Exploring the Role of Christianity in European Colonialism: Insights from Professor Oluwafemi Esan on the Obehi Podcast
The historical association between Christianity and European colonial powers is undeniable. As articulated by Professor Oluwafemi Esan, Christian missionaries often served as the “religious arms” of imperialist states. This relationship was multifaceted, providing both a moral justification and an operational blueprint for the colonization of territories and peoples, particularly in Africa and the Americas.
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Professor Oluwafemi Esan shared these insights during a conversation with Obehi Ewanfoh on the Obehi Podcast. Known for hosting leading thinkers from across the African diaspora, Obehi features voices from fields such as spirituality, history, culture, and leadership.
With more than 1,000 interviews to his credit, he has built a rich platform dedicated to exploring African knowledge systems and lived experiences.
Justification: The Moral Alibi for Empire
European powers, predominantly adhering to various sects of Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy), used the conversion of Indigenous populations as a primary justification for their expansion.
This was often framed as a divine mandate to civilize and save souls, an assertion that, in practice, led to the “extermination of adherents of other faiths, their enslavement of natives, and their exploitation of lands and seas,” as noted in the provided material.
- Initial Portrayal: Missionaries were initially seen by the West as “visible saints,” bringing piety and light to supposed “savagery.”
- Post-Colonial View: As the colonial era ended, this perception shifted dramatically. Missionaries were increasingly viewed as “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion,” acting as the empire’s “agent, scribe and moral alibi.”
- Ethnocentrism and Supremacy: Historian Michael Wood notes that in the 16th century, the conquerors operated with a “baggage of centuries of Ethnocentrism, and Christian monotheism,” which espoused one truth and one version of reality. This monotheistic certainty made it difficult, if not impossible, for colonizers to view Indigenous peoples as fully human or their cultures as valid in their own right.
The goal of Christianization was, therefore, an integral part of the state’s mission, offering both secular benefits (pacification of populations, easier governance) and spiritual ones (as the Portuguese and Spanish courts believed).
The Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the non-European world between Spain and Portugal under the auspices of the Catholic Church, starkly illustrates this integration of religious and geopolitical power.
Biblical Interpretive Epistemology: The Lens of Colonization
The critical link between Christianity and colonialism lies in the way the Bible was interpreted (hermeneutics) and the underlying theories of knowledge (epistemology) that the colonizers applied.
Hermeneutics and the Colonial Agenda
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of texts like the Bible. The colonizers, largely operating from a framework rooted in European Protestant and Catholic traditions, interpreted scripture through a “Lense of Colonization.”
The interpretation methods available at the time included:
- Literal Interpretation: Focusing on the grammatical structure and historical context.
- Moral Interpretation: Focusing on ethical teachings.
- Allegorical Interpretation: Assigning meaning beyond the literal, often placing meaning that “it was never intended to convey.”
- Anagogical Interpretation: A mystical interpretation focused on future spiritual realities.
The colonial masters often employed an Allegorical or selective Literal interpretation that served their purpose.
For instance, passages referencing hierarchy, obedience to earthly authorities (e.g., Romans 13:1-7 on submission to governing authorities), or the idea of a promised land (interpreted as a right to seize foreign territory) were weaponized.
The Allegorical Error: By using the allegorical method, colonizers could strip Indigenous cultures of their spiritual and cultural value and replace them with a narrative of Christian supremacy. This method allowed them to transform Indigenous lands and resources into objects of “salvation” or “civilization” for the supposed benefit of the colonized.
Protestant Scholasticism and Calvinism’s Influence
The theological movements dominant in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Protestant scholasticism and Calvinism, provided intellectual scaffolding for colonial thought.
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Calvinism’s Divine Sovereignty: The core tenets of Calvinism, which emphasize the glory and sovereignty of God in all things and the doctrine of Predestination (God chooses who receives salvation), fostered a worldview that could be twisted to justify conquest.
- The colonizers, often believing themselves to be God’s elect, interpreted their superior military and economic power as evidence of Divine favor. This sense of divine sovereignty could then be extended to justify the subjugation of those deemed “un-elect” or “heathens.”
- The belief that “Divine sovereignty applies to church and social life” meant that the entire colonial project, political control, resource extraction, and conversion, was seen as a holy endeavor.
Epistemology: The Bias of the Interpreter
Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and the dominant European approach at the time was moving towards Positivism (an objective, scientific view of reality), which the interpretive approach later challenged.
