I learned something new about Mexico (was researching Indigenous)

[aTokenYeti]

Dulfite said:

aTokenYeti said:

Yes indeed. In fact you will find that indigenous Americans make up much, much larger portions of the population in central and South America than here in North America. In Bolivia they actually make up a majority of the population, and Evo Morales was the first indigenous leader of an American nation.


There are a variety of historical reasons for this, but broadly speaking the Catholic European colonial powers (Spain, Portugal, France) were more interested in converting the indigenous populations to Christianity, while the Protestant colonial powers (England, Netherlands) were more interested in land acquisition, settlement, and extraction.

Christians, period, were focused on sharing the Gospel and are still. If England/Netherlands were more focused on land acquisition, settlement, and extraction, it's because many in the colonies and after independence weren't letting faith drive their decision making process.

We often focus, at least in regards to the American colonies, on their makeup being the puritans or other Christians fleeing persecution in Europe, and a great many were. But the colonies were also the dumping ground of criminals and other misfits and many of those people went on to trailblaze out west without being converted themselves.

I think there were extremely important theological differences between Catholics and Protestants at the time that radically altered their relationships with indigenous Americans, the issue of pre-ordination being by far the most important. Most European Protestant settlers in North America believe firmly that their land theft and genocidal warfare was morally righteous because they were members of the spiritual “elect”, and that the indigenous were damned to hell from the moment they were born. 

also, I disagree with the notion that English Protestants were keeping persecution. The puritans in particular believed the English crown was too soft on Catholics and wasn’t religiously strict enough.