The Reason Why the Inquisition and Missionary Movement Happened!
The reasons behind the inquisition and the missionary movement are varied and diverse. However, one that pops up in almost every instance is the fear that Europeans felt against outsiders. Europe before it discovered the New World was a generally enclosed society with almost no contact with the outside world. Inside its confines’ it had one definite religion and two minor ones. The minor ones being Judaism and Islam. Christian Europeans had a definite fear of these two religions just because they were so different and so influential: “…Spanish Inquisition to punish Jewish behavior among Spain's large and influential communities of converted Jews” (Monter 4498). The Spanish were extremely afraid of how influential the Jewish community was in their countries. These relatively small communities could influence the whole country. What made Spain fear and hate these communities even more was that these communities were not the Catholic majority they were different. Therefore, in their train of thought they believed that these communities would lead the country in a none Catholic way that would destroy their country. So the next thought would be for Queen Isabella that the only way to stop this from happening is to either convert or kill all of the Spanish Jews, which was a very easy to do since they were such a small community.
In the New World, the missionary movement started to slowly convert indigenous people to Christianity. The process was much slower though in the New World because Christians did not have a majority population so they could not just use mass violence and fear to persuade people to convert. In the New World missionaries had to use tact and guile to convert the people. The reason for conversion remained largely the same though. The reason the Old World countries wanted to convert the native people was the same reason they started the inquisition. It was a fear of outside and unknown people: “The Spanish inextricably linked territorial conquest with converting those they considered "heathens" to Christianity” (schwaller 148). The Spanish used an extremely derogatory term when describing indigenous people. They say heathen, which is an insult, and the reason people insult others are because they fear them. The Spanish deeply feared these new people not only because they saw how rich and powerful these civilizations were, but also because they had just discovered a population of non-Christians inside their own country. They saw this as a takeover, as a direct threat to their religion. Not only were people attacking them from the inside, but also this new discovery, the New World, they believed showed them that they were being attacked from the outside.
The one simple reason, fear, helped destroy an entire population and add millions of people to a religion at the same time. Fear can be a very powerful force. It has started wars and it has provoked peace. It has even started the inquisition and the missionary movement at the same time.
By: Josh Leyenson