ROME – Of all the challenges facing Christian evangelists today, one of the most pernicious actually concerns yesterday. It’s the charge, which circulates recurrently in groups both sacred and secular, that Christian evangelism over the centuries has been a destructive force, aligned with European colonialism and bent on the exploitation and, ultimately, the destruction of Indigenous cultures.
There’s no point denying, of course, that there have been distorted forms of evangelization by the sword, which no one today would defend. Yet if spreading the faith itself comes to be regarded as a destructive exercise, it could create powerful new pressures against evangelization culturally and, potentially, even politically and legally.
How are Catholic evangelists to respond to the charge that historically speaking, Christian missionary efforts have been a negative experience for their target cultures?
First, let’s recognize the primary defense most believing Catholics would offer is one which no secular judge or jury would ever accept—i.e., that Baptism brings souls closer to God and puts them on the surest path toward eternal salvation.
As the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus put it, “If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” Saying that out loud got then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, into no small amount of hot water, but it was orthodox Catholic belief then and remains so today.
Yet, recognizing that such appeals to eternal destiny probably won’t move the needle in terms of public opinion, there are at least three other arguments that can be made in defense of Christian missionary endeavors, all of an eminently secular character.
If spreading the faith itself comes to be regarded as a destructive exercise, it could create powerful new pressures against evangelization culturally and, potentially, even politically and legally.
First, far from destroying Indigenous cultures, in many cases Christian clergy and laity have been instrumental in preserving them. From the role Benedictine monks played in the fifth and sixth centuries in preserving Greek and Roman culture after the fall of Rome to the way lay Christian missionaries often preserved local languages in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands in the nineteenth century by being the first ones to provide them with a written alphabet in order to translate the Bible, as a historical matter missionaries have protected cultures far more often than they’ve annihilated them.
Second, instead of oppressing and exploiting the local peoples they encountered, over the centuries missionaries have expended enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources attempting to lift them up.
This is why Robert Louis Stevenson, the celebrated author of Treasure Island, described the missionaries he met in Samoa in the late nineteenth century as “the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific,” pointing not only to their role in stimulating intellectual and cultural development among native peoples but also their accomplishments in building a series of schools and technical colleges. This is why the Albanian missionary nun Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu, better known as “Mother Teresa,” was given a state funeral in India, with her casket conveyed on the same carriage that had borne the bodies of Indian independence heroes Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, with Indians of all backgrounds praising her efforts to serve the country’s poor.
This is why in Mongolia today, the Don Bosco Technical School functions as both a high school and a technical college, educating roughly 250 students every year while also hosting a caring center for street children and orphans, providing their food, boarding, education, and daily needs, despite the fact there are fewer than 1,500 Catholics in the entire country—meaning the vast majority of students aren’t Catholic and will never become Catholic.
One could go on multiplying examples, but it’s a bit akin to shooting fish in a barrel. The plain fact of the matter is that historically speaking, no force has invested greater resources in the development of Indigenous cultures around the world than Christian missionary movements.
Third, while individual Christians were complicit in the most brutal and exploitative forms of colonization, the broad thrust of the faith cut in the opposite direction, and today the most celebrated Christians are those who resisted the legacy of colonialism and stood on the side of the Indigenous.

In 1838, for example, a party of white colonists slaughtered at least twenty-eight unarmed members of the Indigenous Wirrayaraay people in New South Wales, Australia. A Baptist minister named John Saunders preached a celebrated sermon condemning the slaughter, thundering that “the spot of blood is upon us, the blood of the poor and the defenseless, the blood of the men we wronged before we slew . . . We are guilty here.” When seven perpetrators were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, Catholic judge John Plunkett referenced Psalm 36 in pronouncing judgment: “The crime has been witnessed in heaven and could not be concealed.”
Despite popular narratives to the contrary, the truth is that through the long and admittedly mixed history of colonization, there have always been Christians who stood up against abuse, often at least as numerous as the groups committing them.
As historian Meredith Lake put it, writing about Christian resistance to oppression during the colonization of Australia, these Christians “had a moral vision rooted in an understanding of the Bible—especially in the idea of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed, and his righteous judgement against injustice. This idea is pervasive in the text of Scripture … [and] gave a biblical shape to humanitarian defenses of Indigenous people.”
In Catholic terms, the Diocese of Chiapas (now the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas) in southern Mexico—which features the highest percentage of Indigenous persons of any diocese in the country, with twelve federally registered ethnicities—illustrates the point.
The third bishop of Chiapas, from 1543 to 1550, was the great Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, whose treatise A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies chronicled the abuses experienced by Indigenous persons in the Americas during the period of early Spanish colonization. Four centuries later, Chiapas would be led by the celebrated Bishop Samuel Ruiz García for forty years, between 1959 and 1999, who mediated conflicts between Mexico’s political establishment and armed uprisings among its Indigenous minorities. Ruiz was known especially as a friend of Chiapas’ Mayan peoples, among the most impoverished communities in the country.
Needless to point out, today no figure on the global stage is a more powerful advocate of Indigenous and marginalized peoples than Pope Francis, the ultimate pontiff of the peripheries. If Catholicism can produce such leadership, the charge that it’s necessarily identified with the most toxic forms of proselytism is virtually self-refuting.
The bottom line is that while Christian missionary efforts are perhaps an historically mixed bag vis-à-vis the fate of target populations, the plain fact of the matter is that in the collision between the West and the rest of the world over the last 500 years, no group has stood more consistently and courageously for the preservation, development, and recognition of local cultures than Christian missionaries. Scores of those missionaries have given their lives in defense of the peoples they felt called to serve.
Thus, how to defend Christian evangelism against charges of a checkered past? The best answer is to make sure it’s the whole past we have in view, not just selected chapters of it—in the robust confidence that when the whole story is told, Christian missionaries will be the heroes at least as often as the villains.