7. Expansion of the Jesus Cult

The fifteenth century saw Christian expansion northward to the Lithuanians, Sámi, and Komi peoples, westward to the Caribbean and Brazil, and southward to central Africa, alongside a Muslim expansion eastward into maritime southeast Asia. Legally, the Christian expansion rested on an old debate about whether non-Christian leaders could hold dominion, the right to rule. The traditional argument held that all earthly rulers yielded their dominion to Jesus at his birth, which prohibited non-Christians from holding any authority. A medieval counterargument, renewed in this century by John Wycliffe and Paweł Włodkowic, turned to the plain ken: Dominion was not absolute, but depended on the ruler being in a state of grace, and so the Christian right to conquest was not an eternal truth but one contingent on human actions in time. A recurring theme in the Christian expansion was the importance of the cross as technology; many Indigenous peoples already made use of crosses, and were attracted by the possibility of an updated version.