The key insight of Interpretive Epistemology is that the researcher (or interpreter) is part of the research and can never be fully objective. In the context of colonization:
- Lack of Objectivity: The colonizing interpreters were inherently influenced by centuries of European cultural, political, and religious biases. Their interpretation of the Bible was not a neutral search for truth but an act of social construction of reality tailored to justify their imperialistic goals.
- Imposition of Reality: Instead of acknowledging that people “experience the same reality in different ways,” the colonizers imposed a single, Christian, European-centric “objective reality,” dismissing or suppressing the nuanced, complex, and deeply rooted Indigenous spiritual and social systems.
Enrichment and Contextualization: A Deeper Look
To provide a truly nuanced analysis, it is essential to consider the impact of these dynamics through the lenses of Legacy, Heritage, and African Principles.
The Legacy of Erasure and Resistance
The legacy of colonization is not just political and economic but deeply spiritual. The forced conversion and the imposition of a colonial-lens Christianity led to the suppression and, in many cases, the active erasure of Indigenous religious and spiritual systems across the continent and the diaspora.
Cultural Trauma:
This act created deep cultural trauma, pitting the “new” faith against the heritage of ancestral practices, languages, and philosophies.
Syncretism and Resilience:
However, the story is also one of resilience. Across the diaspora, from Candomblé in Brazil to Vodou in Haiti, enslaved Africans merged their ancestral heritage with elements of the imposed faith, creating powerful syncretic spiritual systems that became forms of cultural preservation and resistance.
The Liberating Potential:
As theologian Lamin Sanneh suggests, while “Western scholarship on Christian missions proceeds by looking at the motives of individual missionaries,” missions ultimately had a far more complex impact.
By translating the Bible into Indigenous languages, missionaries inadvertently created written forms for previously oral languages, which, in turn, often became vehicles for the growth of African-led independent churches and, crucially, for anti-colonial nationalist movements.
African theologians re-interpreted the Scriptures, focusing on themes of liberation, justice, and the God of the oppressed, effectively de-colonizing the Bible‘s message.
African Principles as a Counter-Narrative
The imposed European framework stood in stark contrast to core African Principles that inform community and governance.
Ubuntu:
The philosophy of Ubuntu (“I am because we are”) emphasizes shared humanity, interconnectedness, and restorative justice.
This principle, which prioritizes the collective well-being and relational ethics, is fundamentally at odds with the hyper-individualistic, hierarchical, and exploitative systems justified by the colonial interpretation of the Bible.
Community and Justice:
Where colonial interpretation justified the enslavement and exploitation of one group by another, African ethical frameworks stress mutual support and the inherent dignity of every person.
The struggle for independence and ongoing efforts for equitable governance often draw deeply on these indigenous principles to build a post-colonial future rooted in authentic African values.
The wrongful use of the Bible in colonialism was a sophisticated act of cultural warfare and ideological control. It provided a powerful, supposedly divine, mandate for political subjugation and economic exploitation.
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Yet, the Legacy of this imposition also birthed a powerful Heritage of resistance, where the very text used for oppression was re-interpreted through the lens of African Principles to become a source of liberation and justice.
Would you like me to conduct a deep-dive research into a specific example of how a particular Biblical passage (e.g., “Curse of Ham”) was used to justify the enslavement of Africans?
The Curse of Ham: The Foundational Theological Justification for African Enslavement
The most powerful and enduring biblical passage twisted to justify the chattel slavery of Africans and the subsequent racial hierarchy was the story of Noah and his sons in Genesis 9:20-27.
This narrative, commonly known as The Curse of Ham, became a cornerstone of pro-slavery arguments in the Americas and a rationalization for European colonial brutality in Africa.
The Original Text and its Misinterpretation
The passage describes Noah becoming drunk and lying “uncovered” in his tent. His son, Ham, the father of Canaan, “saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.”
In contrast, his brothers, Shem and Japheth, respectfully covered their father without looking. When Noah awoke, he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, not Ham himself, saying: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.”
The Three-Part Colonial Twist
The colonial masters and their theologians employed an extreme form of allegorical interpretation to contort this text, creating a narrative that was historically, grammatically, and geographically flawed, yet functionally effective for their political and economic goals:
- The Curse Shift: They effectively dropped Canaan from the curse and shifted it entirely onto Ham.
- The Racial Identification: They then asserted that the three sons of Noah—Ham, Shem, and Japheth—represented the three major races of the world.
- Japheth was identified as the ancestor of Europeans (white).
- Shem was identified as the ancestor of Middle Eastern/Asian peoples.
