I think missionaries are usually sent to particular places by organizations, and when one leaves another goes.
It’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes there will be more missionaries than established places to send them, and new missions can be opened—but sometimes a missionary will, through mischance or malice, die before he’s expected to do so and there will be no replacement ready to send.
I don’t actually know about specific incidences, but there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
You’re welcome to be (having had the facts pointed out to you) as surprised or unsurprised as you please; I remark that much the simplest explanation would seem to be that Christianity mostly spreads by military conquest.
That is a simple explanation, yes. Another simple explanation is that Christianity mostly spreads where language barriers don’t get in the way.
I don’t see either of these two explanations as being significantly simpler than the other.
… Oh, I thought of another way for Christianity to get into a new area that’s consistent with the “converting people is really ineffective” narrative. Again, no one claims that converting people is 100% ineffective. So, what you do is to find a place whose rulers are very much in control of the population, and send your missionaries to the royal court or whatever. They probably won’t convince the ruler, but if they do then bingo, you’ve got thousands or millions of new converts fairly immediately. I think this has happened once or twice. I bet it’s been attempted a lot more.
Hmmmm. That would be a sensible scenario. There have also been cases where non-Christian rulers, perhaps fearing the political power of the church, made practice of the religion illegal, with severe punishments for doing so. Taking the two together, it seems fairly clear that converting the ruler would be a very important step for many successful missionaries.
there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
I remain doubtful, but perhaps you’re right.
where language barriers don’t get in the way
Also a reasonable hypothesis. Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
cases where non-Christian rulers [...] made practice of the religion illegal
Yes. Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity; it came back pretty strongly once the communists lost power. Still, paying a lot of attention to the ruler(s) does seem like an effective strategy for those wanting to spread a religion to a new place.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion. #2 will of course be untrue for religions that have never gained official approval by any political power, but we should expect all such religions to be pretty small in numbers for that exact reason. Maybe Hinduism is a sort of exception, being found almost exclusively in India, but I am shockingly ignorant of Indian history and don’t know whether e.g. there’s a history of conquest within what is now a single country.
Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
Hmmm. I don’t know enough history to be able to name specific situations, but what about the other way round—countries that learned Latin without being conquered? (Perhaps for ease of trading?)
Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity
I believe the Roman Empire once tried to suppress it as well. It doesn’t appear to have worked then, either.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
Yes; there seem to have been specific instances where missionary conversion worked, and specific instances where it did not.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
Those conclusions do not seem unreasonable to me.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion.
I think it also depends somewhat on the structure of the religion in question. Judaism doesn’t have missionaries, for example, and I don’t think there’s any way for a non-Jew to become a Jew (I may be wrong on that point, but if there is, the Jews certainly don’t advertise it).
You can convert to Judaism. However you are right that they are not actively interested in converting someone.
There seems to be a certain historical arc here. The earliest religions did not try to convert anyone because they were simply part of the culture of an individual nation, and you don’t convert people to a nationality. Judaism is part of this tradition but at the border of the next, namely the point where people realize that insofar as religions make claims about the world, it does not make sense for some people to accept them and some people to reject them. If a claim about the world is true, everyone should accept it. This leads religions to try to convert people. Now we are reaching a third stage: as even religious people come closer to realizing that those claims were not actually true in the first place, even the religious people are backing away again from converting people. An example would be Pope Francis condemning proselytism and saying that he is not interested in converting Evangelicals etc.
Consider also that religions that convert more people tend to spread faster and farther than religions that don’t. So over time religions should become more virulent.
It’s not going to be perfect. Sometimes there will be more missionaries than established places to send them, and new missions can be opened—but sometimes a missionary will, through mischance or malice, die before he’s expected to do so and there will be no replacement ready to send.
I don’t actually know about specific incidences, but there should be enough data on what happens when a mission is abandoned to be able to tell how successful it can be.
That is a simple explanation, yes. Another simple explanation is that Christianity mostly spreads where language barriers don’t get in the way.
I don’t see either of these two explanations as being significantly simpler than the other.
Hmmmm. That would be a sensible scenario. There have also been cases where non-Christian rulers, perhaps fearing the political power of the church, made practice of the religion illegal, with severe punishments for doing so. Taking the two together, it seems fairly clear that converting the ruler would be a very important step for many successful missionaries.
I remain doubtful, but perhaps you’re right.
Also a reasonable hypothesis. Hmm, do we have cases where the boundaries of the Roman Empire don’t match up well with linguistic boundaries? Probably not, simply because anywhere conquered by the Romans would probably have tended to learn to speak Latin, producing an artificial lowering of language barriers within the empire.
Yes. Though in the most famous recent case I can think of—the Soviet Union—it seems that they weren’t very effective in suppressing Christianity; it came back pretty strongly once the communists lost power. Still, paying a lot of attention to the ruler(s) does seem like an effective strategy for those wanting to spread a religion to a new place.
Going back to the higher-level question of how necessary conquest is to the spread of Christianity: there are apparently something like 100M Christians in China, and not because China was ever conquered by Christians. On the other hand, in the past there seem to have been multiple instances where Christian missions produced a fair number of converts but then the religion largely died out until the next wave of missionaries came in.
My impression after all this is as follows. (1) It is certainly not impossible for Christianity to spread without conquest, and there are a few major instances where it has done so. (2) Most of the world’s Christians, however, are part of Christian communities that got way way by conquest. (3) Attempts to spread Christianity by mere persuasion are sometimes very effective but often very ineffective.
I would expect that all these things apply equally to any other major religion. #2 will of course be untrue for religions that have never gained official approval by any political power, but we should expect all such religions to be pretty small in numbers for that exact reason. Maybe Hinduism is a sort of exception, being found almost exclusively in India, but I am shockingly ignorant of Indian history and don’t know whether e.g. there’s a history of conquest within what is now a single country.
Hmmm. I don’t know enough history to be able to name specific situations, but what about the other way round—countries that learned Latin without being conquered? (Perhaps for ease of trading?)
I believe the Roman Empire once tried to suppress it as well. It doesn’t appear to have worked then, either.
Yes; there seem to have been specific instances where missionary conversion worked, and specific instances where it did not.
Those conclusions do not seem unreasonable to me.
I think it also depends somewhat on the structure of the religion in question. Judaism doesn’t have missionaries, for example, and I don’t think there’s any way for a non-Jew to become a Jew (I may be wrong on that point, but if there is, the Jews certainly don’t advertise it).
You can convert to Judaism. However you are right that they are not actively interested in converting someone.
There seems to be a certain historical arc here. The earliest religions did not try to convert anyone because they were simply part of the culture of an individual nation, and you don’t convert people to a nationality. Judaism is part of this tradition but at the border of the next, namely the point where people realize that insofar as religions make claims about the world, it does not make sense for some people to accept them and some people to reject them. If a claim about the world is true, everyone should accept it. This leads religions to try to convert people. Now we are reaching a third stage: as even religious people come closer to realizing that those claims were not actually true in the first place, even the religious people are backing away again from converting people. An example would be Pope Francis condemning proselytism and saying that he is not interested in converting Evangelicals etc.
Consider also that religions that convert more people tend to spread faster and farther than religions that don’t. So over time religions should become more virulent.