Columbus, Part VI

The Great Commission: Embarrassment or Engine of History? Las Casas, Vitoria, Pope Paul III, and Columbus were motivated in part by the injunction of Christ to communicate the gospel to all nations, which was dear to their hearts. Today, most people, even Christians, believe it is improper to evangelize. Christ's last command seems an embarrassment. Christians should have stayed at home and not even tried, for fear the command would be misused.

Contemporary believers usually think that native religions are somehow valid in their own way. "It will not do, however, given the anthropological evidence, to make facile assumptions that all spiritual practices are on an equal plane," states Robert Royal. "The early explorers who encountered them did not think so, and neither should we."

Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, no big fan of Christianity or the Spanish conquest, in the very act of admiring the richness of Aztec culture, characterizes the Aztec gods as "a whole pantheon of fear." Fuentes deplores the way that missionaries often collaborated with unjust appropriation of native land, but on a theological level notes the dramatic shift in native cultures thanks to Christian influence:

One can only imagine the astonishment of the hundreds and thousands of Indians who asked for baptism as they came to realize that they were being asked to adore a god who sacrificed himself for men instead of asking men to sacrifice themselves to gods, as the Aztec religion demanded.

This Copernican Revolution in religious thought has changed religious practice around the world since it was first proclaimed by a carpenter in Palestine two millennia ago, yet is all but invisible to modern critics of evangelization. Any of us, transported to the Aztec capital Tenochtitlàn or to many other places around the world before the influence of Christianity, would react the way the conquistadors did -- with rage and horror. We might not feel much different about some of the ways that Europeans, imitating Islamic practice, evangelized at times by the sword and perpetrated grave injustices around the world. But in strict religious terms, to see evangelization as pure imperialism is without substance. The usual -- which is to say uncritical -- way in which we are urged to respect the values of other cultures has a kernel of truth buried beneath what is otherwise religious indifferentism.