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Anglicans, Puritans and American Indians: Persecution or Toleration?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

H. C. Porter
H. C. Porter*
Affiliation:
History Faculty, Cambridge
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Extract

‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’ (Mark 16: 15). Modern historians find it fashionable to categorise Missions as examples of Cultural Conflict. Members of the ethnohistorical school—concerned especially with the meeting and blending of Indian and European ways of life—present Conversion as a species of Persecution: an infringement of Indian human rights, an exercise in ethnocentrism or exploitative capitalism—part of the Cant of Conquest. Conversion—the colonialisation of a native belief system—means ‘acculturation’, ‘deculturation’, or tragic ‘despiritualisation’. Accounts of the relation between Indians and English colonists in colonial North America take a hint from the complaint of Roger Williams of Rhode Island, writing in 1654 to the authorities of Massachusetts about the destructive wars, cruel and unnecessary, against the tribes of New England. Christianity means conquest, harsh and brutal. Some of this emphasis on atrocities may spring from historians’ indignation at Christian activities apparently so alien to the Sermon on the Mount.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 21: Persecution and Toleration , 1984 , pp. 189 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1984

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References

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21 Parry, J. H., The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London 1966)Google Scholar ch 8 ‘The Spreading of the Faith’ esp p 164.

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23 Sibbes, Works ed A. B. Grosart (Edinburgh 1863) 5 p 467, quoted by [Sidney H.] Rooy, [The Theology of Missions in the Puritan Tradition: A Study of Representative Puritans (Delft 1965)] p 29. Dr Rooy’s puritans are Sibbes, Richard Baxter, John Eliot, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.

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28 Sig A 2r

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31 Quoted in Rooy p 187.

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35 Letters pp 219–20. (See note 3).

36 Eds Teunissen, J. J. and Hinz, E. J. (Detroit 1973)Google Scholar. See Teunissen and Hinz, ‘Roger Williams, Thomas More and the Narrangansett Utopia’ Early American Literature 11 (1976–77) pp 281–95; Davis, Jack L., ‘Roger Williams among the Narragansett Indians’ New England Quarterly 43 (1970) pp 593–604.Google Scholar

37 Complete Writings of Roger Williams 7 ed Perry Miller (New York 1963) pp 29–41. W. C. Gilpin is good on Williams and Indians in his The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago 1979) pp 39–43, 117–34.

38 So said the German Calvinist Ursinus (1534–83), P. D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London 1981) pp 173–74.

39 Verse and prose in Key (1973 edn) p 133.

40 C. C. Hall ed Narratiues of Early Maryland 1633–1684 (New York 1967) p 272.

41 Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 6 ed J. R. Bartlett (New York 1963) p 345.

42 Ibid pp 278–79, January 1655.

43 (1973 ed) p 193.

44 Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 3 ed S. L. Caldwell (New York 1963) p 252.

45 Ibid 7 p 38.

46 Ibid p 37.