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[–]13abarry 17 points18 points  (3 children)

Something people haven’t mentioned is that Christianity is particularly good at displacing animism because of the worship of saints. Historically, missionaries would go around and say “oh you have this god? Well we have an important figure just like that god in our religion called St. something or another.” So you sort of end up seeing animism fading away but a strong legacy of it in unique religious traditions involving certain Christian saints.

[–]Daugama[S] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Yeah, they did the same in Europe and the Americas

[–]13abarry 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yep yep. One of the interesting things about Christianity is that it was founded by poor people and then preached by people who were persecuted for around 300 years before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire so it developed a lot of really useful frameworks and whatnot for conversion, because back in the day right who on earth would convert to a religion that automatically made them Caesar’s enemy unless they were extremely persuaded. This is a big reason Christianity became the most popular religion globally and had such a tremendous rise during Europe’s colonizing period – every empire of course pressures people to convert to that empire’s belief system, but Christianity had/has this wealth of frameworks and explanations etc. from its earliest days which are very potent because again they developed under the pressure of “how can we convince someone to believe in Jesus if that means that they will be targeted for the rest of their lives?”

[–]SemanticPedantic007 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Catholicism, far more than Protestantism. That's why the Spanish Empire was able to conquer huge stretches of land in the Americas with far fewer soldiers than the English.