God of the Conqueror: How Religion Was Weaponized Against the Colonized

The history of empire is not just a story of land and gold. It is also a story of God.

From the Spanish missions of Latin America to the Anglican schools of Southern Africa, religious institutions were often the first tools of empire. Churches arrived before flags. Bibles before bullets. Priests before governors. And with them came the most dangerous lie ever sold: that submission to foreign rule was not only political, but divine.

The Cross Before the Crown

In the 16th century, Spanish colonizers justified their brutal conquest of the Americas through the doctrine of "spiritual salvation." Indigenous people, they claimed, were not just savages—they were lost souls. Conquest became not just a right, but a holy duty.

Yet one voice stood out in that age of religious conquest: Bartolomé de las Casas. A Dominican friar who initially supported colonization, Las Casas later became one of its fiercest critics. In his work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552), he described in horrific detail the slaughter, enslavement, and spiritual manipulation of native peoples. Las Casas argued that forced conversion was not true Christianity but a grotesque distortion of it.

His plea fell mostly on deaf ears. By then, the cross had become inseparable from the sword.

Africa: Missionaries and Markets

In Africa, the 19th-century missionary movement accompanied European colonial expansion under the guise of the so-called "Three C's": Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization. Missionaries were portrayed as benevolent educators, yet their work often involved uprooting local belief systems, renaming children, banning traditional dances, and rewriting entire cosmologies.

In South Africa, Anglican and Dutch Reformed churches were deeply complicit in apartheid ideology. Religious doctrine was weaponized to teach that white supremacy was part of divine order. Even today, the legacy of that teaching lingers in racial hierarchies and self-perception.

As Ngūgī wa Thiong’o wrote, "The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. The Bible represented the spiritual subjugation."

Asia: God and the Gunboat

In colonized India and Southeast Asia, religious conquest took the form of conversion campaigns that undermined Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism. Missionary schools taught that European languages were superior, and that salvation could only be found in the Christian West.

In the Philippines, Catholicism was used to pacify the population while Spanish and later American powers exploited the islands. Indigenous animist beliefs were demonized, replaced with imported saints and rituals that often mirrored the structure of colonial power.

Rewriting God

One of the most insidious aspects of religious colonization was its erasure of indigenous spiritual systems. African cosmologies, Native American beliefs, and Asian traditions were not simply replaced; they were demonized.

Colonized peoples were told their gods were devils, their ancestors' wisdom was superstition, and their rituals were barbaric. In their place came a sanitized, Eurocentric theology that mirrored colonial hierarchies: white on top, brown and black below.

Even names were changed. New converts took on Biblical names, European saints replaced ancestral figures, and holy texts became foreign and alienating. The theft was not just spiritual—it was cultural, historical, and psychological.

Resistance and Reclamation

Yet resistance persisted. In Latin America, African slaves mixed Catholicism with Yoruba traditions, creating syncretic faiths like Santería and Candomblé. In the Caribbean, Rastafarianism emerged as a critique of colonial Christianity and a reclamation of Black divinity.

In South Africa, liberation theologians used the Bible to argue against apartheid. Figures like Desmond Tutu reclaimed Christian ethics to serve justice, not oppression.

Today, decolonial theologians, indigenous elders, and cultural revivalists are reimagining spirituality on their own terms—free from conquest, shame, and imposed salvation.

Final Thoughts: Whose God Survives?

Religion, in its purest form, can be a force for healing, justice, and transcendence. But history shows that it has also been a weapon: sharpened, sanctified, and aimed at the souls of the oppressed.

To decolonize the future, we must tell the truth about the past. That means naming the violence done in God’s name, honoring the spiritual systems that were trampled, and refusing to let salvation be synonymous with submission.

We must ask not just who believed—but who benefited.

Sources:

• Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552)

• Ngūgī wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)

• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)

• Kwame Bediako, Theology and Identity (1992)

What happens when God speaks in the voice of the conqueror? Maybe it’s time we listen to the voices that were silenced.