Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 9 February 2012

Christianity, the Religion of the Roman Empire

Christianity took 300 years before it was accepted by the Roman emperor, Constantine, as his administration’s preferred religion, a few decades before it officially became the Roman state religion in 381 AD, when Theodosius’s edict banned paganism and enforced belief in the Christian Trinity. The Church met at the Council of Constantinople to accept the emperor’s decisions as a formality. The popes had no say in the matter. Christianity was already the state religion, and the emperor had absolute authority in state affairs.

He had also consecrated 25 December as the birthday of Christ, thereby proving that Christ was now the unconquerable national sun god of Rome. Persecution of the previously recognized religions of the empire as well as of rival Christianities, now dubbed “heresies”, was given free rein. The emperors no longer needed to claim divinity themselves, the emperor was the regent of Christ on earth after the model of the Achæmenid shahs of Persia being the regents on earth of Ahuramazda. Roman society was subject to God through Christ and his regent, the emperor, a much sounder plicy than claiming divinity.

The Christian church was triumphant. The scriptures promised it would, so the task now was to convert the world, a task that suited the ambitions of the leaders of the Roman state. As Christianity was the religion of Rome, Christians were Roman citizens. Christian faith was identical to loyalty to Rome. Rome had not been Christianized, Christianity had been Romanized, and indeed, the earliest name for the empire as singularly Christian was “Romania”, a word coined by a Spanish disciple of Augustine, Paulus Orosius. Faith was now no longer the practical morality of loving kindness taught by Christ but was a principle of patriotic loyalty, just as the worship of the emperor had once been. Devotion to God had become a political principle uniting the divers people of the empire by equating the Church and the state, as many Americans do, or try to do, today. As R A Marcus (Christianity in the Roman World, 1974) put it:

Christianity was the Roman Faith, and the Roman empire was the Christian society. Barbarians were outsiders to both, and their only way of entry was by entering both.

Cited by Gillian M Bediako, The Primal Religion and the Bible, 1997

The takeover of the Church by the state was easy because the Church had for long organized itself in parallel with the political organzation of the empire, largely for practical reasons. But Romans had reasons to be scared by the Christians—its seditious origins in Judaism, its atheistic attitude to the Roman gods including the emperors, and the apocalyptic notions it once held strongly and has never quite given up. So, some of the emperors had seen Christianity as an attempt to organize an alternative state within the Roman state, potentially in preparation for a coup d’etat, and had tried to nip it in the bud—the occasional times of Christian persecution. Constantine was smart enough to realize that he could use the parallel organization of the Church for his own political ambitions, and Christian congregations in support of his claims to the throne, simply by offering power to the bishops, then merging the two parallel organizations—but with himself in control. By these means he succeeded in taking the emperorship, and then reigning for longer than most of them before or after.

A Prophetic to a Traditional Religion

The triumph of Christianity gave Romans a new and authoritarian religion, but the political and economic structure of the state was essentially the same as it had been, and so too was much of Roman life in general. The success of Christianity did not make Romans feel any more secure, and the power of the emperors if anything was increased—the dubious divinity of kings being replaced by the more convincing divine right of kings as God’s chosen rulers. That is precisely what Paul the apostle to the gentiles taught.

It was the Christian religion that changed. It had been what is described as a “prophetic religion”, one that was critical of society and originally prophesied various outcomes as punishment for social sins. That was considered the role of the Hebrew prophets, some at least, who criticized Israelite society or kings, predicting doom to come. Christianity prophesied “The End” of the world because of its wickedness, and Christ taught why it was wicked. He was a social critic, whatever other attributes he may have had, his morality condemning the conventional attitudes of greed and callous indifference to others typical of the Roman occupation in Judæa, and those who collaborated with the Romans, the publicans and the rich Jewish priestly class.

