Converting indigenous people to Christianity was one of the most important justifications for European expansion. Jesuit missionaries were active in Japan and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until authorities banned their teachings. The first missionaries to the New World accompanied Columbus on his second voyage and more than 2,500 Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and other friars crossed the Atlantic in the following century. Later French explorers were also accompanied by missionaries who preached to the Native American tribes with whom the French traded.

Catholic friars were among the first Europeans to seek an understanding of native cultures and languages as part of their effort to render Christianity comprehensible to indigenous people. In Mexico they not only learned the Nahuatl language, but also taught it to non-Nahuatl-speaking groups to create a shared language for Christian teaching. They were also the most vociferous opponents of abuses committed by Spanish settlers (see “European Debates About Indigenous Peoples”).

Religion had been a central element of pre-Columbian societies, and many — if not all — indigenous people were receptive to the new religion that accompanied the victorious Iberians. (See “Evaluating the Evidence 14.3: Tenochtitlan Leaders Respond to Spanish Missionaries.”) It is estimated that missionaries had baptized between 4 and 9 million indigenous people in New Spain by the mid-1530s.20 In addition to spreading Christianity, missionaries taught indigenous peoples European methods of agriculture and instilled loyalty to colonial masters.

Despite the success of initial conversion efforts, authorities became suspicious about the thoroughness of native peoples’ conversion and their lingering belief in the old gods. They could not prevent the melding together of Catholic teachings with elements of pagan beliefs and practices. For example, a sixteenth-century apparition of the Virgin Mary in Mexico City, known as the Virgin of Guadalupe, which became a central icon of New World Catholicism, seems to have been based on veneration of the Aztec Mother Earth goddess, Tonantzin.