Is a missionary a cultural imperialist?

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 there was genocide, and there were beatings, and what is the pope thinking in doing this?” said Bob Senkewicz, a professor at Santa Clara University who is the author, with Rose Marie Beebe, of Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary.

If Senkewicz is right about that, it makes a nice change. Usually the one basic article that US (I don’t know how true it is of Canadian) journalists write about the pope is: how fabulous, the pope is here! Isn’t he wonderful!

But, he said, there are a number of things missing from this story. As with any historical narrative, interpretations depend a lot on the interpreter. The controversy over Junipero Serra is not wrong or manufactured, but it is evidence of how thoroughly postcolonialism has taken over academia and seeped into the public sphere. According to Crux, roughly 25 percent of Native Americans are Catholic, and especially for them, this story is much more complicated.

Well, naturally – Catholicism is a loyalty-based organization. Catholics are going to be loyal to Catholic heroes, because that’s what it is to be Catholic. There are lapsed Catholics, liberal Catholics, nominal Catholics, background Catholics, etc, but non-adjectival Catholics are loyal to the icons.

As Pope Francis prepares to elevate Serra’s legacy, he’s inevitably raising another question: In 2015, is it possible to see a white European who came to a foreign land with the express purpose of converting native peoples as anything but a cultural imperialist?

The answer to that is no, as a matter of definition. That’s what cultural imperialism is. You need a different wording if you want space to allow a yes. You could for instance ask if cultural imperialism precluded other, more benign motives, or whether cultural imperialism is invariably and uncomplicatedly a bad thing, and so on, but there’s not much room for doubt that people who travel to foreign countries with the express purpose of converting native peoples are cultural imperialists. It’s kind of like the way there’s not much room for doubt that the pope is a Catholic.

More in a few; I need some lunch.

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