Catholic missionaries spread their faith around the world – so why couldn’t Protestants keep up?

From the 17th century, Protestants traversed the globe to introduce Indigenous people “to the knowledge of the gospel”. These missionaries were fired up with proselytising zeal. So why, asks Alec Ryrie, did their efforts produce such meagre fruit?

Three figures in 17th‑century dress stand beneath a golden parasol, overlooking a busy harbor filled with sailing ships.

Published: August 28, 2026 at 4:00 PM

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In 1650, amid the excitement over the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s new godly republic, the Baptist minister Henry Jessey published a pamphlet entitled Of the Conversion of Five Thousand and Nine Hundred East-Indians, in the Isle Formosa. It told of how, under the Dutch East India Company’s benevolent rule and thanks to the diligent preaching of the Dutch Reformed Church, tens of thousands of Indigenous people in Formosa (Taiwan) had “turned from their paganism”. More than 5,000 had been baptised as Protestant Christians.

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These were not merely nominal converts. By the time they were baptised, they knew their catechisms, could answer questions about their new faith “wisely and solidly”, and lived lives of such virtue it would put most European Christians to shame. Jessey linked this to news of English Puritans converting Native Americans in Massachusetts. Perhaps, he suggested, it was a sign that “the fullness of the gentiles was ready to come in”, so all the world might be illuminated by the Protestant gospel.

A black‑and‑white engraved portrait of a bearded man in a cap, shown from the shoulders up against a lined background.

In 1650, the Baptist minister Henry Jessey reported that more than 5,000 Formosans had been “baptised as Protestant Christians” | Credit: Getty Images

Most of the pamphlet’s claims were true, but it didn’t tell the full story. The Dutch had indeed baptised thousands, and established churches and schools in south-eastern Formosa. They had produced catechisms and gospel translations in Indigenous languages. They had staffed the churches with Indigenous elders. However, what the pamphlet didn’t highlight was the Dutch military takeover of the island during the 1620s.

In classic colonial divide-and-rule style, the Dutch had used local alliances as a springboard for wider conquests. The first allies the Dutch had made were clear about the terms of the deal: they would convert, but only if the foreigners demonstrated the power of their religion in battle. As a result, the Dutch obligingly provided musketeers to support local headhunting raids. A firearms volley would scatter the people of a village and the Formosans would then close in to collect heads. Calvinist ministers even blessed proceedings. The East India Company also supplied rice to villages that converted and to children who attended Dutch schools.

By 1650, the shine was already coming off these arrangements. Overhunting decimated the island’s deer population, crashing the company’s revenues. Instead of being bribed, the converts were taxed. Worse was to follow. In 1661, Chinese forces landed. The islanders rushed to burn Christian books and returned to “the abominable usages and customs of heathenism”. One minister who tried to reprimand them was found without head, limbs or entrails, a “mutilated trunk”. Dutch rule on Formosa lasted less than 40 years. The Protestant missionary effort that Jessey celebrated left almost no trace behind it.

An engraving of two Indigenous figures in traditional clothing holding staffs, with more people and a longhouse in the background

A 17th-century engraving of Indigenous people in Formosa (now Taiwan). Though thousands converted to Protestantism, their faith was far more brittle than many Dutch colonisers assumed

Forgotten initiatives

The story is typical of early Protestant missions. While the first global age, c1500–c1800, was an age of Catholic missionary expansion in South America, Africa, India and China, the Protestant Reformation hardly spread out beyond Europe until the 1790s. However, as the Formosan experience shows us, this failure wasn’t from a lack of trying. Moreover, although Catholic kingdoms such as Spain, Portugal and even France had a century’s start over Protestant rivals such as England and the Dutch Republic in the race for overseas empire, the Protestants were very much in the game by the 17th century. And for many of these Protestants, empire was a profoundly religious project.

“The main end of our plantation,” insisted the founders of the colony in Massachusetts, was “to bring the Indians to the knowledge of the gospel”. The great Dutch trading companies were determined “to instruct… Blacks and Indians in the rudiments of the Christian religion”, sometimes sinking far more than they could afford into missionary projects. Idealistic aims such as saving souls and honouring God’s name were alloyed with more pragmatic motives, such as using religion to cement political alliances and lubricate trade deals. Protestant donors gave hundreds of thousands of pounds, guilders and thalers to missionary ventures, often spurred by thrilling accounts such as those written by Jessey.

Idealistic aims such as saving souls were alloyed with more pragmatic motives such as cementing political alliances

These forgotten early Protestant missionaries spanned the globe. The Dutch empire in Asia saw substantial missionary initiatives in the Indonesian islands and on what is now Sri Lanka, where more than a million children attended mission schools from the 1660s onwards. A remarkable Danish-Prussian-English missionary joint venture in southern India after 1706 built up a substantial Protestant community, and there were parallel efforts in Madras, Calcutta and elsewhere.

