The missionary impulse at the center of Christian theology has always carried within it the seeds of coercion. A religion that believes it possesses the only path to salvation, that all other paths lead to damnation, and that it is commanded to bring the message to every person on earth is a religion that faces a permanent temptation: when persuasion is too slow or too uncertain, power is available. The history of Christian missions is not uniformly coercive. There were missionaries who learned local languages, respected local cultures and worked through genuine relationship. There were also missionaries who arrived with soldiers, who baptized at swordpoint, who destroyed sacred objects and replaced them with crosses, who reported to colonial administrators who would burn villages that refused the faith. Both traditions exist in the historical record. This post is about the second one - about what happened in Spain in 1492, in Goa in the sixteenth century, in the Americas across three centuries of colonial evangelization - because that tradition has been apologized for, contextualized and minimized in ways that do not survive contact with the documents left behind by the people who carried it out.

Spain 1492: The Alhambra Decree and the End of Medieval Pluralism

The year 1492 is remembered in Western history primarily for Columbus. It is also the year that Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, expelling the entire Jewish population of Spain - somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, with scholarly estimates varying - unless they converted to Christianity. Jews had lived in the Iberian Peninsula for more than a thousand years. They had built communities, institutions and intellectual traditions that were interwoven with Spanish civic and cultural life across generations of coexistence that, while never uncomplicated, had produced a degree of interfaith contact unusual in medieval Europe. The Decree gave them approximately four months to convert or leave, forfeiting property and assets that could not be liquidated in time. Many left. Many converted, becoming the conversos who would then face the Spanish Inquisition's suspicion that their Christianity was insincere - that they were secretly continuing Jewish practice behind the facade of baptism. The Inquisition's particular focus on conversos reveals the logic of the entire enterprise: forced conversion was not primarily about saving souls. It was about eliminating a distinct religious community that was perceived as incompatible with the project of a unified Catholic Spain.

The expulsion of the Muslims of Spain - the Moriscos - followed in stages across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Muslim communities had existed in Iberia since the eighth century and had been gradually incorporated into Christian kingdoms as the Reconquista advanced. They were offered the same choice as the Jews: convert or leave. Many converted. Many conversions were judged insincere, and Morisco communities were subjected to restrictions on language, clothing, naming practices and religious observance designed to extinguish cultural identity as well as religious practice. The final expulsion of the Moriscos was completed between 1609 and 1614, removing an estimated 300,000 people from the peninsula. The human cost of these expulsions was not a byproduct of some other policy. It was the policy. Spain was constructing a religiously unified state, and the method was to make it impossible for non-Christians to remain.

Goa and the Portuguese Inquisition in Asia

The Inquisition of Goa, established in 1561 under Portuguese colonial authority in India, is among the least discussed episodes of Christian institutional coercion in any popular account of the period. It operated for over two and a half centuries, was not abolished until 1812, and was conducted by the same institutional framework - the Dominican inquisitors, the autos-da-fé, the secret denunciations, the torture, the burning of the condemned - that operated in Spain and Portugal, transplanted to a colonial context where it applied not primarily to Christian heretics but to Hindu and Muslim populations who had been compelled or pressured into baptism and were then subject to prosecution if they continued their prior religious practices.

The Portuguese had established Goa as a colonial base in 1510 and the Christianization of the territory proceeded through a combination of incentives and coercion that is documented in the records of the colonial administration itself. Temples were destroyed and replaced with churches on the same sites. Hindu religious practice was prohibited by law in Portuguese-controlled territory. Property and civic rights were conditional in ways that rewarded conversion. Francis Xavier, who spent time in Goa in the 1540s and is now a canonized saint, wrote letters to the Portuguese king requesting that the Inquisition be brought to Goa specifically to deal with the problem of lapsed converts - people who had nominally accepted baptism and then returned to Hindu or Muslim practice. The Inquisition he requested arrived fifteen years after his death and operated for over two hundred years. The victims were not exclusively from non-Christian backgrounds. Portuguese settlers, traders and soldiers also fell under its jurisdiction. But the specific context of a colonial Inquisition applying European heresy-control machinery to populations that had been pressured into baptism in the first place represents a qualitatively distinct form of institutional violence - one that combined religious coercion with colonial domination in ways that neither could have achieved alone.

The Americas: Evangelization and Extinction

The evangelization of the Americas began with Columbus's second voyage in 1493, which included a company of priests whose mission was to convert the indigenous populations encountered. What followed across three centuries of Spanish, Portuguese, French and English colonial expansion was a process of Christianization inseparable from conquest, dispossession and demographic catastrophe. The indigenous populations of the Americas declined by an estimated 50 to 90 percent in the century following European contact, a catastrophe driven primarily by epidemic disease but also by the violence of conquest, the brutality of forced labor systems and the social disruption of cultural and religious destruction. The missionaries operated within this context and in many cases facilitated it, providing the theological and administrative framework that justified the conquest as a civilizing and saving mission.

