Those who did earnestly attempt conversion found not only that slaves were often unenthusiastic about adopting their captors’ religion but that slaveholders were openly hostile. They feared that Christian slaves might refuse to work on Sundays, demanding to attend church. Worse, if slaves could contract Christian marriages, it would be difficult to split up families for sale. Christian slaves might even discover notions of spiritual equality, inviting slaveholders’ perennial nightmare: rebellion.
Kitap: Protestants
Protestanlık Köleliğe Karşı Ama Kölelik Olmadan Rekabet Edilmiyor
A further attempt to found a slaveless colony in the 1730s, in Georgia, only lasted a few months. The colonists reported that “a white man in these lands, if he cannot buy a slave, must work himself like a slave.” It is, after all, very hard to compete with unpaid laborers who can be worked to death.
Merkezi Gücü Olmayan Protestanlığın Misyonerlikte Gecikmesi
Generally, Protestantism is a cheap religion, but foreign missions cannot be carried out on a shoestring. They need training, support, supply networks, and a flow of talented people. Above all, they need institutions able to commit to such things for decades on end. Committed individuals such as Baldaeus, Candidius, Junius, Campanius, Mayhew, Eliot, and von Welz were all very well, but without sustained continuity nothing would be achieved. The Catholic Church’s religious orders could provide all of these things, but in the seventeenth century no Protestant institutions could. This was one sour legacy of early Protestantism’s Faustian bargain with the state. The princes’ seizure of church property during the Reformation robbed Protestantism of the institutional potential to propagate itself, and instead condemned it to merely maintaining a parochial network.
Kuzey Amerika Yerlilerini Convertleme Sebebi
The Dutch in Taiwan and in Brazil also focused, with no success, on the small Catholic populations left by previous Portuguese colonists. In North America, there was no Catholic problem, but one reason often cited by settlers for evangelizing the Native peoples was to prevent Catholic missionaries from infiltrating them first. When these missions did begin, their bemused subjects were made to sit through denunciations of popery. Early modern Catholic missionaries aimed to convert anyone and everyone. Protestant missionaries really only wanted to convert Catholics.
Hristiyan Misyonerlerin Dini Yaymak için Yahudiliği Yok Etmeyi Hedeflemesi
Calvinists had other theological problems, however. Many of them, especially in New England, shared a distinctive view of how the world would end. First, popery would be destroyed and the Jews would convert en masse to Christianity. Only then would the heathen be converted. Mission to non-Christian peoples was not wrong, but it was premature. As Roger Williams, one of the founders of Rhode Island, put it, “God’s great business between Christ . . . and Antichrist” must be resolved before any other missions could be undertaken. In the meantime, at best, a few stray individuals could be saved from the general destruction. Williams himself doubted even that was possible. Some missionaries, including Campanius in New Sweden and Eliot in New England, found a way around this problem. Based on some dubious similarities of ritual and language, they convinced themselves that the Native Americans were descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel. It was a quixotic theory, but if the Indians were in fact Jews, then perhaps their conversion would truly mark the beginning of the end-time. That would make mission not only acceptable but urgent. The fact that missionaries had to embrace such a far-fetched theory shows that the theological obstacles were real.
Kalvinist Kaderciliğin Misyonerliği Yavaşlatması
Most Calvinists, by contrast, believed that the Great Commission was still in force. It is often assumed that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination impeded missionary work: Why bother preaching to the heathen when their fate is foreordained, so you can do nothing either to save or to imperil their souls? In fact, however, most Calvinists believed that they were obliged to spread the Gospel as a simple duty, regardless of whether or not conversions would result. So predestination did not prevent missionary projects, but it might have taken the wind out of them.
İngiliz Koloniciliğinde Dinin Katkısı
The English colonies were driven by commercial and imperial ambitions, but they were also set about with religious rhetoric. Some arguments were of the “because it’s there” variety. In 1609, a London preacher drumming up business for Jamestown, England’s first enduring North American colony, argued that all humanity was called by God to “spread abroad,” in obedience to a “general law of replenishing the earth.” Some found particular significance in journeying westward. Abraham had moved west to Canaan, and the Gospel had spread west from Jerusalem to Rome and then to England, the “end of the earth.” Now, in a final leap toward the setting sun, the Gospel would “in the latter ages of the world . . . bend Westward, and before its setting, brighten these parts, with his glorious luster also.” Whether anyone ever left home on account of these pretty word pictures, we may doubt. Most of the first English colonists were traders and adventurers. When some began to travel on religious grounds, they did so less as pilgrims than as exiles.
Modern Belçika ve Hollanda’nın Ortaya Çıkışı
The story would be repeated in the Netherlands, where in 1566 a sudden cessation of persecution let loose an upsurge of Protestant sympathy. Protestants called it the “Wonderyear,” but prematurely. A swift crackdown gave way to a grinding eighty-year war between the Dutch and their Spanish Catholic rulers, splitting the Netherlands into a Spanish-ruled Catholic south and an independent Protestant north: the origin of the divide between the modern kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands.
Fransa’da Kanlı Bartholomew Günü
the king decided he could no longer remain above the fray. Instead, he tried to eliminate the Protestant leadership at a stroke. Before dawn on Sunday, August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, royal soldiers murdered the wounded man and several other Protestant dignitaries in their beds. It was intended as a surgical strike, but the people of Paris could read the signals. Crying, “The king wills it,” Catholic mobs set out on an unprecedented orgy of destruction. In three days, some three thousand Protestants were killed, along with any Catholics who defended them. Over the following month, this massacre was echoed in a dozen French cities with histories of bitter interreligious tension; perhaps a further six thousand died.11 The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the defining moment of the French religious wars. It was not exactly premeditated, nor did the perpetrators try to disown it. Pope Gregory XIII struck a medal in celebration of the massacre and commissioned commemorative frescoes. And not without reason: the massacre achieved something that individual trials and executions could not. It broke the bravado of Protestantism’s martyr complex. The scale and speed of the killing dazed Protestants, who now questioned whether God was really on their side.
İskoçya’da Presbiteryenliğin Ortaya Çıkışı
Scotland’s Protestants succeeded in deposing their Catholic queen, Mary, and replacing her with her infant son, now King James VI. But having fought for Christ’s kingdom against all odds, they were disinclined to submit to a king of their own making. James was raised Protestant, but spent his adult life in a running battle with Protestant churchmen who would not accept his power over them in any meaningful sense. They wanted a church that elected its own leadership—so-called Presbyterianism, from the Greek word for “elders.” The king wanted the church to be governed by bishops, partly for tradition’s sake, but mostly so that he could appoint them himself.