Spiritual Conquest

This chapter examines the twentieth-century origins of Christian nationalism and Christian globalism in American Protestant missionary efforts and the First World War. It also asserts the prominence of American Protestant engagement with Germany in shaping both theological modes of engagement. Whether it was Germany’s autocratic ambitions or its liberal theology, a growing number of American Protestant ecumenists and evangelicals alike identified Germany as a major threat to their global mission. While ecumenists mobilized for war to build a new Wilsonian international order, evangelicals found inspiration in their premillennial apocalypticism to oppose Germany. The Great War and its aftermath then led both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants to see one another as rivals within their own nation. These events ultimately activated and refined competing forms of international engagement that would define America’s global mission in the decades to follow.

The Spiritual Evolution of Margarito Bautista

A spiritual biography, this book chronicles the journey of Margarito Bautista (1878–1961) from Mormonism to the Third Convention, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) splinter group he fomented in 1935–1936, to Colonia Industrial/Nueva Jerusalén, a polygamist utopia Bautista founded in 1947. It argues that Bautista embraced Mormon belief in indigenous exceptionalism in 1901 and rapidly rose through the ranks of Mormon priesthood until convinced that the Mormon hierarchy was not invested in the development of native American peoples, as promoted in the Church’s canon. This realization resulted in tensions over indigenous self-governance within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) and Bautista’s 1937 excommunication. The book contextualizes Bautista’s thought with a chapter on the spiritual conquest of Mexico in 1513 and another on the arrival of Mormons in Mexico. In addition to accounts of Bautista’s congregation-building on both sides of the U.S. border, this volume includes an examination of Bautista’s magnum opus, a 564-page tome hybridizing Aztec history and Book of Mormon narratives, and his prophetic plan for the recovery of indigenous authority in the Americas. Bautista’s excommunication catapulted him into his final spiritual career, that of a utopian founder. In the establishment of his colony, Bautista found a religious home, free from Euro-American oversight, where he implemented his prophetic plan for Mexico’s redemption. His plan included obedience to early Mormonism’s most stringent practices, polygamy and communalism. Bautista nonetheless hoped his community would provide a model for Mexicans willing to prepare the world for Christ’s millennial reign.

The Spiritual Conquest of Latin America

The notion of a “spiritual conquest,” as opposed to a military conquest by Spanish forces and indigenous allies, was developed in detail in Robert Ricard’s eponymous 1933 work. While the metaphor of a “spiritual conquest” is broadly understood and used, many recent historical works eventually turned their attention to a close analysis of distinct processes and tendencies in terms of the methods, practices, and dynamics of colonial evangelization in Spanish and Portuguese America. The topical sections below address important work in this area of inquiry published in the last twenty-five years, with occasional references to earlier foundational works.

The New Philology and the New History of Religion in New Spain

The New Philology and its emphasis on the use of indigenous-language sources for ethnohistorical insights contributes greatly to the study of religion in New Spain. Previous studies primarily employed Spanish-language accounts and reports to understand evangelization efforts. Although providing important insights, histories based solely on Spanish sources are limited in their contributions. The New Philology, however, provides an additional point of view from which to study religion. Indigenous-language texts in Nahuatl (Aztec), Yucatec Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, and other languages contain a wealth of information on how natives responded, negotiated, resisted, and participated in the spread of Catholicism. The contributions of the New Philology to the study of religion in New Spain, although many, are particularly evident in its re-evaluation of the spiritual conquest; the natives’ role in evangelization; the diversity of religious beliefs, practices, and experiences throughout the colonial period; and through its critical study of the legend surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The Guaraní Missions in the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, 1609–1800

The establishment of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay in 1609 expanded upon the “spiritual conquest” of the Guaranís of South America. The liminal position of this territory, located between the southern boundaries of the dominions of the Iberian monarchies in America, conditioned the policy of conversion applied to the indigenous peoples who inhabited this region. Missionaries sought to attract the attention of indigenous leaders to catechesis to ensure evangelization, but much of their positive results stemmed from a convergence of mythical and historical motivations. Along with the use of firearms, used to repel the attacks of the bandeirantes from the captaincy of São Paulo, these factors contributed to a political alliance forming between the Jesuits and the catechized Guaraní. This alliance, in turn, allowed for the creation of a successful social, political, and cultural arrangement. The foundation of these Christian Indian settlements—known as missions—was one of the variants of the “Republic of Indians,” a framework for limited indigenous self-government codified in Spanish law, which enabled the Guaranís to overcome increasing social fragmentation and reorient their cultural activities. Since teaching “arts and crafts” was a leading vehicle for evangelization, many indigenous people also became literate. Lessons in reading and writing taught in the Guaraní language, through seminars, catechisms, and dictionaries, familiarized the population of the missions with written culture. Daily life in these Christian communities allowed the natives, under the tutelage of the Jesuits, to overcome the precariousness of the conditions to which they were subjected as exploited workers. It also afforded them an opportunity to recreate a semblance of their way of life (ñande reko) adjusted to colonial parameters.

Conversion Diplomacy

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which rulers and princes across Sri Lanka followed Bhuvanekabāhu’s initiative and engaged diplomatically with the Portuguese empire. Conversion to Catholicism became a key diplomatic tool during the 1540s. This served the interests of Lankan rulers and princes in the short term, helping them to transfuse imperial ideas into the Portuguese sphere, but also prepared the ground for larger transformations in the longer run, driven by Catholic Universalism. Sri Lanka as a territory of the mind began to emerge among the Portuguese, combining Lankan ideas of the island as a repository of cakravarti emperorship with a novel notion of spiritual conquest. This chapter explores a range of local contexts including diplomacy in Sītāvaka, Kandy, Jaffna, and smaller polities such as Batticaloa. Emphasis is again on local diplomatic agency.