Christianity and colonialism are often closely associated because Catholicism and Protestantism were the religions of the European colonial powers[1] and acted in many ways as the "religious arm" of those powers.[2] According to Edward Andrews, Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century, missionaries became viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them",[3] colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi."
