. Frances Berdan, The Aztecs of Central Mexico: An Imperial Society (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982); Michael Coe, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (Thames and Hudson, various editions).
16. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. Alfred Percival Maudslay (Hakluyt Society, 1908–1916), Chapter 87.
17. Michael Coe, The Maya (Thames and Hudson, various editions); Anthony Aveni, Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (University of Texas Press, 1980). For the Dresden Codex’s Venus tables, see Floyd Lounsbury, ‘The Base of the Venus Table,’ in Calendars in Mesoamerica and Peru, ed. Anthony Aveni and Gordon Brotherston (BAR, 1983).
18. John Rowe, ‘Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest,’ in Handbook of South American Indians, vol. 2, ed. Julian Steward (Smithsonian Institution, 1946); John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (Harcourt, 1970).
19. Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu (University of Texas Press, 2003); Gary Urton and Carrie Brezine, ‘Khipu Accounting in Ancient Peru,’ Science 309 (2005): 1065–1067.
20. For the Requerimiento, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Text of the Requerimiento in translation in Arthur Helps, The Spanish Conquest in America, vol. 1 (London, 1855), Appendix.
21. Bartolomé de las Casas, History of the Indies, trans. Andrée Collard (Harper and Row, 1971); Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
22. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin (Penguin Classics, 1992). Primary source for Sections II.3 throughout.
23. For Taíno population estimates and demographic collapse, see David Henige, ‘On the Contact Population of Hispaniola,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 217–237; Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, vol. 1 (University of California Press, 1971).
24. Las Casas, A Short Account, trans. Griffin, pp. 15–41. For aperreamiento specifically, see Daniel Grana-Behrens, ‘The Use of War Dogs in the Spanish Conquest,’ Anuario de Estudios Americanos 70:2 (2013). For Columbus’s introduction of the practice, see Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (Knopf, 1990).
25. Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, in The Four Voyages, trans. J.M. Cohen (Penguin Classics, 1969), entries for October 1492.
26. James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca (University of Texas Press, 1972); John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (Harcourt, 1970), Chapters 2–4.
27. Pedro Pizarro, Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of the Kingdoms of Peru, trans. Philip Ainsworth Means (Cortes Society, 1921); Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Chapter 4.
28. Alfred Tozzer, ed., Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Peabody Museum, Harvard, 1941); Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, ed. Miguel Rivera Dorado (Historia 16, 1985). For the auto-da-fé at Maní, see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
29. Tozzer, ed., Landa’s Relación, Introduction. For the survival and decipherment of the Dresden Codex, see Ernst Förstemann, Commentary on the Maya Manuscript in the Royal Public Library of Dresden (Peabody Museum, Harvard, 1906).
30. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs (Thames and Hudson, 1988); for the Coricancha, see Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, Chapter 6.
31. Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford University Press, 1990); Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (University of Texas Press, 1983).
32. Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (Penguin, 2007); Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1932).
33. Richard Henry Pratt, ‘The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,’ in Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the ‘Friends of the Indian,’ 1880–1900, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 261.
34. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, 6 vols. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Vol. 1, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, contains primary findings and the cultural genocide conclusion.
35. Chris Clarkson et al., ‘Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago,’ Nature 547 (2017): 306–310.
36. W.E.H. Stanner, ‘The Dreaming,’ in White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973 (Australian National University Press, 1979); After the Dreaming (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969). Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Jonathan Cape, 1987).
37. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (HREOC, 1997).
38. A.K. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition (Bombay University Press, 1961). The most comprehensive English-language scholarly study of the Inquisition’s records. See also Teotonio R. de Souza, Goa Through the Ages, vol. 2 (Concept Publishing, 1990).
39. Francis Xavier, Letter to King João III, May 16, 1545, in The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992), pp. 94–96.
40. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition, Chapters 3–5; for the range of prosecuted offenses, see also Ana Cannas da Cunha, A Inquisição no Estado da India: Origens (1539–1560) (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, 1995).
41. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition, Appendix A (statistical summary of trial records, 1560–1774).
42. Charles Dellon, Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa (Leiden, 1687); translated as An Account of the Inquisition at Goa (London: D. Browne, 1688).
43. Priolkar, The Goa Inquisition, Chapter 7; Rowena Robinson, Christians of India (Sage Publications, 2003), Chapter 2. For the survival of Goan temple deities in neighboring states, see Pratima Kamat, Farar Far: Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa, 1510–1912 (Institute Menezes Braganza, 1999).
44. William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 1969); Kola Abimbola, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account (Iroko Academic Publishers, 2006). UNESCO recognition: www.ich.unesco.org, element ‘Ifa Divination System.’
45. Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2001); David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 1998), for the closing of Philae.
46. William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish,’ Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17; Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
47. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (James Currey, 1986), especially ‘The Language of African Literature,’ pp. 4–33.
48. The Upanishads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford University Press, 1996); Swami Nikhilananda, The Mandukya Upanishad with Gaudapada’s Karika (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1949).
49. Pāṇini, Ashtadhyayi, trans. Sumitra Mangesh Katre (University of Texas Press, 1987); Frits Staal, ‘Euclid and Pāṇini,’ Philosophy East and West 15 (1965): 99–116.
50. George Gheverghese Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics (Penguin, 1991); Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009).
51. Bimal Krishna Matilal, Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1986); Richard Hayes, Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs (Kluwer, 1988).
52. William Wilberforce, Speech to the House of Commons, June 22, 1813, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 26, cols. 831–872.
53. James Mill, The History of British India, 3 vols. (Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1817); Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford University Press, 1959).
54. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Minute on Indian Education,’ February 2, 1835, reprinted in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, selected by G.M. Young (Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 721–729.
55. Ram Mohan Roy, The Precepts of Jesus (Unitarian Society, 1820); Spencer Lavan, Unitarians and India: A Study in Encounter and Response (Beacon Press, 1977).
56. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1 (Advaita Ashrama, 1907); Amiya Sen, Swami Vivekananda (Penguin, 2005).
57. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936; reprinted Verso, 2014); The Buddha and His Dhamma (Siddharth College Publications, 1957); Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability (Columbia University Press, 2005).
58. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Pantheon Books, 1980); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Pantheon Books, 1977).
59. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005).