How bad was Junipero Serra really? Was he a red-eyed imperialist torturer? Was he a doe-eyed humanitarian altruist? Was he an average guy just doing a job?

Emma Green at The Atlantic collects some opposing views.

“Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture,” Deborah A. Miranda, a Native American and a professor of literature at Washington and Lee University,told The New York Times earlier this year. She joins a host of others who arevoicing objections to Serra’s canonization.

“There is one basic article that North American journalists are writing about this: that the Indians don’t like it, and