Religious Missions and Cultural Exchange

The missionary enterprise was, in the long run, the most enduring legacy of European colonization. The Catholic Church remains the dominant religious institution in Latin America, the Philippines, and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Protestant Christianity, which arrived later and on a smaller scale, became the dominant religious tradition of the anglophone settler societies and of the 19th- and 20th-century missionary movements in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The encounter between European Christianity and the religions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia was one of the most significant cultural exchanges in the history of the Columbian Exchange, and its effects — for better and for worse — are still being worked out in the present.

The standard story, told from the European side, treats missions as instruments of colonization. The standard story, told from the indigenous side, treats them as instruments of cultural destruction. Both stories are partly right. The interesting work, which Serge Gruzinski, Nathan Wachtel, and the late Inga Clendinnen have done in different ways, is to show that the encounter was always reciprocal, that the missions themselves became sites of cultural negotiation, and that the surviving indigenous and African Christianities of the modern world are the products of that negotiation. The Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé, and Mexican Marian devotion of the Virgen de Guadalupe are not, in this reading, survivals of pre-Columbian religion in Catholic clothing. They are new religions, created in the mission context, that brought together elements of African, indigenous, and Catholic tradition in unprecedented combinations.

The Catholic Missionary Enterprise

Spanish and Portuguese colonization was explicitly Catholic. The papal bulls Inter caetera (1493) and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided the non-Christian world between the two Iberian crowns and charged them with the responsibility of evangelizing their respective zones. Missionaries were thus not merely tolerated by the colonial authorities; they were an essential part of the colonial project. The history of religious missions is closely tied to the broader history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the Portuguese Empire.

The Major Orders

The four main Catholic religious orders active in the early Spanish Americas were the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits. Each developed distinctive approaches to missionary work.

The Franciscans, an order of mendicant friars founded by St. Francis of Assisi, were the first to arrive in large numbers, beginning in 1524 with the famous “Twelve Apostles” who came to Mexico. They pursued an ambitious program of mass conversion, building churches on the sites of indigenous temples, learning native languages, and producing scholarly works on indigenous religion and culture. The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún compiled the monumental Florentine Codex, an ethnographic study of Aztec religion and customs that remains a primary source for Mesoamerican history.

The Dominicans, known as the “Order of Preachers,” were renowned for their intellectual rigor and their willingness to defend indigenous rights. The most famous Dominican missionary was Bartolomé de las Casas, who began his career as a slaveholder and conquistador, then underwent a dramatic conversion and spent the rest of his life defending the indigenous peoples of the Americas against the abuses of the colonial system. The famous 1550–1551 Valladolid debate between Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, which concerned the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest and the rationality of the indigenous peoples, is a foundational event in the history of human rights and a major touchstone for the Black Legend debate.

The Augustinians arrived in Mexico in 1533 and established missions throughout New Spain, particularly in the regions of Michoacán and the Huasteca.

The Jesuits, formally the Society of Jesus, were founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. They became the most influential Catholic order in the global missionary enterprise, working not only in the Americas but also in Asia, Africa, and the Protestant regions of Europe. Their work in South America is examined in detail on the Jesuit mission system page. The Jesuits were also central to the Catholic missions in China (the famous Rites Controversy of the 17th and 18th centuries) and Japan (where the Christian community was largely destroyed by the Tokugawa persecutions of the early 17th century).

The Mission as an Institution

The physical heart of the Catholic missionary effort was the mission, a settlement designed to gather indigenous peoples into a Christian community under the supervision of friars or priests. Missions typically included a church, a school, residences for the missionaries, workshops, agricultural lands, and dwellings for the indigenous inhabitants. Daily life in a mission was highly regulated: residents were expected to attend Mass, receive religious instruction, work the mission lands, learn European crafts, dress in European clothing, and abandon most of their traditional religious and cultural practices.

The mission system was developed most broadly in regions of relatively low Spanish settlement: northern Mexico, the Andes, the Amazon basin, and the present-day southwestern United States. The most famous mission chain is the string of California missions established by the Franciscan friar Junípero Serra beginning in 1769. The California missions have become, in the recent work of scholars like Steven Hackel, a focus of debate about the missionary enterprise: defenders emphasize the religious and cultural achievements, critics emphasize the forced labor, the demographic catastrophe, and the cultural destruction.

The Jesuit Reductions

The most distinctive Catholic mission experiment in the Americas was the Jesuit reduction system of Paraguay, the subject of the Jesuit mission system page. Between the early 17th and the mid-18th century, the Jesuits established a chain of missions in what is now Paraguay, southern Brazil, northeastern Argentina, and Uruguay, in which they organized the indigenous Guaraní people into a unique theocratic state. The reductions were remarkable for their economic success, their relative isolation from the colonial slave economy, and the degree to which they preserved indigenous languages and customs within a Catholic framework. Ganson and Gruzinski have written the most useful recent treatments.

The reductions were eventually destroyed in 1759 when the Portuguese and Spanish crowns expelled the Jesuits from their territories. The Guaraní communities continued to exist, but the missions’ autonomy was lost. Their memory, however, has inspired both admiration and controversy.

Conversion and Resistance

The missionary enterprise was not simply a story of European imposition on passive indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples responded to Christian missions in various ways, from enthusiastic conversion to outright revolt, and from selective adoption of Christian elements to the development of complex syncretic traditions that blended Christian and indigenous elements.

