"Our First Duty Was to God and Our Next to Our Country": Religion, Violence, and the Sand Creek Massacre

In his 1961 work, Stan Hoig attempted to "merely trace the actions and events surrounding the Sand Creek Massacre and, by doing so, to fix responsibility, leaving the personal motivations to be questioned by others."¹ Hoig’s remains the definitive published work on the massacre itself, but his lack of explanations for personal motivations leaves the reader unfulfilled. His justification for doing so at the time was the contested nature of the events and the difficulty in divining individual motivations, especially when the perpetrators boasted a number of defenders among both their descendants and in the public at large.² But even in an event with a legacy as publicly contested as Sand Creek, we need to know not just how the massacre happened but also why.³

Fortunately, Elliott West has materially advanced our understanding of how conflict arose between whites and Indians on the Central Plains during the middle of the nineteenth century. His argument, that competition for scarce resources drove the conflict, is compelling, and by privileging environmental factors goes a long way toward explaining how whites and Indians came to blows in Colorado during the Civil War. But West’s explanation only tells us why there was conflict, not why it played out in the manner that it did. Many other Indian-white conflicts did not see the horrific brutality that marked Sand Creek, all underlain with a solid foundation of treachery and mistrust on the part of the perpetrators. Why did some white Coloradans feel the need to attack an encampment that other whites had given assurances of safety? And why, when they attacked that camp, did they act with such appalling brutality toward Indian men, women, and children that today, many accounts of the massacre still excise the details of the worst atrocities? These are questions that must be answered, not only to fully understand what happened at Sand Creek but also to understand generally what leads humans to commit war crimes and genocide, in hopes of preventing them from occurring again.

David Svaldi, by exploring the "rhetoric of extermination" that surrounds the massacre, has explained how Sand Creek might fit into a pattern of genocidal conflict between whites and Indians in the nineteenth century. But even his explanation leaves out an important factor, one that historians have often overlooked in explaining war crimes and atrocities, despite its presence in some of the most barbaric acts in recorded history: the role of religious ideology and indoctrination, especially among political and military leaders with their hands on the levers of state power.

In his recent work, Religion and Violence in Early American Methodism: Taking the Kingdom by Force, Jeffrey Williams has admirably chronicled the linkage between the development of the Methodist Church in the United States and an increasing acceptance of violence to both defend and extend the faith. He notes that "the Indian proved the most common object of Methodism’s newfound willingness to defend and even celebrate the use of violence."⁴ But, while chronicling the rise of the Methodists’ increasing acceptance of violence in the Early Republic, Williams does not fully extend the impact to the bloody conflict in the Plains during and after the Civil War. Thus, scholars have failed to make the connection between this important new development in our understanding of the early church and the tragic events at Sand Creek.

Excessive religious indoctrination, from the political leaders in the territory to the commanders and soldiers on the field, was a significant causal factor in the Sand Creek Massacre. Sand Creek was by no means an episode in a war of religious extermination, but religious beliefs and ideals, primarily those espoused in the evangelical Christianity privileged in the Second Great Awakening, conditioned soldiers and statesmen to see their opponents as inhuman, which in turn allowed the perpetrators and their defenders to turn to religious rhetoric to justify their actions on that fateful day in late November of 1864. It also highlights an...