Religious Intolerance, America, and the World

A History of Forgetting and Remembering

John Corrigan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226314099
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it's an expression of a trauma endemic to America's history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence. Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists' intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic's foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they've abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America's own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

1

Proscribing Amalekites: Violence, Remembering, and Forgetting in Early America

Colonists, Indians, and War

The British who arrived in North America in the early seventeenth century fantasized the land as empty, a vacuum domicilium. They construed their settlement of its northern coast, a place they called New England, as a refiguration of the delivery of the Jews into the Land of Canaan. New England, the Promised Land given them by God, was in their imagining theirs before they arrived. They claimed land inhabited by the natives, offering no compensation for it except the promises of Christian theology. They brought confidence in their superiority to Native Americans alongside an uneasy sense of their similarity to them. Even as they took Indian land, they sought to understand their acts of oppression as gestures of collaboration.

Roger Williams, who settled in Plymouth Colony in 1631, thought harder than most about relations between the British and Indians. He addressed a complaint to King Charles, probably in 1632, challenging the British claim to land occupied without compensation. While he subsequently answered for it in court, the treatise itself did not survive. In a written summary, John Cotton, the religious overseer of the community at Massachusetts Bay, made plain the gist of it. Indians hunted over great expanses of land, and tended to the environment, such as by periodically burning out undergrowth, in order to maximize its bounty. “As noble men in England possessed great parks, and the King great forests in England only for their game, and no man might lawfully invade their property,” related Cotton, “so might the natives challenge the like propriety” of English settlement.1

Expelled from Massachusetts for his theological opinions as much as for his views on social order and relations with Indians, Williams established himself farther south on land he purchased from the Narragansett. He remained critical of New Englanders who displayed a “depraved appetite” for “great portions of land.” Writing from Rhode Island to Major John Mason in 1670, he warned that land was “one of the gods of New England, which the living and most high Eternal will destroy and famish.” Castigating the British for their mistreatment of the Indians, Williams characterized his countrymen as gluttons who chased land as if it were “like platters and tables full of dainties.” In so doing, the British “but pull or snatch away their poor neighbors’ bit or crust” of bread, worsening the Indians’ “continual troubles, trials, and vexations.”2

Major Mason himself was well acquainted with the Indians, having served as captain in the British force that, with its Indian allies, fought the Pequot War. Decades after that war, and seven years after receiving Williams’s plaintive letter on behalf of the Indians, Mason published his own Brief History of the Pequot War. It amounted to a cataloguing of some of the more spectacular “trials and vexations” about which Williams previously had written Mason. In tone and perspective, it in fact was a proud memoir of the British massacre of Pequots at Mystic in 1637.

Mason’s, and New England’s, Pequot War began in 1636 against the background of contestations involving land and the fur trade among the Pequot, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Algonquians, and Mohegans. The English and Dutch colonies sought stable relationships with the Indians of the Connecticut River Valley for the purpose of trade and growth. They calculated that often it was worthwhile to pursue those relationships through force. A series of confrontations between the English and Indians, resulting in deaths on both sides and the destruction of several Niantic and Pequot villages, prompted an English military campaign. The central event in that campaign was the surprise attack by the English, together with their Narragansett and Mohegan allies, on the Pequot fortified village of Mystic. Overwhelmed by the dawn attack, the Pequot were wiped out. After initially entering the village to fight, the English chose to burn it, and stationed their forces around it to kill any who sought to escape. The resulting inferno took the lives of 500–700 Pequot men, women, and children. Several survived to be taken prisoner or disappear into the woods.

