Chakravarti suggests that it was partly new missionaries’ shock at discovering actual pagans to be considerably less receptive to the Jesuits’ message that drove the emergence of the Jesuits’ hierarchy of cultures.

In this schema some pagan cultures – such as the indigenous ones of South America – were considered worthy only of obliteration, while others were so close to the European as to be worthy of accommodatio. This, she suggests, was perhaps more related to those cultures’ ability to resist conversion than any intrinsic properties of the culture itself. This cultural hierarchy remains with us today, Chakravarti argues, as ‘one of the most pernicious legacies of empire, surviving well past the era of colonial rule itself.’

So, too, she argues, is the dissonance between spin and reality, employed with the aim of propagandising interlinked political and ideological aims. She quotes George Bush in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, urging listeners not to doubt US imperial destiny:

It is tempting, when thinking about the histories of Christianity and European imperialism, to treat them  both as unambiguous. Either these temporal and spiritual empires must be presented as wholly evil, or else we must gloss over the physical and ideological violence their spread entailed.

But while her stance is critical of the ideological and political costs of empire, Chakravarti’s essay stops short of knee-jerk condemnation. It invites us to consider both the scale and ambition and also the fracture, propaganda and doublethink involved in these colossal spiritual and political movements – and the ways in which their intellectual frameworks and political visions remain with us today.

---

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

moveincircles

---