Romans found Christianity offensive in its early years of, but, under Constantine, it was transformed overnight, so to speak, into a “religion of tradition”, the exact opposite of what it had been, an establishment religion, supporting and supported by the Roman authorities, the imperial social and political hierarchy. Thus, who defined orthodoxy in Christianity? At the Council of Nicæa, Constantine did, obliging the dissenting bishops to come to an agreement to serve as a unified state religion. In his later decree of formal recognition of Christianity, and abolishing of all rivals, Theodosius, doubtless assisterd by S Ambrose, an outstanding administrator who was given a senior position in Christianity because of his brilliance in administration, not for any spiritual reasons, had…

…defined orthodoxy, eliminated heresy within the group, required members of surrounding groups to conform under threat of destruction and brought the weak and undecided into line—the use of force as an instrument of Church government was now taken for granted.

G M Bediako, Op cit

By the fifth century, the number of Romans still attached to paganism were few, and were mainly outside the cities—thought to be the meaning of pagan—and the barbarians beyond the borders of the empire were also pagan. The urban dwellers were intolerant of the rural yokels, and had settled for the line that Roman civilization was destined by God to be the channel for the progress of Christianity. The Roman Church was the “imperial church”, all right, and was to remain the religion of western imperialism. God could have no possible interest in ignorant yokels and unsophisticated barbarians. The official Church had little or no interest in sending missions to the barbarians, even though the northern tribes had largely been converted earlier to Arianism, the heretical Christianity condemned at Nicæa.

With the transition from being prophetic and expecting the end of the world as imminent, the acceptance of Christianity as the establishment religion had effect a change from favoring barbarian invasions, as symptomatic of the coming End, to the new attitude of superiority over the foreign hicks. It therefore came as a shock to all those Christians who had forgotten Christian apocalypticism that the Germanic invasions became unstoppable. The Christian God had adopted the Roman empire as his instrument, just as he had the Jewish nation, but also in the same way, He was abandoning it when Rome needed His help.

The remaining minority of pagans continued to blame the Christians for the disasters, as they always had done, but now with evident reason. Ignoring Rome’s old gods—whom they, of course, considered the true ones—had brought on their ire, and now they were suffering its consequences—punishment. Of the prominent Roman bishops, Augustine of Hippo stood out as the one with the proper humanitarian universalism that Christ taught in the gospels. In The City of God, he wrote:

The unity of the Catholic Church would embrace all nations, and would in like manner speak in all tongues.

For him, Goths and other Germans could be perfectly good Catholics. The very meaning of Catholic is “universal”.

Rome fell to the Goths in 470 AD, but being Christians, albeit heretical ones, they were duly respectful of the Roman Church and its civilization, eventually adopting Catholicism and Roman institutions. With the conversion of the Franks and then the setting up of the extended kingdom of Charles the Great—Charlemagne—the concept of Christendom began truly to take shape as a monarchy ruled by Christ albeit with a hierarchy of his agents doing the practical work of running it, the Pope, kings and bishops. It was imagined as a universal state and even an universal fellowship in the apostolic sense, for eastern Christians had habitually followed the first Christians in calling each other brothers. Generally only monks in the west did.

Islam

Meanwhile in the east, a new threat had arisen to menace Christ’s Catholic fellowship—Islam. The Moslems, inspired, it seems, by their religious fervor, swept over the Middle East, Persia and North Africa, entering Europe via Spain, their momentum only being halted by the Gauls and Franks defeating them at Tours in 732 AD, just a few years before Charlemagne was born. Had this battle been lost, Europe could have become Moslem, and the imperial religion of the west might have been Islam. Since Constantine, the Church had always had the upper hand. When the barbarians captured Rome and the west, they had remained Christians and joined the Catholic Church. Now, in Islam, the Church had something to fear, but the old superiority was upheld by the victory at Tours, and the leaders of the Church felt secure for a few centuries more.

Then the Seljuk Turks who had been converted to Islam, conquered the Arabic empire, held Jerusalem, and threatened Byzantium, the center of the eastern Roman empire that had never fallen to the northern barbarians. The popes were already facing disillusion and dissension among the people of Christendom because the parousia promised by Christ at the millennium had not happened, and the arrival of the Seljuks gave them the chance to distract popular oppobrium from the Church to a common enemy. The pope called for a crusade! Its purpose nominally was to save Christendom—the saviour saved!

