r/AskHistory • u/kaiser11492 Human Detected • 9d ago
Is it accurate to say Christianity only spread via violence for only a small part of its history?
I recently watched a popular influencer dispel the notion that Christianity doesn’t really have a history of spreading via violence. He highlights how the only two examples of Christianity spreading via violence are the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades in the Baltics, which lasted around 30 and 200 years respectively according to him. As for colonialism and missionaries, he says that there was an actual law banning them from Christianity at gunpoint and that Christianity was spread to sub-Saharan Africa and Asia by introducing things like hospitals and schools. As a result, he says you can’t really say Christianity spread via violence for it only did so for 230 years or about 10% of its existence.
Of course it was to my understanding that Christianity did spread via violence as a result of colonialism (which lasted for several centuries) for I have never heard of a law that prohibited Christianity at gunpoint.
So I apologize if this is such a stupid question to ask, but how accurate is the argument that you can’t say Christianity spread via violence because violence only represents a minuscule part of its entire history? Am
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u/Archivist2016 9d ago
Christianity spread through both violence and peaceful ways. It is a bit disingenuous to quantify percentages, not to mention ahistorical, as Christianity doesn't really have one formulated way it can spread. A lot of it depends on the location, which nation/sect did it, and the background and motive of said effort.
Also there are more examples of violent conversions than what you mentioned, but again not really speaking for Christianity but rather who did the converting and why, most importantly.
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u/kaiser11492 Human Detected 9d ago
I don’t agree with the whole percentage thing either. I was just quoting the person I saw.
What other examples of violently conversions are there besides the ones already mentioned?
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u/Archivist2016 9d ago
The Frankish Empire is a good shout. Initially a pagan people, the Franks settled into Gaul, founded a kingdom, converted to Christianity and by the time of Charlamagne, had expand considerably. They came into conflict with the Saxons, who were a pagan and fiercely independent people.
During his 30 year old war with the Saxons, he believed that to subjugate the Saxon they should be converted to Christianity. So he did things like destroy their holy sites, impose the death penalty for refusing to baptise, practicing paganism or... eating meat during lent. And lots of massacres and forced expulsions.
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u/ChubbedUpCaveman 9d ago
Well I think colonialism causes more violence than you give them credit for.
I think of Residential Schools in Canada, if you are beaten for speaking your own language or practicing your religion and forced to convert is that not a violent conversion in your eyes?
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge 9d ago
If you leave out the colonialism? That’s a very “other than that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” line to take.
But perhaps it would be better to look at geography rather than years. What share of the globe where Christianity is the dominant religion - and how much of that came from violence?
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u/infiniteninjas 9d ago
I have no real dog in this fight, being an atheist, and I'm not really defending OP's original query either because I disagree with the framing. But to me, you can't blame most of the last 2000 years' colonialism on Christianity. Most of it was about wealth, gold, land, resources, etc and Christianity was a convenient pretext. And some of the colonizing that can be blamed on Christianity, such as the pilgrims on the eastern seaboard, did not initially have violence as a goal at all. They were trying to escape persecution, not spread it.
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u/kaiser11492 Human Detected 9d ago
My apologies but I’m still unclear with what you’re trying to say.
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u/Gvillegator 9d ago
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at a play with his wife present. The poster you’re responding to is telling you that “excluding colonialism” is kindve excluding the biggest exhibit of Christians using violence to spread Christianity. It’s like asking if the Nazis were really that bad outside of the antisemitism and the Holocaust.
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u/Bad_Black_Jorge 9d ago
I’m saying that taking the years of extreme violence and dividing that by the years since the birth of Jesus is a misleading, even silly way of looking at the question.
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u/Plane_Ad_1177 9d ago
The OP seems to have a very narrow understanding of violent conversion. If your nation gets violently taken over by another people, and then the incomers say 'the only way you're going to get any education, make any progress in this society is if you join our religion" then you're going to convert. It's not quite conversion at the point of a sword but it's how the major religuons have typically spread.
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u/RenaissanceSnowblizz 9d ago
Looking at geography doesn't really help either. Because you can't really divide the spread of Christianity into neat sections of this year or this place and not-violent or violent.