A crowded hall scene with a preacher on a raised pulpit addressing two large groups of seated people, while a kneeling figure with a child stands below him.

The Dutch missionary Robert Junius baptises new Christians at Formosa. For many Protestants, the race to establish an empire was a profoundly religious project | Credit: Christie's Images Ltd 2018

Faith goes global

There were also serious attempts to reach into the Ottoman empire. In the 1720s and 1730s, England’s Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge spent tens of thousands of pounds producing Christian texts in Arabic, alongside similar English, Dutch and German ventures in Arabic and Turkish printing. One German Lutheran even reached the isolated Christian kingdom of Abyssinia, where he spent 17 years as a close confidant of the emperor and translated John’s gospel into Amharic. There were initiatives all around coastal Africa, from brief forays into Madagascar and Mozambique, through half-hearted efforts by Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, to more sustained but deeply troubled attempts to proselytise from slave-trading forts in west Africa.

As to the Americas, from the first recorded presence of Protestants in the New World in the 1550s, we find them filled with naïve optimism as they try to convert Indigenous peoples. Short-lived Protestant colonies in South America, from the French and the Dutch in Brazil to the most disastrous of all, the Scots in Panama, made strenuous missionary efforts while their time lasted. So too did French Huguenots in Florida, Swedes in Delaware, and the Dutch on Manhattan and in the Hudson valley. In Britain’s American empire, there was an assortment of local projects, partly paid for by well-funded bodies such as England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701).

So why has this story been almost forgotten? Partly because it did not leave much of an archival footprint and partly because the Catholic missions of the era were so much larger. Indeed, Protestants often lamented over how little they were doing – rhetorical attempts to stir consciences and raise money that have subsequently been accepted at face value by historians. But there is an even more obvious reason these early Protestant missions have been forgotten: they largely failed.

Although not completely. The thousands of converts on Formosa were real enough. Some of the Tupi of Brazil converted firmly enough to Calvinism that, when the Portuguese retook the colony, there were leaders of the Tupi resistance who refused to save their lives by renouncing their faith. The Anglican mission to the Mohawks of the New York colony turned the “faithful Mohawks” into loyal allies, who fought for the crown during the American Revolution.

A 17th‑century coastal settlement with red‑roofed buildings and a fortified structure, shown with numerous sailing ships in the harbor and small figures standing on the shore.

Taiwan (or Formosa – shown above) was partly occupied by the Dutch 1624–62, seeing huge missionary investment and a substantial Christian community – until a Chinese invasion snuffed it out | Credit: Alamy

Around the world, most Protestants were readier than Catholics to ordain Indigenous converts during this era. There were hundreds of “country pastors” in India, Africa and North America, such as Arumagam Pillai in southern India, whose German friends said he was “well-informed in all matters; he even knows how to talk in a royal palace”. Another was Samson Occom, a Mohegan from Connecticut who became a bestselling author, celebrity fundraiser and dogged advocate for his people’s rights, and who dismissed all the dangers that beset him: “They could not kill me but once.”

Diminishing returns

Still, there is no mistaking the overall picture. Enormous hopes, slabs of money, an impressive amount of effort and thousands of lives were invested in early Protestant missionary projects. The return, in terms of communities of converts, was minimal. If what you want from your missionary history is a heroic tale of white saviours bringing redemption to a world of heathen darkness, then this is disappointing. For the rest of us, it poses a fascinating question: why did this worldwide effort, sustained across centuries, bear such meagre fruit?

One answer is that the best foundation for missionary success was colonial conquest. In contrast to Catholic powers, the Protestant powers’ empires in this era were small and fragile. There was a pattern of promising missionary efforts being abruptly terminated by military defeat. Even in British North America, repeated wars with France disrupted missionary work.

In addition, Protestant churches were not so well structured for proselytisation as their Catholic rivals. Religious orders, those great engines of missions, were suppressed at the Reformation. Protestant missions were often kept on short leashes by imperial powers and by micromanaging home churches. In any case, many of these churches had shaky financial systems and flat, egalitarian structures that made the effective planning, direction and sustenance of missions almost impossible.

Crucially, deep-seated attitudes underpinned the failure. European Protestants, secure in their own cultural and religious superiority, and mostly at ease in their alliance with their emerging colonial empires, were simply unprepared for the task of trying to take their gospel to peoples across the planet. As a result, they didn’t make enough of an effort to reach people more alien to them than anyone we might ever meet in today’s globalised world.