Not that all Christians were keen to extend the use of force that has served it in expelling pagans and heretics from Christendom in earlier centuries whilst spreading God’s pacific message. In about 1086, a young man approached S Anselm for advice as to whether he should become a monk or a soldier of Christ fighting for the Christian state against the Moslems. Amselm said:

I advise you… to abandon that Jerusalem which is now not a vision of peace but of tribulation… and set out on the road to the heavenly Jerusalem which is a vision of peace, where you will find treasures which only those who despise these ones can receive.

Anselm’s view was the minority one, and still until this day most Christians are more interested in earthly treasures and the tribulation that goes with them than any vision of peace. Christians then as now, in the US at any rate, had become accustomed to success, not through the gospel message but by domination and coercion. Charlemagne had made use of the same military philosophy to build his empire even though he was critical of the Church—critical of its ignorance and complacency, not its hypocrisy over conquest. The use of the sword for enforcement of Christianity in the era of opposing paganism and heresy had extended into the Frankish age, and now extended into the new age of resisting Islam, a religion continually accused by Christians of having spread by the sword.

The Christian leadership felt confident but that confidence had been dented by the Islamic threat. They did not feel so superior and complacent as they had been, but then the first crusade was remarkably successful, and consequently Christian approval of militarism soared, complacency turned to trumphalism, and superiority to contempt. Christianity was proven true, and Islam false:

In this period, the European attitude to Islam was almost entirely self-regarding. Even the missionaries carried towards their retreatring horizons a Latin Christianity conceived in European towns… the first imperialism in the modern sense.

N Daniel, Islam Europe and Empire, 1966, cited by Bediako, Op cit.

“The aggression, motivated by a fusion of Christian and martial traits” (Bediako) was fed by “crusade propaganda”, a mixture of distortion and fantasy that has become the everyday news media accompaniment to every act of modern imperialist aggression by Christendom today! The leadership of the Church had now become more interested in territorial acquisition and the exercise of temporal power in advancing the Church’s domain, while the minority of Christian moralists whose faith rested in Christ’s practical teaching were equally confident that Moslems could be persuaded into Christianity. (Bediako here is drawing heavily on Criticism of the Crusade: A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda (1975) by Palmer A Throop.) Humbert of Romans held to the majority view as a Christian apologist for the crusades. He considered:

The sword was a God given instrument for a church in a more advanced stage of development.

G M Bediako, Op cit.

The Crusades

The initial success of the crusading spirit inspired this grotesque distortion of Christ’s ideals, but the false optimism and superiority gave way to pessimism, a decline in crusading enthusiasm, and a deepening disillusionment with a papal theocracy that had been badly damaged by that failure of Christ to reappear on schedule already noted. That failure was a driving force for the popes to distract the people, discontented over the absent parousia, into foreign wars—a popular tactic of politicians still.

With the passage of a further two centuries from the millennium, still with no appearance by Christ, and the crusades subsequent to the first degenerating into Christian banditry and slaughter, the distrust of the popes by the people was profound. After the failure of the Third Crusade (1187-1192), a troubadour, the Monk of Mataudon, who ended up as Prior of a Benedictine Priory near Villafranca, went so far as to describe god as “a fool who follows you into battle”. By the thirteenth century, the Fourth Crusade (1198-1204) had resulted only in the sacking of Constantinople, a rich Christian city, the rival to Rome in the eastern empire, and increasingly Christians were turning from Catholic Christianity to the heresies of Catharism and Bogomilism, Christianities untainted by imperialism, and therefore much closer to the Christianity of the apostles.