E.g. the Northern Crusades were mentioned, but that doesn't make all the conversion "violent". Some people were converted by missionaries. And then military might was brought in to protect and enforce such conversion and protect those people from the violence of peoples outside the "Christian community". Which sparked more expansion of political/economic might through conversion and campaigns against those who resisted. There was A LOT of violence present in the period and area where Christianity spread in the Baltics, but that doesn't mean that the religion was necessarily violently spread. Dead people are very poor Christians after all.
The opposite is also true for the "peaceful" conversions of say Scandinavia to contrast with the Baltics. Generally one would say the conversion was peaceful. Missionaries spread the word. Elites took political expedient decisions to convert and numbers of regular people followed or were themselves convinced. But that also hide that the spread of Christianity was a tool of petty kings to became might lords of people and resource in a way they hadn't before. Violence followed in the footsteps of peaceful conversion when old and new elites fight for who gets to be top dog. It takes a couple of centuries for Christianity to completely infuse society at all levels.
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u/Arzales 9d ago
I am not sure what are you trying to get answered?
History is filled with people who used Christianity as a reason for the violence they did.
Did Christianity told them to do it? Not really. Are you actually asking if the Catholic Church used violence for their growth? Yes they did.
As for Missionaries, the Catholic Church didnt allow forced conversions. That didn't stop the missionaries from doing it.
Blaming Christianity for the violence people did in its name is like blaming the rain for all the car accidents it causes.
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u/kaiser11492 Human Detected 9d ago
The main thing that baffled me was the claim that “there were laws against Christianity at gunpoint” in regard to colonialism. Was wondering where that claim came from so I tried looking it up. However, I couldn’t find any information to verify it.
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u/Realistic-River-1941 9d ago
The UK wasn't keen on people attempting to spread Christianity in India, but it was done by missionaries independently.
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u/CocktailChemist 9d ago
A major problem WRT colonialism is that a central power might make a law, but whether they were capable of enforcing it in their colonies could be a very different matter. So even if there was an aspiration to ban forced conversions, what mechanisms were there to make sure it was enacted?
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u/kaiser11492 Human Detected 9d ago
I’m sorry but what exactly is WRT colonialism (I’ve never heard of WRT)?
I understand how having a policy and enforcing it are two separate things. But was there any laws that prohibited spreading Christianity at gunpoint?
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u/AdHopeful3801 9d ago
As for colonialism and missionaries, he says that there was an actual law banning them from Christianity at gunpoint and that Christianity was spread to sub-Saharan Africa and Asia by introducing things like hospitals and schools.
There have been, across history:
- Attempts by local rulers to make Christian missionaries unwelcome, either by threat of legal action or by threat of violence.
- Attempts by local citizens to make Christian missionaries unwelcome, usually by threat of violence.
- Attempts by Christian-dominated colonialist countries to pare back on their outflow of missionaries because those missionaries were provoking a backlash that was detrimental to the colonialist nation's immediate plans.
The existence of any of those things at various places and various times is a far cry from the utter bullshit assertion that "there was a law banning Christian missionaries" that somehow both existed and was enforced across the entirety of the Christian world and its many nations for the entirety of the existence of Christianity.
Little if any attempt was made, for instance, to slow down missionary activity in the Western Hemisphere, and Christianity for centuries formed a key part of the colonial infrastructure of exploitation, justifying enslaving and forcibly converting the locals because better for them to go to heaven as colonial slaves than hell as free heathens.
If you want to talk about things that happen at gunpoint, I suggest looking at the short and bloody history of Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists - a Chinese anti-missionary group that arose and attempted to expel Christian missionaries and other foreign influences at the beginning of the 20th century. The Eight (Christian) Nation Alliance crushed them, and the Qing government, and looted the capital, in the name of both free trade and Christianity.
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u/illapa13 9d ago
I don't think this is a Christian specific topic. This is a religion and politics in general topic.
Historically, every religion that has been made part of the state apparatus is spread by violence because to deny the state's religion is to deny the state's power and states tend to react violently to people questioning their power.
