Christianity and colonialism

[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".

[5] Meanwhile, "differing South Asian groups who enthusiastically embraced Christianity have been mocked as dupes of Western imperialists" and criticized as being "separatist minded by their initial communities.

[13] Falola cites Jan H. Boer of the Sudan United Mission as saying, "Colonialism is a form of imperialism based on a divine mandate and designed to bring liberation – spiritual, cultural, economic and political – by sharing the blessings of the Christ-inspired civilization of the West with a people suffering under satanic oppression, ignorance and disease, effected by a combination of political, economic and religious forces that cooperate under a regime seeking the benefit of both ruler and ruled.

Jan van Butselaar writes that "for Prince Henry the Navigator and his contemporaries, the colonial enterprise was based on the necessity to develop European commerce and the obligation to propagate the Christian faith.

[19] Adriaan van Oss wrote:[20] If we had to choose a single, irreducible idea underlying Spanish colonialism in the New World, it would undoubtedly be the propagation of the Catholic faith.

Introduced in the context of Iberian expansionism, Catholicism outlived the empire itself and continues to thrive, not as an anachronistic vestige among the elite, but as a vital current even in remote mountain villages.

[16] The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military, and civilians.

[24] Ralph Bauer describes the Franciscan missionaries as having been "unequivocally committed to Spanish imperialism, condoning the violence and coercion of the Conquest as the only viable method of bringing American natives under the saving rule of Christianity.

"[25] Jordan writes "The catastrophe of Spanish America's rape at the hands of the Conquistadors remains one of the most potent and pungent examples in the entire history of human conquest of the wanton destruction of one culture by another in the name of religion".

[26] Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar on the island of Hispaniola, was the first member of the clergy to publicly denounce all forms of enslavement and oppression of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The head of the order Friar Jean-Claude Colin and Bishop Jean-Baptiste-François Pompallier worked in close conjunction with the colonized imperialism and colony-building program of the French government.

[30] Trouble arose in Hawaii, where the local government strongly favored Protestant missionaries from the United States over the Picpusien Fathers, who had established a mission in Honolulu in 1827.

In other writings, Jesuit missionaries in New France preaching to the Amerindians described the indigenous peoples as "savages" and tried to instill European standards of religion and civilization upon them.

... Blackburn shows that this resulted in the displacement of much of the content of the message and demonstrates that the Native people's acts of resistance took up and transformed aspects of the Jesuits' teachings in ways that subverted their authority.

A large body of scientific work exists examining entanglements between Jesuit missions, western science emanating from Jesuit-founded universities, colonization and globalization.

Its pilot, upon being interviewed[citation needed], insinuated to the Japanese authorities that it was the Spanish modus operandi to subvert native societies from within via mass Christian conversion prior to conquest.

In 1825, the military scholar Aizawa Seishisai published a series of essays to be presented to the Tokugawa government on, among other things, the threat to Japan's sovereignty posed by Christianity.

In it, he suggested that the European and American powers used Christianity as a cultural weapon by which native populations could be turned on their own governments in order to facilitate conquest and colonization.

The text discussed directly the Toyotomi-era encounters with the Jesuits, and warned that the countries of Asia, particularly Japan and China, had become geographically and politically isolated as the last surviving nations maintaining polities not based on Abrahamic religion.

It pains me to have to say that the Christian missionaries as a body, with honorable exceptions, have actively supported a system which has impoverished, enervated and demoralized a people considered to be among the gentlest and most civilized on earth.

were sent from Portugal to Goa with the goal of fulfilling the papal bull Romanus Pontifex, which granted the patronage of the propagation of the Christian faith in Asia to the Portuguese.

[50] Xenddi[51] was a discriminatory religious tax imposed on the Goan Hindu minority by the colonial era Portuguese Christian government in Goa, Daman and Diu in 1704.

Land revenues were paid by the Goan Catholics in Goa, and the regional Church argued that Xenddi tax would make Hindus pay their fair share.

Fage, he states, "Mid-and late-nineteenth-century Europeans were generally convinced that their Christian, scientific and industrial society was intrinsically far superior to anything that Africa had produced."

He had a mythical status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: Protestant missionary martyr, inspirational story of rising from the poor, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, and an anti-slavery crusader.

After a period of political unrest, Mwanga agreed to surrender his temporal powers to the Imperial British East Africa Company in exchange for being allowed to nominally return to the throne.

The traditional chiefs would be paid larger salaries and have charge of tax collection, local courts, military recruiting, and obtaining forced labor for public works projects.

When the far-right Petain government came to power in Vichy, France in 1940, a high priority was to remove the educated Marxist elite from any positions of authority in French West Africa.

Speaking with hindsight and on the basis of current theology, Francis said: "No actual or established power has the right to deprive peoples of the full exercise of their sovereignty."

At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor.