Sanctified Chains: The Church and the Economy of Coerced Labor

By Kino Smith

The stones of empire’s churches were never free. Beneath sanctuaries and schools across the globe lies a hidden ledger—centuries of coerced labor, reframed as holy sacrifice. From Manila to Cusco, from California’s missions to Canada’s residential schools, faith became the language through which unpaid work was demanded, extracted, and sanctified.

The Philippines: Service as Salvation

In the Philippines, colonization fused faith with forced service. Beginning in 1565, the Spanish introduced the polo y servicio, a system requiring Filipino men between ages sixteen and sixty to surrender forty days of unpaid labor annually—later reduced to twenty in 1884 after widespread resistance.^1 Wealthier elites could escape duty by paying the falla tax, but the poor carried the burden.

This labor built fortifications, ships, and churches, including the San Agustín Church in Manila (completed 1607 by Augustinian friars).^2 The friars preached that such labor was sacrifice to God. In reality, it was unpaid economic infrastructure for both the church and the empire.

The Andes: The Mita and the Mountain of Silver

In 1570, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo formalized the mita, adapting Incan tribute systems into a colonial draft that conscripted Indigenous men into shifts of forced labor.^3 At Potosí, the empire’s richest silver mine, up to 13,000 Indigenous workers annually labored under this system.^4 Others were pulled into building Jesuit monuments like the La Compañía de Jesús in Cusco (completed 1668).^5

The demographic consequences were catastrophic. The Andean population fell from 9 million in 1530 to fewer than 1.5 million by 1650, a collapse driven by disease, malnutrition, and brutal overwork.^6 Gilded churches rose even as communities emptied.

California: Missions of Faith and Mortality

Between 1769 and 1833, Franciscans under Junípero Serra founded twenty-one missions across California.^7 Indigenous peoples, baptized as neophytes, were confined to the mission system. The bells marked not only prayer but also hours of agricultural and construction work.

At Mission San Gabriel (est. 1771), more than 6,000 Tongva and Kizh people were absorbed into this system.^8 They built adobe walls, tended fields, and worked vineyards under friars’ supervision. Mortality was staggering—records show 10–20% annual death rates among baptized Indigenous populations at some missions.^9

Jesuit Slavery in the United States

In 1634, Jesuit priests arrived in Maryland aboard the Ark and Dove, bringing the Catholic faith and establishing plantations.^10 By the 1700s, Jesuits owned hundreds of enslaved Africans who labored on estates like St. Inigoes and White Marsh.

When Georgetown College faced collapse in 1838, Jesuit superior Rev. Thomas Mulledy, S.J., sold 272 enslaved men, women, and children to Louisiana planters for $115,000 (about $3.7 million today).^11 The proceeds stabilized the university, but shattered families. Jesuit colleges in Missouri and Kentucky also relied on enslaved labor.^12 The church framed it as necessity; history records it as betrayal.

Canada and the United States: Children as Laborers

In 1831, the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario opened, marking the start of Canada’s residential school era.^13 By 1880, Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist denominations operated more than 80 such schools, where Indigenous children were forced into unpaid agricultural, carpentry, and domestic labor. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) documented at least 4,100 deaths linked to these institutions, though estimates rise above 6,000.^14

In the U.S., the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 funded mission-run schools. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (est. 1879), children spent half the day in classrooms and half in unpaid work sustaining the school.^15 The Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Reports (2022, 2024) confirmed 408 such schools, nearly half operated by churches, and verified at least 973 student deaths so far.^16

Africa: Missionary Discipline and Colonial Labor

The Church of Scotland Mission at Kikuyu (1898) exemplifies how Protestant missions in Africa blurred faith and labor. Converts were placed in “industrial training” regimes—working on farms, in workshops, and on construction projects under missionary oversight.^17

Colonial law reinforced this system. The 1912 communal labor ordinance in Kenya legalized compulsory service, cloaked as civic duty.^18 Missionaries often defended it as moral instruction, even as African clergy and activists denounced it as exploitation. These debates laid the groundwork for anticolonial resistance and independence movements.

The Gospel of Work

Across continents, missionaries preached a “gospel of work.” As anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff note, Protestant missions in Southern Africa regulated not only belief but time itself: bells segmented days into prayer, farm work, and industrial training.^19 Labor became salvation, sacrifice became proof of faith, and unpaid service was exalted as virtue.

This theology survives today in the language of “time, talent, and treasure.” What appears as voluntary devotion has roots in centuries of coerced labor sanctified by religious authority.

A Scriptural Reckoning

The testimony of history makes plain that coerced labor and exploitation, even when cloaked in religion, stand in direct opposition to the teachings of Scripture. The Bible is clear that every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), deserving dignity and freedom. To strip people of their labor, families, and futures is to deface that image.

“Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbor serve him for nothing and does not give him his wages.” (Jeremiah 22:13)

“The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.” (James 5:4)

“Do not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether one of your brothers or one of the sojourners… You shall give him his wages on the same day… lest he cry against you to the Lord, and you be guilty of sin.” (Deuteronomy 24:14–15)

“The worker deserves his wages.” (Luke 10:7)

“Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” (Matthew 7:12)

The forced sacrifices of colonization were not the Gospel—they were its betrayal. Where empire demanded unpaid labor, Christ commanded justice. Where the church sanctified exploitation, the Lord condemned it as sin.

True worship cannot be built on stolen labor. In God’s economy, righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne (Psalm 89:14).

Across five centuries, the church was not a passive witness to empire but an active engine of labor extraction. From the polo y servicio in the Philippines to the mita in Peru, from California’s missions to Jesuit plantations and Indigenous boarding schools, millions of workdays and thousands of lives were consumed in the name of God and empire.

The legacy endures. Volunteerism and unpaid “sacrifice” in marginalized communities still echo these colonial theologies. Reckoning requires more than apology—it demands acknowledging the unpaid economy of empire and repaying the human debt owed to those who built churches, schools, and missions with their very lives.

References

1. Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009).

2. Julius Bautista, Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu (Ateneo de Manila Press, 2013).

3. John H. Rowe, “The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37:2 (1957).

4. Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (University of New Mexico Press, 1984).

5. Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cusco, Peru (Duke University Press, 1999).

6. Noble David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

7. James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (Yale University Press, 2004).

8. Steven Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis (UNC Press, 2005).

9. Robert H. Jackson, Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687–1840 (University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

10. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury, 2013).

11. Georgetown University, “Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Project” (2016).

12. Kelly Schmidt, “Slavery and the Jesuits in Maryland and Missouri,” Jesuit Histories (2019).

13. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, Vol. 1 (2015).

14. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (2015).

15. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (University Press of Kansas, 1995).

16. U.S. Department of the Interior, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Reports (2022, 2024).

17. Tom Cunningham, “Missionaries, the State, and Labour in Colonial Kenya,” History Workshop Journal 95 (2023).

18. Opolot Okia, Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

19. Jean & John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1991).