Captain Mason led the attack and began the burning that some historians refer to as a genocide.3 His account, published in 1677, was conspicuously republished in 1736 by Thomas Prince and then again in 1897 with three other seventeenth-century accounts of the war, in a collection edited by the Ohioan Charles Orr. Mason wrote that once the fire was kindled, “the Indians ran as men most dreadfully amazed.” Seeking to escape the English who had entered the village, “such a dreadful terror did the Almighty let fall upon their spirits, that they would fly from us into the very Flames where many of them perished.”4 The English with “great Rejoycing” recognized that “God was above them, who Laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven.” Such was “the just Judgment of God” upon the “heathen” and a show of the mercy of God toward the English.5 Mason exulted: “Our Mouths were filled with Laughter and our Tongues with Singing.” The delivery of the faithful to victory was plain: “Was not the Finger of God in all of this?”6 Mystic was, as historian Bernard Bailyn wrote, “holy war.”7 It was battle, recalled Rev. Thomas Shepard of Cambridge, in which the English triumphed because of their Christian faith: “the Providence of God guided them to . . . the divine slaughter.”8

Other accounts of the battle at Mystic add human detail and echo the Christian certainties of God’s intervention and the justice enacted upon the heathen Pequot. The slaughter was too much for the younger English soldiers, wrote Captain John Underhill, one of the leaders of the attack on Mystic. They blanched at how “great and doleful was the bloody sight . . . to see so many souls lie gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.”9 The Indian allies of the English, said Underhill, cried out that the burning of the Pequot was no good, because “it is too furious and slays too many men.”10 Wondering if Christians should not show more compassion and mercy, he affirmed that “Sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.” And there was “sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”11 For Mason, similarly, God was “burning them up in the fire of his wrath, and dunging the ground with their Flesh.”12 In the end, Mason summarized it in a telling turn of phrase: “the Face of God is set against them that do Evil, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth.”13 The clergyman Philip Vincent, present in New England during the war, concurred: “the Pequetans are now nothing but a name.”14 The General Assembly of Connecticut endeavored to make sure of the erasure by outlawing even the name, including for the few survivors, and rendering the Pequot River the Thames and the site of the village New London.

Charles Orr, in his introduction to the collected accounts of the conflict, believed that the Pequot War was a defining event for those who lived through it, and for their descendants. “No event in the early history of New England,” he asserted, “had a greater influence on its destiny than that known as the Pequot War.”15 The war indeed occupied the memories of early New Englanders and served subsequently as an important point of reference for their understanding of their relationship with the Indians. It is important as well for its instancing of the habitual mingling of violence and religion in early America. And it illustrates the complexity of encounters between English and Indians. The English, casting Indians as heathen, were deeply suspicious of them, suspecting them of collaboration with the Devil and countless corruptions, from their filthy sexuality to their duplicity, cruelty, and physical and mental inferiority. Roger Williams, who studied their languages assiduously, who insisted on paying them for land, and who served them as broker and negotiator in their encounters with other English, confessed at various times that he was terrified of them for the evil in their hearts.16

But as much as the English registered their hatred of Indians, they also expressed their admiration for them. In the accounts of the Pequot War are references to the mettle of the Pequot and their display of virtue, and praise specifically for their courage in battle. Captain Underhill observed on the one hand that Indians typically played at war, behaving as if the “fight is more for the pastime than to conquer and subdue enemies.” But at the same time he declared that in the midst of the conflagration at Mystic that exterminated them, “most courageously these Pequeats behaved themselves.” There were, he said, “many courageous fellows unwilling to come out . . . and so perished valiantly.”17 Roger Williams became convinced, in the aftermath of the Pequot War, that there was more in common between the Christian English and Native Americans than he had thought. He saw virtue in the Indians, and he saw violence in the English. The war “convinced Williams that religion never justified violence and that Native Americans and Christians shared a moral code.”18

The Pequot War of 1637 illustrates the manner in which religion supplied an intellectual and emotional framework for violence against Indians in New England. It was a furnace, indeed, in which was forged a crude self-understanding of New England among the British who colonized it. King Philip’s War, fought forty years later, was an equivalent disaster for the Indians and as profound a lesson for the English as the Pequot campaign. That lesson was again about the differences between Indians and English, the instabilities of their relationship, and the mixed sorrow and jubilation of a war. Less visible to the English at the time but apparent to later generations, it was a lesson about the role of religion in justifying and prosecuting war, and about resemblances alongside disparities.

