1492 Was Big: Christianity, Slavery, Colonialism and Imperialism
Deconstructing Christianity: Entire nations having a Christian identity is a modern idea that is connected with some of the worst human rights abuses in history.
Detail from the painting “Into the Golden West” by Roland Davies (1904-1993)
Over ten years in the late fifteenth century, married Roman Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile (1451–1504), and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) mounted a series of seasonal military campaigns against the Muslim Emirate of Granada in southern Iberia using the new technology of artillery. It finally ended with the defeat of Granada and its annexation by Castile, ending the last of Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Christopher Columbus was present at the surrender of Granada’s last leader, Muhammad XII. As Isabella and Ferdinand consolidated their power, a program of ethnic cleansing brought an end to religious coexistence in that part of the world.
In 1492, Jewish people in the newly unified kingdom of Spain were forced to convert to Christianity or be deported. Over the first three decades of the sixteenth century, Islam was effectively outlawed in Spain. Many thousands of Jewish and Muslim people converted to Christianity to go on living in peace. The Spanish Inquisition was created to enforce ideological conformity among these conversos, who were under constant suspicion of covertly practicing their former religions.
These developments were not merely the product of petty bigotry. The kind of absolute government seen as essential to the new capital-based economy of early modern Europe could not tolerate a diversity of autonomous, self-governing institutions or communities. All over Europe, smaller kingdoms and principalities were being combined into larger, centralized nation-states. The Inquisition was a modernizing institution devised by the Spanish monarchs to create unity through ideological conformity with a single Spanish national identity.
The aristocracy of Europe in the sixteenth century was beginning to create an unprecedented type of civilization, one that depended on a radical change in the economic basis of society. Instead of relying on a surplus of agricultural production that could be traded to fund cultural achievements, modern economies began to rely on technological replication from extracted resources, and the continuous reinvestment of capital. The colossal wealth that can be created this way has brought great benefits to human civilization in some ways; and at the same time, this seemingly indefinite and boundless creation of wealth, without address of its unintended consequences, has created the most self-annihilating technological, social, economic, and environmental problems that we face today. The responses of the Judahn prophets to what was understood as the systemic, collective sin of their civilizations, and of Jesus and the apostles to that of their own, can provide us with some clues as to what might be required of Christians by way of a response today.
But Spain, arguably the most advanced nation in Europe at the time, was not the only model for a shared national identity. In the course of its struggle against Spanish hegemony, the Netherlands developed a comparatively liberal ideology to counter Spanish autocracy. This contrast exemplifies two rival versions of modernity that persist to this day, competing for the soul of every nation, including our own. This continuum, from conformist, authoritarian autocracy to multicultural pluralism, exists irrespective of constitutional organization or political ideology. Various ideologies have informed autocratic rule, while ideological rivals sometimes project the impulse toward autocracy onto their opponents, deservedly or not.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas. That decree granted permission to King Alfonso V of Portugal to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Muslims and pagans, anybody who was non-Catholic or non-Christian. Its language of “pagans” and “enemies” reveals the implicit and explicit dehumanization and denial of the image of God within non-European and non-Christian people, viewing them as only worthy of exploitation through perpetual slavery. The Doctrine of Discovery became a set of legal principles formulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that governed European colonizing power.
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Both Catholic, and subsequently, Protestant churches became primary vehicles through which the trans-Atlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, colonialism, and imperialism spread, laying the theological groundwork for the subjugation of indigenous and African-descended people in the Americas, and Africans in colonial Africa. Protestants would weaponize the Christian faith and the Bible against enslaved Africans. Anglican, Dutch Reformed, and Lutheran slaveholders from the Dutch West Indies to Virginia conceived of their Christian identities as fundamental to their status as enslavers. If and when enslaved people of African descent did come to faith, they would say, “Your faith only frees your soul; your soul is free in Christ, but we get to own your body.”
Nevertheless, as societies and cultures in Europe altered to accommodate material and economic changes, Christianity as it existed would have to change, and it certainly did. For one thing, a combination of factors reduced the church's absolute power and influence over time. Monarchs adopted policies that subordinated the church's influence to their political goals, and banks and stock exchanges were created outside the church's purview.
The interconnected movements of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution accelerated the secularization of society. The development of civil society out from under ecclesiastical control did not mean that people were less religious, or that religion was less important; it meant that relationships between the largest structures of society were being rearranged and that the church establishment was being demoted from a position of overall political dominance—a position that would have astounded those who had formed and spread Christianity according to the values articulated by Jesus, which validated the very bottom of the social hierarchy, and passively, nonviolently resisted structures of wealth and power.