Strategies of Conversion

Catholic missionaries used various strategies to win converts. They destroyed or repurposed indigenous temples, sometimes with great violence. They staged elaborate public rituals — processions, theatrical performances, baptisms of entire communities — designed to convey the power of the Christian God. They learned indigenous languages and produced dictionaries, grammars, and religious texts in those languages, often as part of a sincere effort to communicate Christian doctrine. The friars also worked to understand indigenous religious and political systems, sometimes incorporating indigenous laborers, artists, and intellectuals into the missionary enterprise.

The missionary approach was often contradictory. Some missionaries sincerely sought to protect indigenous peoples from colonial abuses, while others saw the missions as instruments of cultural destruction. The most famous defender of indigenous rights, Bartolomé de las Casas, was initially a colonist himself; his conversion to the cause of indigenous rights came in part from witnessing the brutality of the Spanish system.

Patterns of Indigenous Response

Indigenous responses were equally varied. Some communities adopted Christianity enthusiastically, sometimes to accommodate the new colonial order or to gain access to the goods, knowledge, and protection that missionaries offered. Others resisted, sometimes violently. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in present-day New Mexico, in which Pueblo communities rose up and expelled the Spanish from the region for twelve years, is the best-known example of large indigenous resistance to missionization. Smaller revolts and acts of resistance occurred throughout the missionized Americas.

Many indigenous peoples adopted a middle path, accepting some Christian practices and doctrines while retaining elements of their own religious traditions. The result was the rich and complex religious syncretism that characterizes much of the religious life of the Americas still.

Protestant Missions

Although the Spanish and Portuguese established the first Christian missions in the Age of Exploration, Protestant missionary activity soon followed. The Reformation, beginning in 1517, eventually produced various Protestant missionary efforts, though on a much smaller scale than the Catholic enterprise until the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Dutch Reformed Tradition

The Dutch Reformed Church was the established church of the Dutch Empire and the principal Protestant denomination in Dutch colonial possessions. Dutch Reformed missionaries accompanied the Dutch East India Company to the East Indies, South Africa, and the Americas, particularly in New Netherland (later New York). The missionary effort in Dutch territories was generally less ambitious than the Catholic enterprise, focusing on European colonists and a small number of indigenous converts.

The English Tradition

English colonization in North America was carried out by various Protestant denominations. The Puritans of New England established a theocratic society in the 17th century in which the conversion of indigenous peoples was a stated goal, though actual conversions were limited and relations with native peoples were often hostile. The Mayhew family and the missionary effort on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, where the Wampanoag converts to Christianity included the famous preacher Joseph Takaha — discussed at length in J.W. Rahe’s A Home for the Brave and elsewhere — were the partial exception. Quakers in Pennsylvania had a more pacific approach and developed relatively better relations with the Lenape. The Anglican Church, established as the official church of several English colonies, also supported missionary activity, particularly through the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701.

The Moravian and Methodist Missions

The Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination originating in Bohemia, established one of the most successful early Protestant missions. The Moravian Brethren established missions in the Caribbean, including the islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and Jamaica, in the 1730s. They were also active in Greenland, Labrador, and among the enslaved populations of the Americas. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was converted through the Moravian missions and later established a Methodist tradition that became one of the most successful missionary denominations in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The 19th-Century Missionary Expansion

The late 18th and 19th centuries saw a massive expansion of Protestant missionary activity, driven by the evangelical revival movements in Europe and North America. New organizations such as the London Missionary Society (1795), the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), and the Church Missionary Society (1799) sent thousands of missionaries to Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the remaining indigenous regions of the Americas. By 1900, Protestant Christianity was established across much of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, and the Christian world had been remade by the missionary enterprise.

Cultural Exchange and Syncretism

The encounter between Christian missionaries and the indigenous, African, and Asian peoples they sought to convert was not a one-way process of imposition. It produced some of the most complex and creative religious and cultural syntheses in modern history. Gruzinski’s The Mestizo Mind (2002) and Wachtel’s The Faith of Remembrance (2014) are the most theoretically ambitious recent treatments.

Religious Syncretism in the Americas

In Latin America and the Caribbean, indigenous and African religious traditions blended with Catholic Christianity to produce various syncretic traditions. Vodou in Haiti blended West African Vodun with French Catholicism; Santería in Cuba emerged from Yoruba religion and Spanish Catholic practice; Candomblé in Brazil combined Yoruba and Bantu traditions with Portuguese Catholicism. The Andean religious tradition of Pachamama (the worship of the earth mother) and the Mesoamerican devotion to the Virgen de Guadalupe are further examples of the religious blending that occurred in missionized regions. The Marian apparition of Guadalupe to the indigenous convert Juan Diego in 1531, a foundational event in Mexican Catholic identity, was, in Gruzinski’s reading, an event that could only have happened in the encounter between Spanish Catholic and Nahua religious traditions.

The Cultural Legacy of Missions

Beyond religion, missions had profound cultural effects. They introduced European languages, dress, foodways, and architectural styles to indigenous peoples; they also preserved and recorded indigenous languages, customs, and knowledge in writing. The Catholic missions of the 16th through 18th centuries produced a substantial body of ethnographic literature that is a primary source for the study of pre-modern indigenous America. Mission schools, where they functioned effectively, taught literacy, arithmetic, and European crafts alongside Christian doctrine.

The legacy of missions is therefore deeply mixed. On the one hand, missions were often instruments of colonial domination, cultural destruction, and forced assimilation. On the other hand, they produced some of the first systematic records of indigenous cultures and provided the institutional infrastructure — schools, hospitals, and communities — on which many later indigenous and mestizo societies were built.