Christian missions were, and are, cultural imperialism — Western missionaries destroyed indigenous cultures, languages, and religions under the guise of saving souls, often hand in glove with colonial powers.

Why people find it persuasive

The historical entanglement of mission with empire is well documented — missionaries frequently arrived alongside colonial administrations, and mission schools in many colonies did suppress indigenous languages and customs.

Important distinctions

• • Mission entangled with, and sometimes serving, colonial power vs. mission that opposed and outlasted colonialism.
• • Genuine cultural destruction vs. cultural translation and indigenous appropriation of the gospel on local terms.
• • The historical record of specific missions and eras vs. mission as such.
• • Evangelism as invitation vs. evangelism as coercion.

Christian response

• • The record is genuinely mixed and includes serious wrongdoing that should not be minimized: residential and mission schools in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere did suppress indigenous languages and, in the Canadian case, inflicted documented abuse, for which major denominations have since formally apologized (the United Church of Canada in 1986, the Anglican Church of Canada in 1993).
• • It also includes substantial missionary opposition to colonial abuses: Bartolomé de las Casas campaigned against Spanish enslavement of indigenous Americans in the 1500s; missionaries were central to exposing and ending Belgian atrocities in the Congo Free State (E. D. Morel's and Roger Casement's campaigns drew heavily on missionary testimony); and William Carey and other missionaries in India campaigned against sati (widow-burning) and worked against, not for, British colonial indifference to it.
• • Missionary linguistic and educational work is also responsible for reducing hundreds of languages to writing for the first time, producing the first dictionaries and grammars, and founding schools and hospitals that persisted after colonial withdrawal and remain foundational infrastructure in many post-colonial states — SIL/Wycliffe's ongoing Bible translation work, whatever one thinks of the theology, has done more for minority language preservation than most secular linguistics programs.
• • The global center of gravity of Christianity itself refutes the 'Western imposition' framing empirically: the majority of the world's Christians now live in the Global South, and Christianity is growing fastest in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, driven substantially by indigenous leadership and indigenous missionary movements (Korean, Nigerian, Brazilian missionaries now send more workers abroad than they receive), a pattern hard to explain if the faith were merely a colonial imposition rejected once colonial power receded.
• • The theological logic of mission (Matthew 28:19's 'all nations') long predates and is separable from European colonialism by many centuries — the gospel had already spread to Ethiopia, Armenia, Persia, India (the Thomas Christians), and Central Asia along trade routes well before European colonial expansion began in earnest.

Christian counterresponse

That is a fair and significant historical indictment of specific eras and figures, which contemporary mission theology (since roughly the mid-20th century, shaped by figures like Lesslie Newbigin) has explicitly reckoned with, emphasizing indigenous leadership, cultural respect, and separation from any state or colonial sponsorship — but it does not establish that mission as such, rightly conceived and practiced, is intrinsically imperialist.