- Ham was identified as the ancestor of all Black Africans, with his “curse” being the origin of black skin color itself and his eternal destiny being servitude.
This convoluted logic led to the conclusion that God Himself, through Noah, had divinely ordained the Black race for perpetual servitude to the white race (descendants of Japheth). The enslavement of Africans was thus not a matter of human greed but a fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy.
Evidence of Use: As early as 1453, the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara explicitly used the Curse of Ham to justify the enslavement of Black Africans in Guinea, linking their status to the “curse that Noah cast upon his son Ham.”
This interpretation became a “foundational text” for the Early Modern justification of slavery, cementing the idea that blackness and slavery were inescapably joined.
Legacy and Context: The Role of African Principles
This misinterpretation served as a potent Legacy of spiritual and cultural violence. It was a primary tool used to strip the enslaved of their Heritage and dignity, transforming them from human beings with diverse cultures and kingdoms into a single, cursed, chattel commodity.
The Battle for Interpretation: Black Theology of Liberation
The enslaved and their descendants, however, did not passively accept this colonial-driven theology. This gave rise to the Black Theology of Liberation in the diaspora (United States) and post-colonial contexts, which re-read the Bible through the lens of African Principles like Ubuntu (humanity toward others).
The Exodus Paradigm:
Enslaved Africans in the Americas and later, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, focused on narratives of deliverance. They identified with the Israelites in bondage in Egypt, seeing the Exodus story (Exodus 3:7–10) as a promise of God’s active intervention for the oppressed and a blueprint for their own eventual liberation.
Jesus as Liberator:
They focused on the ministry of Jesus Christ as the one who proclaimed “good news to the poor and freedom for the oppressed” (Luke 4:18–19), rather than the one who silently condoned servitude (a separate pro-slavery argument based on verses like Ephesians 6:5, which instructs bondservants to obey their masters, a passage often taken out of its historical context of ancient Near Eastern servitude).
African Initiated Churches (AICs): Across the continent, the rise of African Initiated Churches was a powerful theological act of decolonization. As noted by Professor Vuyani Vellem, AICs serve as “protagonists in the interlocution project of African spirituality of liberation.” They:
- Contextualize: They integrate the Christian message with African religiosity and cultural heritage, incorporating music, dance, and spiritual concepts that reflect the community-focused ethos of Ubuntu.
- Unshackle: They actively work to “unshackle African spirituality from Western Christian spirituality and its expansionism,” offering an “alternative to… authoritative salvationist dispensation of Western religiosity.”
- Focus on the Concrete: The re-reading of the Bible is done from the perspective of their own concrete social existence, addressing poverty, oppression, and injustice, rather than abstract, Western theological concerns.
This theological resistance demonstrates that while the Bible was a tool of colonial oppression through a deeply flawed hermeneutic, it simultaneously became a profound source of liberation theology when read through an ethical framework rooted in justice and the lived experience of the oppressed.
Economic and Political Dimensions
The theological justification of the Curse of Ham had direct and massive economic and political consequences.
| Dimension | Colonial Justification | Reality (Legacy) |
| Political Structures | The doctrine of divine sovereignty (Calvinism) and the Curse of Ham legitimized the imposition of European governance and legal systems (like the Code Noir and similar slave codes) as God-ordained authority. | Led to centuries of racialized, hierarchical political systems that persist in post-colonial contexts, necessitating political movements that explicitly demand Black humanity and self-governance. |
| Economic Realities | The Curse provided a moral basis for the brutality of chattel slavery, which was the foundation of the Atlantic economy and early modern capitalism. It justified forced, unpaid labor and the denial of property rights to Black people. | Created massive, intergenerational wealth gaps globally. The “primitive accumulation” of capital for Europe was paid for by the spiritual and physical devastation of the African continent and diaspora. |
| Cultural Expressions | Christianity was seen as the means to “civilize” the “barbarous” descendants of Ham, leading to the suppression of Indigenous languages, art, and family structures (e.g., prohibition of African drumming, destruction of traditional family units). | Sparked powerful movements to recover and affirm African Heritage, driving the global influence of African and diaspora arts, music (e.g., Gospel, Jazz, Reggae), and philosophies. |
The historical evidence is clear: the wrongful use of the Bible in colonialism was not a marginal error but a central, systematic act of interpretive abuse.
It provided the symbolic system necessary to legitimize one of the greatest economic and political crimes in human history, but the analysis reveals the inherent resilience and spiritual power of the African diaspora in reclaiming the text for a theology of liberation.
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