The Antinomian Crisis: Prelude to Puritan Missions

When in 1646 missionary John Eliot brought Puritanism to American Indians in the first and largest Puritan missionary enterprise, it was a Puritanism that had been radically reworked by the Antinomian Crisis of 1636–38. This fact has been overlooked because it was not understood until recently that the altercation with "antinomian" Anne Hutchinson authorized multiple orthodoxies rather than the single orthodox errand that had been previously assumed.¹ In fact, the phoenix which arose from the ashes of the crisis as American Puritanism was not, I would like to suggest, the orthodox spiritist Puritanism that arrived here in the Great Migration of 1630. Instead, it was a surprisingly works-oriented variant of Puritanism. Most importantly for Algonquian native peoples, this variant allowed wide latitude for fashioning a vibrant, autonomous, indigenous Puritanism.

John Eliot—who was to become the "Apostle to the Indians"—was a significant figure in the trials of Anne Hutchinson. His words in the trial transcripts are in perfect concord with those of his supporter,Thomas Shepard, the key ministerial influence on the "preparationist" side of the dispute, which tendered the idea that works could prepare one for salvation. Eliot wrote the first book from America on Puritan missions, and Thomas Shepard wrote the second (Morrison 263; Cogley 263; Tracts 2). Each book was published within a year of the events described in them, and became influential in shaping subsequent events in the crucial first years. Within five years the Indians themselves would have a hand in seeing their own confessions into print in England. Critics who have been concerned to protect downtrodden Indians from unscrupulous missionaries have unfortunately glossed over this important moment in Algonquian history. I follow historian Ann Kibbey's lead in noticing that the Antinomian Crisis had a direct and dramatic effect upon native peoples. Kibbey has carefully documented the genocide against Pequots which arose from the excitement of the crisis. How ironic that the one historical moment served as stimulus to the vanquishing of the Peqots as a military power and, on the other hand, to the circumstances leading to Massachuset strength and autonomy.

Alqonquian Puritans in general and Massachuset Puritans in particular were not forced into Puritanism against their will. Certainly, they were subjected to pressures which they had to negotiate. If I say that we need to consider certain identities of particular native peoples other than that of victimhood, this is not to mitigate the suffering of a great many people throughout the region in this period, nor to exonerate evildoers. But it should be emphasized that the preparationist strain of Puritanism, with its active agenda for public accountability, served the ends of certain Massachuset people. By contrast, the Puritanism of Hutchinson and the early John Cotton, with its emphasis on a seemingly passive and certainly more internal infusion of grace from the Spirit of God directly to the spirit of the individual, needed to be displaced in order to make possible strong Massachuset adaptations of Puritanism.²

For years, scholarship on John Eliot and the Indians was reduced to borrowed generalizations from other cross-cultural contacts in the seventeenth century. These generalizations can be summarized with an image, that of the missionary pressuring dispirited natives into conversion. Fortunately, the most recent scholarship on Eliot has been undoing some of this damage. I want to build on this new energy, and begin by enumerating the ways in which this image (missionary pressuring dispirited natives into conversion) does not account for the specific motives of the Massachuset of the praying towns, even if it is an apt emblem for other parts of the early modern world.

As I shall argue, the missionary was not primarily a missionary but rather a preacher with a full-time pastorate which did not allow him (not to mention any other whites)much time with the Indians. Second, he did not pressure the Indians to become Calvinist but in many ways applied pressure in the opposite direction. Third, although the Indians had been ravaged by disease several times over two decades, the Indians who embraced Puritanism were not more dispirited than their immediate...