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The concept of ‘Nativism’ (from Eng., ‘native,’ ‘inborn’ in the sense of ‘one's own’) denotes those religious movements that draw their justification from their own tradition and expressly appeal to it. This tradition can be imaginary. Nativistic currents arise mostly in a situation of colonial oppression, and can also be regarded as a reaction on the part of the colonized to structural, open → violence. The birth of a consciousness of inequality, and the feeling of an existential threat from wi…

1. Missionaries were often the forerunners of colonialism. Colonial encounters occurred not only with non-Christian cultures in Asia, Africa, and America, but also between Western colonialism and indigenous Christianity—as on the western coast of southern India, with the Thomasine Christians as the Portuguese arrived in 1498, or again in the Ethiopia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Portuguese Catholicism likewise met indigenous Christian variants. Frequently an appropriation of the…