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  • Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England by Julius H. Rubin
  • Jennifer Snead
Julius H. Rubin, Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Pp. 405. $62.52.

In his Tears of repentance: or, a further narrative of the progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians of New-England (London, 1653), Puritan missionary John Eliot reported that despite the eagerness his Massachusetts converts displayed toward the observations of “Church-Estate, Baptism, and the rest of the Ordinances of God,” he for many years had “delayed them upon this point, That until they were come up into Civil Cohabitation, Government, and Labor, which a fixed condition of life will put them upon, they were not so capable to be betrusted with that Treasure of Christ, lest they should scandalize the same, and make it of none effect.” Finally, however, the Indians “now being come under Civil Order, and fixing themselves in Habitations, and bending themselves to labor, as doth appear by their works of Fencings, Buildings, &c. . . . my argument of delaying them from entering into the Church-Estate, was taken away” (Eliot, 1–2). Eliot’s qualms about the indoctrination of his spiritual charges into the ordinances of the Christian faith before they were habituated into behaving like good Europeans were part of the Protestant debate over “civilizing” versus “Christianizing” the indigenous peoples of New England. Which should come first, an inward turn to Christian belief or an outward performance of Christian living and work habits? And what was the proper relationship between the two?

Julius H. Rubin revisits the civilize/Christianize question from the perspective of those Native American converts themselves: the “Praying Indians” of Eliot’s Reformed Natick and Massachusetts Colony praying towns in the later seventeenth century; the New Light Christian Indians of Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, Stockbridge and Brotherton; the Moravian converts of early-1740s Shekomeko and Pachgatgoch; and the communities established by Samson Occom in Brothertown and New Stockbridge in the 1770s. Turning away from the issue of missionaries’ intentions, Rubin instead asks what it was about Reformed Protestantism that so many Native Americans found appealing. Following Jean O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (2010) and michael V. Wilcox’s The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest (2009), both of which explore the ideological construction of “terminal narratives” of Native extinction that helped to justify colonial conquest (Rubin, 3), Rubin refuses to consider the indigenous converts of colonial New England as either passively victimized by colonial aggression or as actively resisting and subverting it. Instead, [End Page 102] he argues, Christian Indians must be seen as “complex human actors,” agents “selectively [making] choices about incorporating English culture as they struggled to preserve their communities and recreate themselves and their traditions” (2). Protestant theology, piety, and morality were crucial components of that selective incorporation. As Rubin convincingly demonstrates over eight chapters, these Native Americans “embraced Reformed Protestantism as a form of ethnic renewal” (305), blended Christianity with their traditional lifeways, and created “unique and hybrid Christian Indian identities and communities” (2).

To shift focus away from the reduction, acculturation, or even “cultural genocide” that terminal narratives of Native extinction so often posit as the inevitable results of conversion, Rubin’s methodology combines ethnohistory and the sociology of religion. He triangulates his readings of primary sources—Native conversion narratives, missionary reports, journals, letters, and autobiographical accounts—with Max Weber’s phenomenology of how religious experience structures coherent worldviews, and with William Sturtevant’s concept of ethnogenesis as the self-conscious construction of ethnic identities among minorities and marginalized groups. Seen in this light, Reformed Protestantism provided the Christian Indians of New England with the building blocks they needed to reconstruct a culture and society decimated by lethal epidemics, brutal wars, and colonial expansion. Rubin demonstrates how Eliot’s “Praying Indians” found in Protestant religious melancholy and penitence a viable way to make meaning out of the collective trauma that followed the decimation of their populations after smallpox, plague, and King Philip’s War of 1637. “Praying Towns” and...

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