The heart of this rebellion was Languedoc in the south of France, and the popes saw it as such a danger that they organized a crusade against their fellow Christians there, the Albigensian crusade. Troubadours like Guilhem Figueira, and Guillaume le Clerc accused the Catholic leadership themselves of the heresy of promoting a “false crusade”. Guilhem was actually in Toulouse besieged by the Crusaders in 1229 when he wrote his sirventes contra Roma, or “Satirical Song Against Rome”. In it he writes:

Rome, to the Saracens you do little damage, but to the Greeks and Latins massacre and carnage. In the bottom of the abyss, Rome, you have your seat in hell.

After the defeat of the Seventh Crusade, led by Louis IX of France, an Auvergnat troubadour, Austorc d’Aurilhac, sang:

I see Christianity routed. I do not believe there has ever been such a loss. It gives us reason to stop believing in God and to worship Mohammed there where he is…

It turned out that crusading, meant to defend and save Christendom from Islam, actually undermined the faith of Christians, taking them to skepticism about the validity of Catholicism and its sacraments, a skepticism that ended up with the Reformation. The Albigensian Crusade was brutal, bloody and sooty, but although it stopped Bogomilism in the South of France, it actually spread the dissenting Cathars far afield in Europe, where the Church attempted to pursue them by means of the Inquisition, led by the Dominicans. The Catholic Church, by these means, divided and destroyed the most determined opponents of the sacramental—one might say, the magical—Christianity of Catholicism, but although the unity of the Bogomils and Cathars had been destroyed, their ideas had not. They moved with the dissenters wherever they went—and many became travellers plying their trade as craftsmen—telling others their criticisms of Catholicism.

In the next centuries, by degrees, the Roman Church lost its absolute power to “local and vernacular expressions of faith”. Christendom as a centralized Christian condominium crumbled as political power passed to kings, and the skeptics at the grass roots considered alternatives derived from the earlier heresies. Ultimately, those who listened to the dissidents were branded as witches, but the Catholic thesis had been opposed by the Bogomil and Cathar antithesis, to yield the synthesis of Protestantism, in the Reformation. The synthesis, Protestantism, was a Christianity more Catholic than Cathar, and so burnt those labeled as witches as enthusiastically as did the Catholics, though both sides took to victimizing their opponents by accusing them of witchcraft.

In particular, Protestants were willing to accept the old Catholic Christendom as being Christendom still, whereas Cathars did not regard Catholics as Christians at all. Protestants had the aim of replacing the Catholic Christendom with a Protestant one. Today in the USA it has succeeded—pastors have replaced priests in telling Protestants what to believe, and how they must read their bibles. Reading the bible for oneself was of the great triumphs of that vernacular movement that the popes hated. Catholics could not read their own bibles because they were written in Latin, but the heretics translated them into modern European languages so that anyone could read what they said and make up their own mind about the message. US protestants have given that up, and now are manipulated by politicians acting as priests, telling them lies that they could easily expose for themselves if they just did their own reading. What the slimy pastors tell US Protestants is no closer to the moral teaching of Jesus than Catholicism. In particular, the Protestant attitude to Islam remained the same as the Catholic one—one of imperial superiority.

Colonialism, the New Imperialism

Catholic

With the Moslems resisted in France in 732 AD, the onward progress of Islam in the west had been halted, but most of Spain remained Moslem for 700 more years before a renewal of crusading fervor, the desire for acquisition, under Ferdinand and Isabella motivated a wave of colonialism, all in the interest of “God and Christendom”, for a crusade was to bring under Christian rule “Saracens, pagans, and other unbelievers inimical to Christ”—the words of the pope in a papal bull permitting the king of Portugal to “attack, conquer and subdue” those people his explorers met, and to acquire land and property for the king under the authority of God. Spain and Portugal had stayed Catholic and now their overseas ventures were being blessed by the pope and accompanied by Catholic missions enforced by soldiers and soldiers of fortune. The crusading spirit had adapted to its new role of enforcing European colonialism, imperialism in fact.

