Chapter 15 Cultural Transformations

Chapter 15 Cultural Transformations 

• In the modern era, there was the spread of Christianity to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans
• There was also the emergence of a modern scientific outlook, which sharply challenged Western Christianity even as it too acquired a global presence. 
• There were new empires and new patterns of commerce. The early modern era also witnessed novel cultural transformations that likewise connected distant people 
• Christianity was established solidly in the Americas and the Philippines far more modestly in Siberia, China, Japan, and India
• Science was a new and competing worldview, and for some, it became almost a new religion

The Globalization of Christianity 

• Christianity was limited to Europe at the beginning of the early modern era. 
• In the year 1500, Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east, with small and surrounded by communities of various kinds in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia 

Western Christendom Fragmented: The Protestant Reformation 

• In the early 16th century, the Protestant Reformation shattered the unity of Roman Catholic Christianity
• The Reformation began in 1517 when a German priest, Martin Luther King (1483-1546) publicly invited debate about various abuses within the Roman Catholic Church by issuing a document, known as the Ninety-Five Theses. 
• Luther had come to understand that salvation and that it came through faith alone. Neither the good works nor the sacraments had any bearing on the eternal destiny of the soul. Faith was a free gift from God 
• Large numbers of women were attracted to Protestantism, Reformation teachings and practices did not offer them a substantially greater role in the church or society 
• Protestants gave to reading the Bible for oneself stimulated education and literacy in women. Reform thinking spread rapidly due to large measures of the printing press. 
• As the movement spread to France, Switzerland, England, and elsewhere, it also fractured into a variety of competing Protestant churches -- Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, Quaker, Anabaptist
• For more than 30 years, the French society was torn by violence between Catholics and the Protestant minority known as Huguenots
• On August 24, 1572, Catholic mobs in Paris massacred about 3,000 Huguenots and thousands more died in the weeks that followed. 
• Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, granting a substantial measure of religious toleration to French Protestants → with the intention that they would return to the Catholic church.
• The Peace of Westphalia (1648) brought the conflict to an end with some reshuffling of boundaries and an agreement that each state was sovereign, authorized to control religious affairs within its own territory

Christianity Outward Bound 

• The resolutely Catholic Spanish and Portuguese both viewed their movement overseas as a continuation of a long crusading tradition 
• Colonial settlers and traders, of course, brought their faith with them and sought to replicate it in their newly conquered homelands → New England Puritans, planted a distinctive Protestant version of Christianity in North America → emphasis on education, moral purity, personal conversion, civic responsibility, and little tolerance for competing expressions of the faith 
• Missionaries had their greatest success in Spanish America and in the Philippines area that shared two critical elements beyond their colonization by Spain

Conversion and Adaptation in Spanish America

• Europeans saw their political and military success as a demonstration of the power of the Christian God. Native American peoples generally agreed, and by the 1700 or earlier the vast majority had been baptized and saw themselves in some respects as Christians
• Earlier conquerors had made no attempt to eradicate local deities and religious practices
• Europeans claimed an exclusive religious truth and sought the utter destruction of local gods and everything associated with them 
• Cofradias, church-based associations of laypeople, organized community processions and festivals and made provisions for proper funerals and burial for their members 
• Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe neatly combined both Mesoamerican and Spanish notions of Divine Motherhood

An Asian Comparison: China and the Jesuits 

• The reality of a strong, independent, confident China required a different missionary strategy, for Europeans needed the permission of Chinese authorities to operate in the country. 
• The most obvious difference between the Chinese and the Native Americans is the political context. 
• In presenting Christian teachings, Jesuits were at pains to be respectful of Chinese culture, pointing out parallels between Confucianism and Christianity rather than portraying it as something new and foreign.  
• The missionaries offered little that the Chinese really wanted. It became increasingly clear that Christianity was an all-or-nothing faith that required converts to abandon much of traditional Chinese culture. 

Persistence and Change in Afro-Asian Cultural Traditions

• Although Europeans were central players in the globalization of Christianity, theirs was not the only expanding or transformed culture of the early modern era. 
• African religious ideas and practices accompanied slaves to the Americas. 

Expansion and Renewal in the Islamic World 

•  The early modern era likewise witnessed the continuation of the “long march of Islam” across the Afro-Asian world. 
• To orthodox Muslims, religious syncretism, which accompanied Islamization almost everywhere, became increasingly offensive, even heretical. 
• The most well known and widely visible of these Islamic renewal movements took place during the mid-eighteenth century in Arabia itself, where the religion had been born more than 1,000 years earlier. 
• By the early 19th century, this new reformist state encompassed much of central Arabia, with Mecca itself coming under Wahhabi control in 1803.

China: New Directions in an Old Tradition 

• Neither China nor India experienced cultural or religious change as dramatic as that of the Reformation in Europe, nor did Confucian or Hindu cultures during the early modern era spread widely, as did Christianity and Islam. 
• China during the Ming and Qing dynasties continued to operate broadly within a Confucian framework, enriched now by the insights of Buddhism and Daoism to generate a system of thought called Neo-Confucianism. 
• Anyone could achieve a virtuous life by introspection and contemplation, without the extended education, study of classical texts, and constant striving for improvement that traditional Confucianism prescribed for an elite class of “gentlemen” 

Science as a Cultural Revolution 

• Before the Scientific Revolution, educated Europeans held a view of the world that derived from Aristotle, perhaps the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers. And from Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian mathematician, and astronomer who lived in Alexandria during the second century. 
• The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary because it fundamentally challenged the understanding of the universe
• The culmination of the Scientific Revolution came in the work of Sir Isaac Newton 
• By the time Newton died, a revolutionary new understanding of the physical universe had emerged among educated Europeans: the universe was no longer propelled by supernatural forces but functioned on its own according to scientific principles that could be described mathematically.