The encomienda system, which assigned indigenous populations to Spanish colonizers as a labor force, was defended and organized partly through the Catholic Church's administrative presence in the colonies. The requirement of the Requerimiento - a legal document read aloud to indigenous people before military action, informing them of Christianity and the authority of the pope and demanding their submission, typically in a language they could not understand - was a Church-approved instrument of conquest. Its purpose was not genuine evangelization. It was the production of a legal record that the indigenous population had been offered the opportunity to convert and submit before being conquered by force. The document was recognized as a farce by many of the Spanish soldiers who were required to use it and by some of the priests who observed it. It was used anyway, for decades, because it served the administrative and legal needs of an imperial project that required a religious justification.

The Mission System and Its Costs

The Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit missions that operated across the Americas, from California to Paraguay to Brazil, represent a more complex chapter than the straightforward violence of the initial conquest. Some missionaries were genuine advocates for indigenous populations against the worst excesses of colonial exploitation. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had been an encomendero before his conversion to advocacy, produced the most detailed contemporary account of Spanish atrocities against indigenous peoples and spent decades lobbying the Spanish crown for legal protections. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is a document of extraordinary moral courage written from within the system he was criticizing.

But the mission system as an institution, even in its more benevolent expressions, operated on premises that amounted to cultural destruction by design. The California missions run by Junipero Serra - now canonized as a saint - housed indigenous populations in conditions that modern scholars have characterized as coercive at minimum and lethal at worst. Indigenous people were not free to leave. Traditional religious practices were forbidden. Traditional social structures were dismantled and replaced with mission hierarchy. Mortality rates within the missions were dramatically higher than in unconverted indigenous communities nearby. Serra's canonization in 2015 produced sustained protest from indigenous communities who experienced his legacy not as salvation but as the institutional destruction of their ancestors' cultures. Pope Francis canonized him anyway, noting his defense of indigenous people against colonial violence, which was real, while the critics noted that the system he built was itself a form of colonial violence, which was also real.

The Pattern Across Cases

Spain in 1492, Goa in 1561, the Americas across three centuries - these are not isolated episodes with different explanations. They are expressions of the same structural logic: a religion with exclusive truth claims, backed by state power, encountering populations it defined as lost and using that definition to justify coercion. The specific form of coercion varied. In Spain it was expulsion and the Inquisition. In Goa it was colonial prohibition and the imported machinery of heresy control. In the Americas it was the full spectrum from legal theater to outright genocide, with mission enclosure and cultural destruction occupying the middle range. What all three cases share is the theological framework that made the coercion seem not just permissible but obligatory: souls were at stake, time was short, and the alternative - allowing people to remain in what the church defined as error and damnation - was morally unacceptable to the people making the decisions.

That framework is worth naming explicitly because it is the same framework that drives contemporary Christian nationalist arguments about the obligation to shape civil law according to Christian moral teaching. The specific content is different. Nobody is proposing the Requerimiento or the expulsion of Jews in twenty-first century America. But the underlying premise - that a religiously defined truth obligates its holders to use available power to bring others into conformity with it - is continuous from 1492 to the present. The history of what that premise has produced when it had state power behind it is the argument this series exists to make visible.

My Bottom Line

The forced conversion and expulsion episodes documented here are not cherry-picked anomalies from an otherwise gentle missionary tradition. They are the predictable outcomes of combining exclusive truth claims with state authority and a theological mandate to convert. They are what happened when the logic of the mission was allowed to operate without constraint. The apologists for this history make two arguments that deserve acknowledgment before being rejected. The first is context: these were different times, different standards, different understanding of what cruelty meant. That is partly true and entirely insufficient. The people being expelled, tortured and destroyed knew it was happening to them. Their suffering was not diminished by the fact that their persecutors believed they were doing God's work. The second is that individual missionaries often acted with genuine compassion and in genuine opposition to the worst excesses. That is also true and also insufficient. Individual decency operating within a coercive institutional structure does not redeem the institution. It describes what ordinary human goodness looks like under conditions of institutional evil - present, insufficient, and used after the fact to argue that the institution was not really what the record shows it was.

The choice was convert, leave or die. Christianity offered it in Spain, in Goa, in the Americas and in a dozen other contexts where it had the power to enforce the demand. That is not the power of a message. That is the power of a state. The distinction matters, and the record makes it impossible to pretend it does not exist.