Susan Juster: Killing, and dying, in the name of God in the New World
[Susan Juster is professor of history at the University of Michigan. Her recent publications include Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (1994) and Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (2003). She is currently working on a cultural history of religious violence in the American colonies.]
One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God’s will. "We must burn them!" the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; "We must burne him," John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?
The simple, and no doubt right, answer is that it was both. In early modern Europe, people were defined as much by what they believed as by how they looked. The line between Christian and non-Christian was the one fundamental divide that separated people, communities, and kingdoms into hostile camps, and it certainly does not surprise us to see seventeenth-century Christians (not to mention latter-day ones) justifying bloodshed in the name of God. In the British North American colonies, where the "sacred" had a more tenuous material and institutional existence and where legitimacy of any kind was harder to come by, it is nearly impossible to disentangle religious violence from other forms of aggression. One could easily say that all actions undertaken by European settlers to defend themselves and their communities in the vast missionary field that was the New World bespoke religious anxieties and aspirations. But having said this, it is still possible to place some phenomenological and interpretive boundaries around the problem of "religious violence." What forms of violence should we categorize as "sacred" violence, and how do we know when notions of the sacred are at stake in acts of violence, whatever form they might take? (I should note that, though I am using the terms sacred and religious interchangeably, there is a difference: as I’ve come to understand the terms, the sacred refers to all that which exists outside or transcends the human sphere, whereas religion refers to those practices and institutions that defend the sacred within the human sphere. Sacred is the more encompassing term and the less definable.)
A survey of the myriad ways Europe’s Christians found to kill and maim one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the age of the wars of religion—would uncover formal and rhetorical similarities in narratives of martyrdom, massacre, iconoclasm, judicial torture, and orchestrated assaults (both popular and state-sponsored) on dissenting communities. The colonial Indian wars of the seventeenth century fit very comfortably in this historical landscape; in numerous ways, these wars may best be understood as continuations and extensions of Europe’s wars of religion. Nearly identical forms of violence marked all these events (burning of innocents, dismembering of combatants and posthumous violations, destruction of sacred objects such as Bibles, cannibalism and other ritualized acts of consumption of one’s enemies, and a central preoccupation with blood and its purgative and purifying properties). And, perhaps more tellingly, these atrocities were often described in identical language from one genre to the next; the tortures endured by martyrs at the stake in the Old World, so meticulously and lovingly described by Reformation and Counter-Reformation propagandists, are exactly replicated in narrative detail in the graphic accounts of the Indian wars published by sympathetic missionaries in the New World. (The parallels are even more pronounced in Spain’s conquest of its Indian population.)
This is grim reading. And I will spare you the gory details. My point is simply that there are striking similarities between New World violence against indigenous peoples, perhaps the exemplary form of colonial violence, and the European wars of religion, which many historians consider the apex of human savagery in the early modern era. The formal and rhetorical similarities only take us so far, however, in understanding the role of the sacred in colonial violence. Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity. Certain thresholds (emotional, ideological, and perceptual) had to be crossed in order for violence to be interpreted and sanctioned as serving religious ends rather than secular ones. ...
Read entire article at Common-Place.org
One of the most chilling images in early American history is the deliberate firing of Fort Mystic during the Pequot War of 1637. Five hundred Indian men, women, and children died that day, burned alive along with their homes and possessions by a vengeful Puritan militia intent on doing God’s will. "We must burn them!" the militia captain famously insisted to his troops on the eve of the massacre, in words that echo the classic early modern response to heretics. Just five months before, the Puritan minister at Salem had exhorted his congregation in strikingly similar terms to destroy a more familiar enemy, Satan; "We must burne him," John Wheelwright told his parishioners. Indians and devils may have been scarcely distinguishable to many a Puritan, but their rhetorical conflation in these two calls to arms raises a question: Was the burning of Fort Mystic a racial or a religious killing?
The simple, and no doubt right, answer is that it was both. In early modern Europe, people were defined as much by what they believed as by how they looked. The line between Christian and non-Christian was the one fundamental divide that separated people, communities, and kingdoms into hostile camps, and it certainly does not surprise us to see seventeenth-century Christians (not to mention latter-day ones) justifying bloodshed in the name of God. In the British North American colonies, where the "sacred" had a more tenuous material and institutional existence and where legitimacy of any kind was harder to come by, it is nearly impossible to disentangle religious violence from other forms of aggression. One could easily say that all actions undertaken by European settlers to defend themselves and their communities in the vast missionary field that was the New World bespoke religious anxieties and aspirations. But having said this, it is still possible to place some phenomenological and interpretive boundaries around the problem of "religious violence." What forms of violence should we categorize as "sacred" violence, and how do we know when notions of the sacred are at stake in acts of violence, whatever form they might take? (I should note that, though I am using the terms sacred and religious interchangeably, there is a difference: as I’ve come to understand the terms, the sacred refers to all that which exists outside or transcends the human sphere, whereas religion refers to those practices and institutions that defend the sacred within the human sphere. Sacred is the more encompassing term and the less definable.)
A survey of the myriad ways Europe’s Christians found to kill and maim one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the age of the wars of religion—would uncover formal and rhetorical similarities in narratives of martyrdom, massacre, iconoclasm, judicial torture, and orchestrated assaults (both popular and state-sponsored) on dissenting communities. The colonial Indian wars of the seventeenth century fit very comfortably in this historical landscape; in numerous ways, these wars may best be understood as continuations and extensions of Europe’s wars of religion. Nearly identical forms of violence marked all these events (burning of innocents, dismembering of combatants and posthumous violations, destruction of sacred objects such as Bibles, cannibalism and other ritualized acts of consumption of one’s enemies, and a central preoccupation with blood and its purgative and purifying properties). And, perhaps more tellingly, these atrocities were often described in identical language from one genre to the next; the tortures endured by martyrs at the stake in the Old World, so meticulously and lovingly described by Reformation and Counter-Reformation propagandists, are exactly replicated in narrative detail in the graphic accounts of the Indian wars published by sympathetic missionaries in the New World. (The parallels are even more pronounced in Spain’s conquest of its Indian population.)
This is grim reading. And I will spare you the gory details. My point is simply that there are striking similarities between New World violence against indigenous peoples, perhaps the exemplary form of colonial violence, and the European wars of religion, which many historians consider the apex of human savagery in the early modern era. The formal and rhetorical similarities only take us so far, however, in understanding the role of the sacred in colonial violence. Ultimately, what seems to distinguish sacred violence from other acts of aggression is not its form but its intensity. Certain thresholds (emotional, ideological, and perceptual) had to be crossed in order for violence to be interpreted and sanctioned as serving religious ends rather than secular ones. ...
From the perspective of the historian of the European colonial experience, it seems reasonable to suggest that the act of burning alive was an expression of religious anathema, whether reserved for heretics or racial others, and that those who suffered (and perpetrated) this horror were understood to be fulfilling religious roles. Whether construed as heathens, infidels, apostates, or devil worshippers, Indians and Africans occupied a position of spiritual significance for their European neighbors, and acts of violence directed against these religious and racial outsiders were, I would argue, always acts of sacred violence. In this sense, the terrible wars of religion that destroyed so much of Europe did not end in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, or in 1689 with the Act of Toleration in Great Britain, or in 1710 with the final defeat of the Camisard Revolt in France but continued to gather victims well into the Age of Reason.