Protestant missions were often kept on short leashes, both by imperial powers and by micromanaging home churches

Their preconceptions were set by their earlier encounters in Europe with Jews, Muslims and ‘barbarians’ – that is, with peoples such as the ‘wild Irish’ or the Sámi of northern Scandinavia. Those encounters seemed to teach that the best route to conversion was conquest and the top-down imposition of Christian norms. For generations, Scottish Highlanders’ children were dragooned into schools where, to ‘civilise’ them, they were forbidden to speak a word of Gaelic. The same model was exported to residential schools for Native Americans, institutions that were intended as charitable yet we now see as perpetrating cultural genocide.

Or again, the proverbial reluctance of Jews and Muslims to convert, even under pressure, suggested that sometimes unbelievers were simply too sunk in their own stubborn errors to be ‘rescued’. It was all too easy, like one Calvinist minister at the Cape of Good Hope, to conclude that the “heathen” were “senseless cattle”. If conversion was impossible, you could stop trying with a clear conscience.

A European settler or missionary speaks to a seated group of Indigenous people outdoors, gesturing as they listen beneath trees and mountains.

The Puritan missionary John Eliot preaches to Native Americans in the 17th century. Protestant efforts to convert Indigenous Americans met with mixed rewards | Credit: Topfoto

But almost worse than despair was over-optimistic idealism. European Protestants were convinced their religion, and indeed their entire way of life, was superior to any of the barbaric delusions in which heathen people were mired. So, they believed that, as soon as their gospel was declared, grateful infidels would flock to convert. The great Welsh philologist William Jones – who was no fool – believed that if Christians discreetly scattered selections from the Bible across the Indian subcontinent and left the population to discover the text for themselves, they would be convinced by its intrinsic power with no need for heavy-handed missionary interventions.

Reverting to despair

In parts of the world with no Indigenous literary tradition, the same hope lay behind projects of mass education. In the meantime, Protestants were sure that the heathen would be allured by the evident purity of Protestant worship, and by the shining moral example of the godly Christians who had come to live among them. When these hopes failed, the obvious response was to revert to despair. “We gave the heathen an example,” one Massachusetts Puritan reflected bitterly in 1723, “If they had not been miserably besotted, they would have taken more notice of it.” He could only deduce that God had chosen not to save these feckless barbarians.

It is easy to mock this smug wishful thinking, but what else do any of us ever do in a new situation than draw on our pre-existing experience and presumptions? Generations of hopeful Protestants repeated the same doomed strategies, convinced that when the time was right – but not until then – God would ensure their efforts bore fruit.

One Massachusetts Puritan could only deduce that God had chosen not to save these feckless barbarians

Where this became lethal was in Protestant attitudes to the slave trade. Most Protestants disliked Atlantic slavery, but it was too vast an economic reality to be wished away. They concluded that slavery needed to be redeemed by being made Christian. But most slave-holders steadfastly refused to allow any efforts to preach to the enslaved, correctly suggesting that Christian notions such as the spiritual equality of all humanity, and Protestant practices such as assembling for worship or learning to read and write, would be deeply corrosive to the slavery system.

A black‑and‑white engraved portrait of a man in clerical dress with shoulder‑length curls, shown from the waist up beside a column.

The formerly enslaved missionary Jacobus Capitein had to buy his respectability by writing a treatise defending slavery | Credit: Getty Images

So would-be Protestant missionaries bent over backwards to reassure slaveholders that their gospel was harmless, that enslavement was entirely compatible with Christianity, and that conversion would render enslaved people more diligent, obedient and docile. Jacobus Capitein, an African who had been enslaved but was ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1742, had to buy his respectability by writing a treatise defending the legitimacy of slavery. This desperate cant did nothing to reconcile slaveholders to Protestant missionary efforts. What it did was turn the Protestant gospel into an apologia for slavery. One Englishwoman tried to teach enslaved people in the Caribbean a song ending:

God, the master we serve, knows for us what is best:

And when life’s toils are ended we sweetly shall rest;

For every good deed in God’s book is recorded.

So faithful good negroes will be surely rewarded.

A faith so nakedly designed to serve vested interests had no chance of appealing to the enslaved.

For two centuries, most Protestants lived inside a comforting bubble, so sure of their approach that they could not be shaken by the mere fact of failure. A few discordant voices questioned these truisms, but it took the American Revolution to burst this bubble by triggering a sudden Protestant moral awakening over the slave trade. This eventually led to slavery’s abolition. It also started a new wave of Protestant missions, which finally began to learn from the generations of failure that preceded them. The key insight of these missionaries – so obvious to us that we can miss the enormity of the imaginative leap it represented – was that they needed to deal with the world not as they believed it would or should be, but as it was.

Alec Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University. His latest book is The World’s Reformation: How Protestantism Became a Global Religion (Yale University Press, 2026)

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This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

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