When God Arrived With a Government: When Salvation Required Surrender and Christianity Policed the Soul

Abstract

An interpretive historical essay examining Portuguese Goa as a case in which evangelization operated within a colonial state able to alter sacred space, civil status, language, memory, and the terms of religious choice. Moving from the conquest of 1510 and Francis Xavier's request for an Inquisition to the tribunal's regulation of local Christian practice, J.C. Howard argues that religious authority reaches its deepest form when external surveillance becomes self-surveillance. The journal edition includes eleven sources and explicit evidence boundaries distinguishing documented history from the author's moral, psychological, and theological interpretation.