ABSTRACT
IN MUCH OF THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL MISsions, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has received a poor press. In the past fifteen or twenty years, historians and ethnohistorians of both Protestant and Catholic missions have cast aspersions on the quantity, quality, and longevity of native conversions to the intrusive religions. They have sought not only to deflate the numerical success of the colonial missionaries but to ridicule their cultural goals and methods and to minimize their spiritual results. The effect of all this debunking has been to paint the missionaries either as evil tools of imperialism or as naive fools, and their Indian neophytes as hapless victims of clerical oppression or as cunning Br'er Rabbits of the forest.