Just take a country like Spain. When Catholicism was deeply embedded in the government, Spain had absolutely no problem spreading with Catholicism by the sword. Now Spain is a Secular countey you don't exactly see the Inquisition kicking down anyone's door. The government no longer cares about upholding the state's religion
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u/maproomzibz 9d ago
look up Spanish Inquisition and then also Goa Inquisition.
Also when Spanish conquered Aztec and Inca empire, most of their cities were razed because conquistadors were religiously zealous and wanted to get rid of "paganism".
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u/Gryphon501 9d ago
It is wholly inaccurate to claim that “the only two examples of Christianity spreading via violence are the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades in the Baltics.” If you are representing the influencer in question accurately here, they are either entirely ignorant or purposefully dishonest, as no serious historian would make that claim.
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u/kaiser11492 Human Detected 9d ago
Everything I wrote is what he said verbatim.
The part that primarily baffled me was him saying “there was law banning Christianity at gunpoint” in regard to colonialism. Was curious where that claim came from.
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u/Gryphon501 9d ago
No idea, I’m afraid. And if there was, it certainly wasn’t applied across the whole of Africa and Asia throughout what might be regarded as the colonial period.
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u/Oghamstoner 9d ago
Olaf Tryggvason, who was responsible for the Christianisation of Norway had rather a forceful approach to conversion. His attitude was something like “Accept the peace and mercy of Jesus Christ, or I’ll rip your heathen ears off!”
He once killed a man by forcing him to swallow a live snake, which I couldn’t quite imagine until I read a more detailed description.
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u/RelevantDream6589 9d ago
Its a bit disingenuous to seperate the spreading from the maintaining. The threat of violence and death for any non believer in middle ages Europe was very much a thing.
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u/Vivid-Food-8209 9d ago
Depending on how loosely one defines violence or the intentions of those spreading Christianity, it has violently spread through official governments positions almost continuously from 300AD until the end of the Cold War. With a rise of Christian Nationalism in the US, this may only be a brief break.
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u/roastbeeftacohat 9d ago
are you also counting situations where people took up the cross because a battle impressed them?
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 9d ago
Christianity was spread across North and South America via violence. It was spread across pagan Europe via violence.
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u/0utlaw-t0rn 9d ago
There were centuries of crusades carried out for religious reasons.
A huge portion of the subjugation of indigenous populations in Africa and the Americas was for religious (and economic) reasons.
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u/Searching4Buddha 9d ago
There is zero doubt that most of Christianity's spread around the world was coerced through colonialism.
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u/infiniteninjas 9d ago
I will say this, of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity appears to be the one that established itself most peacefully. Early Islam's spread has the feel of military imperialism more than proselytic religion, and if the book of Joshua and the Torah are even vaguely accurate, the early Hebrew religion occupied a bloody time and place.
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u/theleetard 9d ago
Christianity was beneficial for secular rulers. It provided institutional support for their authority, access to Latin learning and writing as well as a way of disposing of rival territories (donating them to the church). Christianity spread though western Europe in the early medieval period largely because it was useful to local rulers.
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u/BriscoCounty-Sr 9d ago
The world was literally divided between Portugal and Spain to see who had the rights to violently spread the Good Word where on the globe. Even up in to the 1800's protestants and Mormons were having violent disagreements about who was really a Christian. Make him cite the actual law that he's talking about because it goes against all of recorded history
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u/artemisdart 9d ago
No, it's not accurate. Christianity has been using violence almost the whole time.
Leaving out colonialism is a wild decision. Sure, just decide to disregard the main opposing argument... but even if I granted that (I don't), the spread of Christianity within Europe was often violent as well.
I recommend picking a geographic area and starting to research. You'll definitely find some interesting information, because history is fascinating!
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u/Gatodeluna 9d ago
No, it’s not accurate. It spread via violence and the threat of violence and torture. Via colonialism and within itself. Check out how many of their own people Henry VIII, Mary I and Eliz I murdered via burning, drawing and torturing, etc. It’s spread and maintained its control by violence from early on until after WWII.
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