Some Dominicans questioned the justice of the Spanish treatment of the native Americans under the pope’s blessing of “conquest, subjugation and exploitation”:

By what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged a detestable war against the people who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? … Why do you keep them so oppressed and weary? … And what care do you take that they should be instructed in religion? … Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?

G M Bediako, citing L Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for justice in the Conquest of America, (1949)

Thus spake Antonio de Montesinas in 1511 in a sermon given in Hispaniola. Of course, the Dominican order was founded to persecute heretics like the Cathars and their successors, the witches, who were also human and had rational souls whom Christians were meant to love as themselves, when they were saving their souls by diligently burning them alive tied to a stake so that they could not escape the flames. Sermons like this show that some Christians did read and comprehend the words of Christ, and took them seriously, but regretably such people were always, and still are, few, the majority prefering the spectacle of public, or private, murder and torture.

The Spaniard, Juan Girés de Sepúlveda, claimed its justification was how grave people’s sins were, and the rudeness of their nature—reasons why the Indians’ position was to be servants of sophisticated people like the Spanish:

How can we doubt that these people—so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated by impieties and obscenities—have been justly conquered by such an excellent, pious and most just king as Ferdinand the Catholic… and by such a most humane nation, and excellent in every kind of virtue.

Sepúlveda, cited by Bediako from L Hanke, The Spanish Struggle

Of course, “the most humane nation, excellent in every kind of virtue”, with such “excellent, pious and most just” Christian kings, called Presidents, is today the USA.

So, there was always the simple fall back of justifying any atrocity as necessary to spread the faith—the wonderful end justifying any means. Then again, these people were savages portrayed as practitioners of human sacrifice and cannibalism, which God’s subject were good enough to want to prevent. They were, after all so low in the ranks of humanity they were not even considered as sons of Ham, Shem or Japhet in the Jewish scriptures. Their very humanity was therefore in doubt, a great convenience for colonial and imperialist crusades. The Christian leadership of the USA have consistently used the same propaganda tactic—Vietnamese were subhuman Gooks, Iraqis were Ragheads. It can be no sin even for Christians to torture and murder subhumans can it?

Bartholomy de las Casas opposed the view of Sepúlveda. Sticking to a closer comprehension of the moral teaching of Christ, he affirmed that all human beings were equally human:

All the peoples of the world are men… all have understanding and volition… the five external senses and the four internal senses, and are moved by the objects of these, all take satisfaction in goodness, and feel pleasure with happy and delicious things, all regret and abhor evil.

But even las Casas felt no less superior in practice to the natives—they were human, yes, but they were nonetheless barbarians requiring civilizing:

No nation exists today, nor could exist, no matter how barbarous, fierce or depraved its customs may be, which may not be attracted and converted to all political virtues and to all the humanty of domestic, political and rational men.

Protestant

Needless to repeat, the Protestant colonialists were no different in their essential racialism from the Catholics. In an article in The Westward Enterprises, we read:

Far from condemning Spain, English propagandists looked on Spain as their colonial model and presented the “Indians” as liars and deceivers needing firm treatment as a preparation for Christianization.

Loren F Pennington, The Amerindians in English Promotional Literature, 1575-1625

Christianity was the way the colonialists megaphoned their excuses for theft. Propaganda sermons given for the Virginia Company justified conversion as the reason for taking the natives’ land. In 1609, a preacher, Daniel Price, said in a sermon that the aim of the colonists was to…

…make a savege country to become a sanctified country. You will obtain their best commodities, they will obtain the saving of their souls. You will enlarge the boarders of thy kingdom, nay the bounds of heaven.

God was still such a monster that people who had never had the chance to know anything about the sacrifice of His Son could burn forever in hell for their inevitable ignorance.

So, the Puritans of the sixteenth century had adopted the attitudes of the Spanish that the land of the savage “indians” were meant by God to be for the civilized Europeans, the difference simply being the change from Spaniards to Englishmen. The savage condition itself was a sign itself of Satan’s power, so that the wars against the natives was simply part of the struggle against sin. Christians persuaded themselves for centuries that they were doing God’s work in murdering and enslaving people in distant countries, stealing their land and resources, and as if it were a fair exchange forcing them as a salvific act to become Christians thereby saving their souls, or so imperialist theology claimed.

