Christianity in AP World History: Modern

Christian communities along the Silk Roads and in Africa, 1200-1450

Topic 1.2 and Topic 1.6 say Christianity, Judaism, and Islam kept shaping societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia during this period. Ethiopia is a solid African example, since it was a Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim and other neighbors. In Europe, the Catholic Church organized daily life through parishes, monasteries, and church law, while Christian and Muslim Spain exchanged scholarship.

In Topic 2.1 (The Silk Roads) and Topic 2.7 (Comparison of Economic Exchange), Christianity mostly appears as one of the cultural things that moved alongside goods. The Church of the East (often called Nestorian) had communities across Central Asia and into China. Under Mongol rule some elite figures belonged to it, including Sorghaghtani Beki, mother of Kublai Khan. Rabban Sauma, a monk from Mongol-ruled China, traveled west to Europe in the late 1280s.

The bigger argument here is that expanding trade networks spread culture as well as silk and porcelain. Christianity works as evidence for that claim. For a comparison question, Buddhism and Islam spread along the same routes in a similar way.

How the Reformations split Christianity and still grew it

Topic 3.3 (Belief Systems of Land-Based Empires) makes two claims about 1450-1750 that you should be able to state in your own words. First, the Protestant Reformation broke with existing Christian traditions. Second, the Protestant and Catholic reformations together helped Christianity expand.

The break began in 1517, when Martin Luther challenged the sale of indulgences and papal authority. It produced Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican churches. In England, Henry VIII separated the English church from Rome in 1534 for political as well as religious reasons, which makes it good evidence that religion and state power were tangled together.

The Catholic Church answered with its own reform. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) restated Catholic doctrine, and the Jesuits, founded in 1540, sent missionaries such as Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci into Asia. Catholic missionary work was one way Christianity expanded. Protestant reforms and Protestant missionary activity contributed to that growth too, so a full answer gives both sides credit.

This topic also covers the Sunni-Shi'a split and the rise of Sikhism. A useful comparison sets the Protestant Reformation beside the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry, which intensified a Sunni-Shi'a division that was already centuries old. Sikhism fits differently. It emerged in South Asia out of interaction between Hinduism and Islam.

Converting indigenous peoples as a rationale for empire, 1750-1900

Topic 6.1 (Rationales for Imperialism, 1750 to 1900) lists four required justifications: Social Darwinism, nationalism, the civilizing mission, and the desire to religiously convert indigenous populations. Christianity belongs to that last one, carried by Protestant and Catholic missionaries into Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

Missionaries often built schools and hospitals and taught European languages along with the Bible. Nineteenth-century missionaries who accompanied European imperial expansion in Africa are a good example of conversion tied to empire.

Christianity also took on local forms that had nothing to do with justifying foreign rule. In nineteenth-century China, Hong Xiuquan combined Christian ideas with his own religious visions and led the Taiping Rebellion against the Qing. Use him as evidence of Christianity being adapted in China, and keep him out of an argument about imperial rationales.

The tricky part is that religious conversion and the civilizing mission overlap. Missionaries usually saw spreading Christianity as part of "uplifting" a people they considered less advanced. A strong answer names both ideas and explains how they reinforced each other. It also notes the gap between the stated goals and the results, which often included forced labor and resource extraction under colonial rule.

Unit 9 picks up the story in Topic 9.9, where rights-based movements challenged older assumptions about religion along with race, class, and gender. That gives you an endpoint if a continuity-and-change essay runs into the twentieth century.

Writing about Christianity in SAQs, the DBQ, and the long essay

A missionary letter, a Reformation text, or a colonial report might be the source behind a multiple-choice set or a primary-source short-answer question. Questions built on sources like these ask about cause, effect, or context more than doctrine. Knowing what Christians believe matters less than explaining what Christianity was doing in a specific time and place.

On the long essay and the document-based question, Christianity is useful evidence for continuity and change in belief systems, for cultural diffusion through trade, and for ideologies of empire. A top answer names the specific branch and the specific actor, such as Jesuit missionaries or Lutheran princes.

Three mix-ups cost points:

• Treating "Christianity" and "Catholicism" as the same thing. Catholicism is one branch, and after 1517 you need to say which branch you mean.
• Assuming the Reformation weakened Christianity overall. Topic 3.3 says the opposite: the two reformations together spread it.
• Folding religious conversion into Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was a pseudo-scientific racial theory, while conversion was a religious motive. They are separate justifications on the Topic 6.1 list.