The staging of spiritual conquest in missionary literature represented the Christianization of the Philippines, much in the same way later historians would characterize Hispanization as a sociological process: a progressive, cumulative, even “evolutionary” accomplishment. This is certainly the way religious chroniclers have insisted on remembering it; a two-step forward, one-step backward affair. As we have seen in previous chapters, this willful narrative comes at a great cost: to the point of reinventing war as a form of peace, masking the rule of expediency as the rule of divine justice, and portraying the persistence of an unconquered frontier as the impetus towards an ever-unfinished conquest. The propagandistic value of this literature served as a constant reminder that for the religious Orders, the promotion of the Christian faith and the recounting of the historical deeds of the conquistadors meant the same thing.

The act of desengaño and spiritual emancipation as strategies of deculturation (see last chapter) exposes the instrumentality of Christianity as a colonial ideology. At the same time, it omits the issue of its efficacy or inefficacy among native populations. It is one thing to explain how friars and Jesuits explained the task of evangelization to each other and colonial officialdom. But how did they explain Christianity to the conquered peoples? What combination of coercion and persuasion led colonial subjects to profess the Christian faith and settle in and around the mission towns?