Only the few had any qualms that Jesus taught that salvation was everyone’s personal struggle, a struggle to avoid taking the broad gate to hell and instead finding the narrow gate to heaven, a lifelong struggle that left no room for any Christian to feel pure enough to act as a judge of others. Christian priests and pastors had persuaded these people that just by professing Christianity they were already saved, and so they could freely torment and butcher others until they surrendered and converted to a religion they knew nothing about. Meanwhile, the poor natives lost everything else, not least their self respect and, often with it, their will to live.

Evil and “The West”

The colonizing peoples, once known as Christendom, are now more commonly called “The West”. Curiously, the west was, in early Christian thought based on the bible, considered as evil. Lactantius, the Christian commentator, wrote:

He [God] also established two parts of the earth itself opposed to one another and of a different character—namely the east and the west—and of these the east is assigned to God, because He Himself is the fountain of light and the enlightener of all things, and because he makes us rise to eternal life. But the west is ascribed to that disturbed and depraved mind, because it conceals the light, because it always brings on darkness, and because it makes men die and perish in their sins. For as light belongs to the east and the whole course of life depends on the light, so darkness belongs to the west, but death and destruction are contained in darkness.

Divinarum Institutionum Libri Septem

This idea originated in solar worship, coming to us via the Persian religion, because the sun rises in the east (oriens) and sets in the west (occidens). So the east is associated with sunrise, light, and all things good, while the west is associated with sunset, darkness and all things bad. The good God is still the God of light, and light signifies salvation, whereas the wicked God, the Devil, is the god of darkness, and darkness signifies hell and damnation. The west has therefore, since time immemorial, been considered as wicked, and the western imperial powers have simply added to that idea, and bravely continue to do so!

This early association of the west with evil has appeared in the renunciation of the devil by the clergy before a baptism, and is the reason why baptisteries were on the west side of the church—the priest renounced the Evil One boldly facing the west. Similarly, when a clergyman exorcised a demon from someone possessed, the victim faced the east while the exorcist, cross raised up before him, faced the devil in the west. Later, in the sixth and seventh centuries, churches had towers, dedicated to S Michael, erected on their west side.

S Michael was the archangel who led God’s heavenly host against wickedness, and who was expected by Christ waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane—the Essene belief being that Michael would lead the heavenly host out of the Mount of Olives to defeat evil and renew the world at the End of Time. When dawn came, and Michael and the heavenly host did not, Jesus knew his expectation of a world renewal was mistaken, and his fate as a false prophet was to die. Immediately that he did, though, his disbelieving followers transferred the belief in the arrival of Michael with God’s armies to save the world into the belief in the return (parousia) of Christ as the leader of God’s armies to save the world. So, Christ is actually a form of the archangel Michael.

Michael seems to have been the Angel of the Lord, the Jewish equivalent of Mithras, the face of God. God, being the sun, could not be looked upon by humans, but Mithras was the dawn sun, the equivalent of Horemahket in Egypt, who could be looked upon at dawn, so when Ahuramazda wanted to appear to men, he did so as Mithras. S Michael served the same role for Yehouah, the Jewish God. So, Mithras and Michael were varieties of the dawn sun, and the western towers of churches, which stood between the church and its congregation and the devil, were dedicated to Michael as the high point of the church to receive the first rays of the rising sun and thereby offer protection from the evil darkness of the west. And Lo! the darkness did recede before the light. Hills were similarly often dedicated to S Michael, and indeed had often been dedicated to the pagan sun gods in pre-Christian times.

