Religion in the New World (1500–1800)

The right granted by the Pope to the Spanish crown to control Church appointments and finances in its American colonies, tying religion directly to royal government.

The Padroado, giving the Portuguese crown similar control over the Church in Brazil.

Spiritual (convert and save souls), political (teach obedience to crown authority), and cultural (reshape indigenous family life, work and settlement to a Catholic-European model).

Newly built, Spanish-style towns organised around a church, into which scattered indigenous populations were forced to make conversion and taxation easier.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico, in which indigenous communities violently drove out Spanish settlers and priests for over a decade.

A Dominican friar who became the leading critic of the mistreatment of indigenous peoples, arguing they had full human souls and rights.

Jesuits built self-sufficient, semi-independent reduction communities (e.g. in Paraguay) with their own farms and economy, while Franciscans and Dominicans worked mainly through existing colonial towns and reducciones.

Reformers saw the Jesuits as too wealthy, independent and protective of indigenous converts against settler and crown demands — a 'state within a state'.

The blending of two different religious traditions into one — in this context, the mixing of indigenous belief with Christian teaching.

Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) — the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to Juan Diego on a hill once sacred to the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, blending Catholic and indigenous devotion.

Church campaigns, especially in 17th-century Peru, to search out and destroy hidden indigenous shrines and objects seen as idolatry disguised within Catholic practice.

Because it reflects indigenous populations actively reshaping an imposed religion to preserve elements of their own worldview — a form of adaptation and resistance, not passive failure.

The blending of two different religious traditions into one shared form of belief and practice — seen in the fusion of indigenous and Catholic worship in Spanish/Portuguese America.

She reportedly appeared to an indigenous man, Juan Diego, in 1531 at a site already sacred to the Aztec mother-goddess Tonantzin — linking old and new belief in one figure.

Indigenous religious brotherhoods, nominally Catholic, that organised community worship and let local communities keep some control over religious life.

Massachusetts Bay (Puritan) enforced strict conformity and banished dissenters like Roger Williams; Pennsylvania (Quaker, William Penn) built genuine tolerance into its 1681 founding charter, welcoming diverse faiths.

Maryland's 1649 Act of Toleration protected Christian worship, but a Protestant political takeover soon reversed those protections for Catholics.

The Anglican Church was the official, tax-supported church of Virginia, so Baptists, Presbyterians and other dissenters lacked equal legal standing.

A wave of emotional, revivalist religious preaching across the British colonies, roughly c1720–c1760, led by figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.

New Lights embraced the Great Awakening's emotional revivalist style; Old Lights defended calmer, traditional worship — the split weakened established church authority.

By encouraging ordinary colonists to question religious authority for themselves, it helped normalise questioning authority more broadly, which some historians connect to pre-Revolutionary attitudes.

The Jesuits, nicknamed Black Robes by indigenous peoples because of their long black cassocks; they lived among nations like the Huron/Wendat and recorded their work in the Jesuit Relations.

Jesuits (Black Robes), Recollects (a Franciscan order, active from 1615), and Sulpicians (based mainly around Montréal).

In Spanish America conversion often followed military conquest and forced labour systems; in New France, missionaries relied more on alliance and cooperation because French settlement depended on the fur trade with indigenous nations.