Church History

The transatlantic slave trade relocated millions of Africans under coercion into a plantation world that enriched European and American economies for centuries. Christianity was not a spectator. Iberian crowns baptized empire; Protestant merchants prayed and trafficked; churches owned people; missionaries debated whether conversion required freedom; enslaved Africans remade Christian faith into survival, protest, and hope. … Read More

If the previous article traced Christian entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade, this one traces how Christian activism helped make that trade—and eventually slavery itself in many jurisdictions—legally and morally indefensible. Abolitionism was never only Christian; Enlightenment natural rights, slave resistance, economic shifts, and imperial politics all mattered. Yet Quaker discipline, evangelical conversion ethics, Black … Read More

Between Columbus’s first voyage and the independence wars of the early nineteenth century, Latin America became the largest Catholic region on earth. That fact is not a hymn and not a curse by itself. It is a historical outcome of Iberian conquest, papal grants of patronage, mendicant and Jesuit missions, demographic catastrophe and recovery, African … Read More

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a cluster of Latin American Catholic theologians and pastoral workers argued that Christian faith must be thought from the underside of history: from poverty, landlessness, dictatorship, and structural violence. They called the resulting reflection liberation theology. Admirers heard the prophets and the Magnificat. Critics heard Marxism in a cassock. … Read More

Christianity in China is not a nineteenth-century novelty with a medieval rumor attached. In 635, according to the Xi’an stele of 781, a Church of the East mission reached the Tang court. Later centuries saw Yuan-era Christians, Jesuit scientific accommodation under the Ming and Qing, the bitter Chinese Rites Controversy, suppressed communities, Protestant and Catholic … Read More

The Great Awakening is often remembered as a colonial American lightning strike: Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, George Whitefield on a field, sinners trembling, a nation of evangelicals born. That memory is not empty. It is too small. Britannica describes a revival concentrated in British America mainly between about 1720 and the 1740s, linked to Pietism, … Read More

India’s Christian history refuses the neat plot in which Europeans invent the Indian church in the sixteenth century. Communities on the Malabar Coast have long claimed Saint Thomas the Apostle as founder; they lived for centuries in East Syriac liturgical orbit, negotiated caste and kingdom politics, and then faced Portuguese Catholic pressure to Latinize. Meanwhile … Read More

Between 1700 and 1900, Christianity’s geographic center of gravity began a shift that the twentieth century would complete: from a religion whose most powerful institutions were European to a religion with large, self-directing churches on every inhabited continent. The usual picture is a Victorian missionary in a pith helmet. That picture is late, Protestant, and … Read More

In little more than a century, Christianity in Korea moved from a persecuted minority faith to a major public religion of the South—complete with megachurches, global missionaries, universities, and political visibility—while the North’s church life was crushed into a remnant under communist rule. Outsiders reach for simple keys: American missionaries, Korean zeal, capitalist takeoff, shamanic … Read More

A stubborn textbook sentence still walks the earth: Christianity came to Africa with nineteenth-century missionaries. The sentence is false as history even when it is true as a local memory in a particular village evangelized in 1870. Africa hosted Christian kingdoms while much of northern Europe was still being converted. Aksum adopted Christianity in the … Read More