American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Historically the association of Christianity and empire has most often been a phenomenon that relates to either a Christendom model of church and state relationships or what might be best characterized as the “colonial” experience of European Christians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For example, Luis Rivera Pagan’s work A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas develops the idea that the conquest of the Americas is the beginning not only of ”European world hegemony,” which spreads across the face of the globe, but the interrelationship between European expansion and Christianity as an ”imperial ideology.”’ Furthermore, while Catholic Christianity, in the case of Spain, is perhaps an ”obvious” instance of imperial ideology, with direct links between church and state, Nonconformist British evangelical Christianity in South Africa, without the trappings of official Christendom, readily served the interest of empire building. John and Jean Comaroff have argued that ”Nonconformist missionaries were the van ard of the British presence in.. .the South African interior; they were also the most ambitious ideological and cultural agents of Empire, bearing with them the explicit aim of reconstructing the Native world in the name of God and Great Britain.” The contradiction at the heart of the South African example of British Nonconformist missionaries is that they seriously believed they were only converting the ”other” to Christianity, whereas the evangelical enterprise in practice was a story “of the reconstruction of a living culture by the infusion of alien signs and commodities into every domain of Tswana life.”