Such thinking, although pre-Christian, shows how Christianity emerged from a purer, less allegorical solar belief. The God of the Jews and Christians actually admitted to the prophet, Isaiah, that he is the author of good and evil, so does not pretend to stand solely for goodness and light. An editor of Isaiah is negating the Persian religion which had two almost equal gods, the good one, Ahuramazda, and the wicked one Ahriman, because the Jews, when they got control of the temple on the defeat of the Persians did not want their god to have any equal. That posed the problem of theodicy, and the Jewish editors solved it by accepting that any single God must be responsible for evil as well as good, but then ignoring further consequences.

In other words, the duallist Persian religion is more coherent than its children, the monotheistic Jewish and Christian ones. But because the half baked solution of the redacted Isaiah does not work, Christians revived the wicked god in the person of Satan, a bad angel only marginally less powerful than God Himself. This is plainly Ahriman resurrected, because Ahriman too was only just short of the power of God, the difference simply being that the God of dawn and light has foresight—He knows what is going to happen. The god of dusk and darkness only knows what has happened. The difference between good and evil is the use of foresight. Good people know the consequences of their actions and hesitate to do ill. Wicked people could not care less one way or the other. They just assume they will be right. Thus the dichotomy of east and west with the space in between being the battleground of good and evil is merely a form of ancient Achæmenid duallism.

So now the division of good and evil, of light and dark, of oriens and occidens, is “the east” and “the west”, and despite the propagandists of the west trying their utmost to reverse ancient perceptions so that west is now good and east is bad, they cannot. The history of western colonialism and imperialism, which continues daily, confirms ancient precepts clearly. Western military imperialism proves the ancient idea is valid—it proves it! The west is evil in fact! The world is a battleground between good and evil, and that translates seamlessly into the battleground between east and west.

US Imperialism

Historian of the Christian missions, Andrew Walls, finds the same characteristics in American missions as in American business and conspicuous financing. Colonialism is characterized with the three Cs—commerce, civilization, and Christianity. Professor of Christian Missionaries, Michael T Cooper (Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism And Forgotten Missiological Lessons) pleads for Christians to do more than understand biblical and systematic theologies, but to understanding the historical context in which they were developed too. He recognizes that colonialism is uniformly identified with western political expansion, Missionaries were pioneers of western colonial expansion, and, according to David Bosch (Transforming Missions: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, 1991) “mission” was equated with “colonialism” from the sixteenth century onward. Stephen Neill (Colonialism and Christian Missions, 1966) explained that under colonial rule, people considered weak and inferior were reproached for it, and therefore justly exploited and culturally impoverished.

Because today the word “colonialism” has a bad odour, when practised, it has to be disguised. Cultural imperialism—the superiority of American culture, theology, history and morality—is the modern imperialism, although accompanied by plenty of the old fashioned military kind.

Colonialism rejected the need of using traditional native cultural forms in favor of its belief in the superiority—the cultural hegemony of American Christian civilization. Many churches planted by American missionaries are imbued with American culture. The “God-given” unity of churches across the American inspired world, their similar liturgical styles, familiar hymns, and gospel singing, is the enforcement of American-styled Protestant Christianity:

Christianity as represented by Americans has been shaped by essentially American cultural influences. American missions are thus both products and purveyors of American culture.

Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith, (1996)

Latin American theologian Ismael Amaya writes on American missionary Christianity:

Much of the motivation behind the colossal effort to support the gigantic missionary enterprise around the world, is the conviction that God has raised America—especially Anglo-Saxon America—as the vessel of redemption of the world.

Ismael I Amaya, “A Latin American Critique of Western Theology”, Evangelical Review of Theology 7 (1983)

Yet the United States itself grew out of a colony of Europeans exploiting native Americans and imposing European Christianity upon them.

Whereas westerners used to steal the land and resources of natives so as to save their poor ignorant souls from hell fire, now the mission is to save them from dictatorship and political chaos—the hell is now on earth, or soon will be. Colonialism was robbery disguised as salvation and the bringing of western civilization to the uncivilized. Now, under the guise of globalism, it still persists, desperately bringing Christ to the natives as faith in him melts altogether at home, or, worse, continues to deform into its opposite.

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