The Spanish secular church was rapidly swept up in trade and exploitation of the Americas, sharing the contempt and impatience with unfamiliar foreign cultures of Spanish colonists intent on re-creating an essentially feudal social hierarchy of noble landowning rulers commanding dependent agricultural laborers. Expectations of social hierarchy, including widespread acceptance of slavery for black Africans, also characterized the ideas of most missionaries, who were recruited from a culturally confident Spanish population.

Nevertheless, it was primarily missionaries who condemned the brutal results of the virtual enslavement of Amerindians and, however imperfectly, cooperated with the Crown (which was interested in ordering colonial society) to protect them. Often finding themselves at odds with settler communities that habitually defied royal authority to violently conscript indigenous labor, missionary policy developed, as in Mexico, for example, on the logic of separating Amerindians into town communities, where protective mission institutions (church, school, orphanage, hospital), prohibitions on European contact, and Christianization were mixed with attempts to re-create traditional agricultural and artisanal self-sufficiency. In mission compounds, proselytes were taught Christianity and Latin, and often compelled to adopt European customs such as domestic architecture and manners, western dress, and monogamy.

Missionary reservations were the most developed form of this latter policy. The first was established by the Franciscans in Guatemala in the 1540s, and later Jesuits favored this strategy, most famously applied in the nearly autonomous Jesuit state that arose in Paraguay. In one Asian Pacific area, the Philippines, Spanish colonization (following territorial claims made in 1521 by the explorer Magellan in his circumnavigation of the globe) also led to widespread conversions. In hostile and economically unproductive regions, however, like California and many rugged inland South American areas, while mission communities were established with a zeal that produced martyrs, few conversions resulted owing to the absence of widespread Spanish social power.

As culturally aggressive institutions allied to state power, Spanish missions offered social structure and economic opportunity in return for at least the outward forms of Christian practice. The ritual of Catholic worship was often readily syncretized with previous beliefs, especially in the Aztec and Incan lands where subject populations already accustomed to paternalistic priestly religion and inured to docile agricultural toil came rapidly under control of the Church. Because missions baptized freely and parishes were often enormous in their extent, missionaries in reality contributed to the creation of a set of local cultures that were wide-ranging amalgams of Christianity and the cultural forms--music, dance, and iconography--of ancient religions. . . .

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