Here’s the thing: Christianity, like Islam, is a missionary religion. That is, Christianity throughout its history (certainly since the apostle Paul) has regarded as one of its core goals turning as many people as possible into Christians. Taken to its logical conclusion, an ideal of Christianity would be to have every single human being be a Christian.
The ending of the Gospel of Matthew (which, fyi, scholars largely believe not to be part of Matthew’s original manuscript but a later addition) puts these words in the mouth of the risen Christ:
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” [Matt 28:19-20, KJV]
These words have been labeled as “the Great Commission,” and have been used to justify any manner of consequences, including, for example, the horrific assertion that both colonization and slavery were actually good things because these actions brought Christianity to those who had theretofore been living in “darkness.”
Today’s saint, Francis Xavier, is honored as an indefatigable (read “persistent pain”) force for the conversion of people in lands and cultures quite distant from his own. Here is how Butler praises this saint:
This conversion of nations according to the divine commission is the prerogative of the Catholic Church, in which it has never had any rival. Among those who in the sixteenth century laboured most successfully in this great work, the most illustrious was St. Francis Xavier, the Thaumaturgus (“miracle worker”) of these latter ages (i.e., since the start of the European Renaissance), whom Urban VIII. justly styled the apostle of the Indies.
The Indies referred to here were the Portuguese settlements along what is present-day India.
Consider this word that is not even in the Great Commission itself: conversion. By the time that Christianity went from a minority, occasionally persecuted offshoot of Judaism to being the official religion throughout Europe, the Church ceased speaking about teaching (i.e., using persuasive words with others) and instead about converting (i.e., changing others). The idea that others are in need of conversion is premised on the judgment that they are wrong as they are. It goes well beyond the notion that “Hey! I have had a life-changing experience and I want to share that with you with the hopes that it will be a good thing for you, too!” and enters into the territory of “All you believe and how you understand yourself, your community, and your reality is WRONG. And ONLY I, as a representative of my (brand of) Christianity can fix you, and for you to be fixed, you must do as I tell you.”
This is precisely the point when evangelism (literally “sharing good tidings”) goes bad (what, by choosing the opposite Greek prefix, I label “dysangelism.”) Calling for another’s conversion is never good news, is never ever truly evangelical. It is religious hubris that all-too-often has been a Trojan Horse containing horrors. Conversion Preaching does not liberate, it obliterates. Conversion Preaching (and its direct descendant, Conversion Therapy) is always Bad News. Post hoc justifications be damned.
Such dysangelicals are, ironically, the very ones that Jesus decried during his time on earth–those who devalue and even threaten the lives of others that do not mirror their own.