Bates accurately described Las Casas’ efforts to protect New World Indians from Spanish persecution, but religious fervor has blinded Parish. The worst devastation of native culture was not

the work of the soldiers and landowners she condemns but that of the missionaries she exalts. In both Catholic Latin America and Protestant North America, only compliant Indians enjoyed even

nominal acceptance. Since the Indian gods were false, Europeans reasoned, their native cultures must be inferior--a conclusion driven to genocidal limits by Christianity’s relentless

missionary impulse. Indians who rejected the white man’s religion were persecuted and exterminated. In fact, even Las Casas advocated humane treatment of Indians _ only _ within the context