Very begrudgingly.. They didn’t even allow Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust to enter Palestine during the war since Britain didn’t want to agitate the local Arab population. There was no grand design Britain had no clear policy or real idea what they were trying to accomplish there so they were just happy to get rid of the territory asap and make it someone else’s problem.

> Catholic church left pagans to their own devices?

It varied, although generally the Catholic church was fairly open at integrating or even occasionally tolerating pagan practices or providing alternative options to people used to more polytheistic religions. Like the whole saint worshipping (“venerating”) thing. Often (with some exceptions) pagans found conversion fairly easy since they could just map their gods to equivalent Christian saints continue worshipping them. Basically every converted pagan society had a multi-generationa transition period.

Then you had stuff lime praying to magical corpses or body parts, so their previous owners could perform miracles. With some exceptions it has generally been a highly flexible religion before the reformation.

Islam is much more rigid about following the rules and stuff like idol worship (as a consequence they brought back visual arts back to the stone ages..)

One interesting thing is that in the 1400s open debate and heterodoxy was generally tolerated or even accepted IF you did it in Latin and only inside the “international scholar network” that existed at the time and didn’t go around preaching your ideas to peasants and such.

I’m certainly not implying that it was in any way good or let alone perfect in absolute terms, just that it.

> same reasons power and money.

That’s highly reductive

Many of the regions they invaded were still (or until quite recently) majority Christian. After all initially it was a defensive relief expedition organized by the pope and the Byzantine emperor to free the territories the empire lost in Anatolia very recently. Of course it was massively more successful than anyone anticipated and they just kept on going and then the whole thing got “slightly” out of hand..

But yes, as I said there were some huge exceptions. However early on the way Christianity spread was fundamentally different to Islam. It was usually not through violent conquest but bottom up.

European imperialism was quite mixed as well. Christianity played a huge part in the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Much less so in British India and other similar places.

Unlike Islam which which usually wiped out local cultural and linguistic identities (during the periods of Arab conquests, that shifted quite a but later on of course)

Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)