CH 15 CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS- RELIGION AND SCIENCES (1450-1750)

• Today Christians from Asia, Africa, and Latin America conduct missionary work in Europe and North America.

• this marks a remarkable reversal of an earlier pattern

• today more than 60% of Christians live outside of Europe and North America 

• out of Europe came two developments during the early modern period

• Christianity became a global presence

• the Scientific Revolution fostered a different approach to the world

• Europeans were central players in these developments but did not act alone

• peoples who converted shaped Christianity

• science also met with varying receptions in other regions of the globe 

• In 1500, Christianity was mostly limited to Europe.

• small communities in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia

• serious divisions within Christianity (Roman Catholic vs. Eastern Orthodox) 

• on the defensive against Islam

• loss of the Holy Land by 1300

• fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 

• Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529

• Conversion and Adaptation in Spanish America

• process of population collapse, conquest, and resettlement made Native Americans receptive to the conquering religion

• Europeans claimed exclusive religious truth, tried to destroy traditional religions instead of accommodating them

• occasional campaigns of destruction against the old religions 

• some overt resistance movements

• blending of two religious traditions was more common

• local gods (huacas) remained influential

• immigrant Christianity took on patterns of pre-Christian life

•  Christian saints took on functions of pre-colonial gods

•  leader of the church staff (fiscal) was a prestigious native who carried on the role of earlier religious specialists 

• Catholic Church strenuously opposed much of this thinking

• burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 for proclaiming an infinite universe

• Galileo was forced to renounce his belief that the earth moved around an orbit and rotated on its axis

• but no early scientists rejected Christianity 

• Ideas shape peoples’ mental or cultural worlds and influence behavior

• The development of early modern ideas took place in an environment of great cultural borrowing.