The church and the conquest
Christianity and colonialism in the Americas
The Spanish conquest of the Americas is carried out under the sign of the cross. Priests accompany the conquistadors. The Requerimiento — a legal document read aloud to indigenous people before attacking them, in Spanish they cannot understand, informing them that the pope has given their land to Spain and demanding immediate submission — is the most revealing document in the history of Christian imperialism.
The cross is planted in every conquered city. Indigenous religious sites are destroyed or repurposed as churches. Baptism is mass-administered to people who have no idea what it signifies. The new faith arrives on the same ships as the smallpox and the steel.
The church's complicity in the conquest is total and structural, not merely incidental. The theology of the just war, the papal donations of 1493, the institutional church's dependence on the wealth that flows from the colonies — all of it implicates the church in what happens to the people of the Americas.
And yet: Las Casas. And Antonio de Montesinos, who preached against the encomienda system in 1511 and was nearly expelled for it. And the Jesuits of Paraguay who built the reductions — communities that protected indigenous people from slave hunters. And the many indigenous people who received a genuine faith, however violently it arrived, and made it their own.
The gospel arrived in the Americas mixed with conquest. The people received the gospel anyway and, in many cases, made it more fully their own than the people who brought it.
This is the complicated gift. It cannot be untangled.
“Tell me, by what right and by what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude?”
— Antonio de Montesinos, sermon in Hispaniola, December 21, 1511 AD
“But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
The gospel arrived in the Americas on slave ships and with the sword, carried by people who used the cross to justify conquest.
And the people who received it, in many cases, found in it something truer than the people who brought it intended — a God who takes the side of the poor, who sees the violated, who will not let injustice have the last word.
This is the gospel's strange resilience: it survives its own worst messengers. It arrives corrupted and is received as pure. The people it was used to oppress discover in it the resources for their liberation.
This does not excuse the messengers. It testifies to the message.
What has the gospel produced in you that is truer than the version you first received?