The Globalization of Christianity

• Despite its Middle Eastern roots and previous presence in various regions of the Afro-Asian continent, Christianity was mainly restricted to Europe at the start of the early modern era. In 1500, Christendom spanned the globe from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east, with small and vulnerable populations of various types in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia.

Western Christendom Fragmented: The Protestant Reformation

• As if these problems weren't enough, the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century destroyed the unity of Roman Catholic Christianity, which had given the cultural and organizational underpinning of a developing Western European civilization for the preceding 1,000 years.

• Luther's objection, on the other hand, had a theological foundation, which made it potentially revolutionary. Luther, a disturbed and brooding man concerned about his connection with God, had just come to a new view of salvation, believing that it comes only by faith.

• The new theological beliefs used to articulate common people's resistance to the entire social system, notably in a series of German peasant revolts in the 1520s, who were upset by the corruption and opulence of some bishops, abbots, and popes.

• A Catholic Reformation, or Counter-Reformation, erupted as a result of the Protestant split and reforming impulses within the Catholic Church. Catholics defined and reaffirmed their distinctive teachings and practices, including the pope's power, clerical celibacy, and the worship of saints and relics, during the Council of Trent (1545–1563).

Conversion and Adaptation in Spanish America

• The contrast between civilizations where Christianity became widely practiced and those where it was generally rejected may be seen in Spanish America and China. Both examples, however, reflect important cultural contacts of the type that were becoming increasingly common as European expansion introduced the Christian faith to people from all over the world with vastly diverse cultural traditions.

• Previously conquerors had not attempted to eliminate indigenous gods or religious rituals. Subject people were able to adapt to the gods of their new rulers while preserving their traditions because of the flexibility and inclusivity of Mesoamerican and Andean faiths. Europeans, on the other hand, were unique.

• Traveling dancers and teachers, possessed by the spirits of local gods, or huacas, predicted that an alliance of Andean deities would soon defeat the Christian God, infect intruding Europeans with the diseases they had brought to the Americas, and restore the Andean world to an imagined earlier harmony.

• Immigrant Christianity was also integrated into local cultural traditions in Mexico. Parishes were mostly based on pre-colonial cities or areas. Built on or near the grounds of previous temples, churches became the focal point of communal identification.

Expansion and Renewal in the Islamic World

• Similarly, the "long march of Islam" over the Afro-Asian globe continued in the early modern age. The extension of the Islamic border, which had been in the works for a thousand years in Sub-Saharan Africa, India's eastern and western wings, and Central and Southeast Asia, reached new heights.

• They supplied Arabic literacy, formed informal schools, distributed protective charms containing Quran verses, functioned as counselors to local officials and healers to the ill, frequently intermarried with locals, and did not require new converts to abandon their previous customs.

• Religious syncretism, which accompanied Islamization nearly everywhere, became more unpleasant, even heretical, to such devout Muslims. Religious Renewal and reform movements arose throughout the large Islamic world in the eighteenth century, and such sentiments played an essential part in them.

China: New Directions in an Old Tradition

• During the Ming and Qing dynasties, China continued to function largely within a Confucian framework, but with the addition of Buddhist and Daoist views, resulting in Neo-Confucianism.

• A movement known as Kao zheng, or “research based on evidence,” shaped another new path in Chinese aristocratic society. Kaozheng was designed to “seek truth through facts,” and it was critical of mainstream Confucian philosophy's baseless speculation, emphasizing the necessity of verification, precision, correctness, and thorough analysis in all disciplines of research.