Christian missionary history forged the fusion enabling modern political redemption

Evidence

And yet Christianity’s missionary history managed to fuse the two— to fold the spiritual promise (“Christ died to save us all”) into the political project (“the world must be changed for Christ”)—making the modern concept of redemption possible. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Gives the precise mechanism by which Christian (especially missionary) history made modern secular-redemptive projects thinkable — a genealogy that both supports and complicates the Cooper thread. — connects to: Postwar US empire relied on missionary children and oilmen for regional knowledge