King Philip’s War was led on the Indian side by Metacom, son of a Wampanoag chief known to the Pilgrims at Plymouth as Massasoit. In 1675, amid increasingly frictive relations between the Wampanoag and the English colonists, he directed a year-long offensive against English towns, aided by Indian allies from other tribes who remained aligned with him for various lengths of time. Destroying a dozen towns, killing many English, and severely disrupting the social and commercial structures of southeast New England, the war eventually spread northerly as far as Maine, where it festered and erupted in periodic violence until the middle of the next century. In the south, English losses were about ten percent of the population. Indian losses by mid-1676 were as much as half their population. As Metacom’s allies left him, and the Mohawks, entering the conflict, inflected severe losses on the Wampanoag, the acute phase of the war wound down.

Metacom, known as King Philip, was killed in Rhode Island during the summer of 1676. The English cut his body into pieces, which they hung in trees. They placed his head on a pike and brought it to Plymouth, where Cotton Mather, a rhetorician of religious war, reputedly made off with the jaw as a trophy. The bone of the Indian was a remembrance—of war, of providence, and of unpredictability. In the end, “for Cotton Mather, as for his father, King Philip’s War was a holy war, a war against barbarism, and a war that never really ended.”19 Mather, for all his cheerleading of Christian retributive justice, at the same time lamented that the battles with Indians had taken a long-term toll: “But our Indian Wars are not over. We have too far degenerated into Indian Vices. . . . We have shamefully Indianized in all these abominable things.”20

New Englanders, prolix in their depictions of tragedy since earliest settlement, wrote at length about King Philip’s War. Mather’s Brief History of the Warr with the Indians (1676), William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Wars in New England (1677) and, eventually, Mary Rowlandson’s popular narrative of her captivity among the Indians, like many other writings, celebrated the god on the side of the English. Rowlandson’s narrative, however, also depicted the complexity of relations between Indians and English. Her eleven weeks of captivity blurred for her the categories of savage and civilized, heathen and Christian.21 Eating Indian food and liking it, observing Indians in English dress, recognizing that some prayed to the Christian God as she did, and perceiving even how her own behavior drifted into Indian ways complicated for her the conceptualization of Indians as the polar opposite of the Christian colonists. That sense of the fluidity of roles played by English and Indians was present elsewhere among New Englanders who left literary traces of their experiences of the crises of the seventeenth century. As a collective memory it endured.

The Indian Wars were crises that bore deep and lasting consequences.22 Benjamin Tompson’s long poem New England’s Crisis (1676) typified the expression of popular understanding of King Philip’s War as an epic confrontation of Protestants with “Pagan spirits,” who, possibly urged on by “some Romish agent,” indulged their “lust to make a Christian bleed.” For Tompson, the “crisis” was war in the usual sense of bloodshed and loss, of “unheard of crueltyes.” But the poem additionally was apocalyptic in tone, a bloody witness to the deficiencies of New England Christians.23 The tragedies of killing and loss were interwoven with religious ideas about just punishment, about God’s displeasure with Christians straying from their commitments to their faith. It was a warning, and a reminder of the precariousness, the instability, of the world. It was a call to New Englanders to remember who they were, but a call in the form of a question: “Who are we?”

New Englanders were, first of all, an anxious people. They worried about their piety. They wondered if it was enough and if their choices were moral choices, acceptable to God as well as to the community. They fretfully examined their lives for failings, intent on reviewing every aspect of their behavior and feeling, rarely expressing satisfaction that they had mapped their sins adequately. For such a meticulous religiosity, little that happened was free of religious meaning. Shoeing horses, gazing into glowing embers on the hearth, or picking apples could be occasions for profound spiritual realizations. Traumas likewise were religious business. War with the Indians, layered with fear, joy, guilt, hope, and anguish, and with ideas about the destiny of a chosen people in a Promised Land, was a fraught experience. Narrated into the larger, apocalyptic religious worldview of New Englanders, it acquired over time a powerful historical gravity. It survived within the collective as a memory not only of battle, but of who New Englanders were, how violence was involved in their religious calling to North America, and how the line between good and evil, savage and civilized, English land and Indian land, could be vague.

Scholarly discussion of crisis in early New England has taken as points of departure a number of events, including the Antinomian crisis, commercial transformations, the Indian Wars, and turbulent politics in England. Scholars have been particularly interested, however, in how ...