Politics & Power Quote by John Strachan

Apocalypse as a sales pitch: Strachan frames Christian expansion not as a historical process but as a mass resurrection. “Awakened from the sleep of death” is a conversion narrative scaled to whole peoples, collapsing culture into a single diagnosis - lifeless until touched by the “words of eternal life.” The rhetorical trick is binary: death versus life, superstition versus church, darkness versus civilization. Once you accept the framing, demolition becomes mercy.

Strachan’s intent is pastoral and political at once. As a clergyman in the British imperial world, he’s defending missionary Christianity as the engine of moral order and legitimate authority. His language sanctifies institutional power: apostles speak, nations wake, temples fall, churches rise. Human agency on the ground - debate, resistance, syncretism, coercion - disappears. History is rewritten as a clean moral sweep, with Christianity cast as self-evident progress.

The subtext is harder-edged. “Temples of superstition were shut or destroyed” turns religious suppression into a righteous housekeeping project. “Civilized world” quietly sets the membership rules: civilization is something you enter by exiting your old sacred spaces. It’s a theology that flatters empire by making conquest look like enlightenment, a spiritual alibi for cultural replacement.

In the early 19th century, this was a familiar Protestant mood: post-Reformation confidence, missionary societies, and a British North Atlantic elite eager to align faith with “improvement.” Strachan isn’t merely celebrating a sacred past; he’s supplying a template for his present - evangelization as civilization, and civilization as permission.