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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
‘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.
1 Bowden, Henry W., American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago 1981)Google Scholar.
2 Berkhofer, Robert F., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York 1978)Google Scholar; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill 1975); Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley 1978); Neal Salisbury, ‘Red Puritans: the “Praying Indians” of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot’ William and Mary Quarterly 31 (January 1974) pp 27–54; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans and the Making of New England 1500–1643 (New York 1982); Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge 1980).
3 Complete Writings of Roger Williams VI, Letters ed J. R. Bartlett (New York 1963) p 272.
4 Francis Jennings in D. B. Quinn ed Early Maryland in a Wider World (Detroit 1982) p 236.
5 Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis 1980) ch 23 “From the Bay Colony to Indo-China’.
6 Bishop Henry Whipple, preface to Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonour (London 1881) pp ix-x.
7 Anderson, Gerald H. ed The Theology of the Christian Mission (London 1961)Google Scholar. Summary from essays by Noel Davey, Gerald Anderson, Donald Miller and L. H. DeWolf, plus points from Evelyn Underhill, ‘Christianity and the Claims of other Religions’, in E. R. Morgan ed Essays Catholic and Missionary (London 1928).
8 Edited and introduced by an anthropologist, Elizabeth Tooker.
9 Axtell, James, ‘The Ethnohistory of Early America: A Review Essay’, William and Mary Quarterly 35 (January 1978) pp 110–44 Google Scholar; Axtell, James, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York 1981)Google Scholar; Kupperman, Karen, Settling with the Indians: the Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America 1580–1640 (London 1980)Google Scholar; Bowden, Henry W. and Ronda, James P. eds John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues (Westport Conn. 1980) pp 3–56.Google Scholar
10 Sublimis Deus Latin text and English translation in Francis MacNutt, Bartholomew de las Casas (New York 1909) pp 426–31.
11 Williamson, J. A. ed The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII (Hakluyt Society Cambridge 1962) p 211 Google Scholar.
12 Hakluyt ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ in E. G. R. Taylor ed Original Writings and Correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts (Hakluyt Society London 1935) 2 p 216.
13 Barbour, Philip L. ed The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter 1606–9 (Hakluyt Society Cambridge 1969) p 25.Google Scholar
14 Porter, H. C., The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian 1500–1660 (London 1979) ch 19Google Scholar, ‘Alexander Whitaker, Cambridge Apostle to Virginia 1611–17’ and ch 23, ‘The Judicious Master Thorpe 1620–22’; Eric Gethyn-Jones, George Thorpe and the Berkeley Company: A Gloucestershire Enterprise in Virginia (Gloucester 1982).
15 True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics ed Robert Kingdon (Ithaca 1965) p 257.
16 The Essential Thomas More ed J. J. Greene and J. F. Dolan (London 1967) p 210.
17 [Williams, A] Key [into the Language of America eds J. J. Teunissen and E. J. Hinz (Detroit 1973)] p 134. See Teunissen and Hinz, ‘Roger Williams, St Paul and American Primitivism’ Canadian Review of American Studies 4 (1973) pp 121—136.
18 Perkins, An Exposition upon the Epistle of Jude, in Works 3 (Cambridge 1609) p 545.
19 Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania ed L. B. Wright and V. Freund (Hakluyt Society London 1953) pp 60–61.
20 Works of Jewel ed J. Ayre PS (Cambridge 1848) 3 pp 197–99.
21 Parry, J. H., The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London 1966)Google Scholar ch 8 ‘The Spreading of the Faith’ esp p 164.
22 Key pp 145–46.
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.
24 Key p 302.
25 More, Works, Utopia p 222; Ralph Robinson translation in Everyman Library Utopia (London 1951) pp 120–21.
26 Sibbes, Richard, Works I p 389 Google Scholar. Rooy p 28.
27 Sermons ed E. Arber (London 1871) p 124.
28 Sig A 2r
29 Key p 133.
30 Thomas Hooker: Writings in England and Holland 1626–1633, eds G. H. Williams et al. (Cambridge Mass 1975) p 252.
31 Quoted in Rooy p 187.
32 ‘Moral and Religious Aphorisms’, no. 114, C. A. Patrides ed The Cambridge Platonists (London 1969) pp 327–28.
33 Hanke, Lewis, Aristotle and the American Indians (Chicago 1959) p 124 Google Scholar.
34 Merrill Jensen ed American Colonial Documents to 1116, EHD (London 1955) p 226.
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.