Sacred Violence in Early America by Susan Juster (review)

In Sacred Violence in Early America, Susan Juster sets out to elucidate the "logic" of such violence by analyzing "Protestant rhetoric" in "four arenas of discourse" (243, 244). In writing about each of those arenas she aims to identify continuities and discontinuities with early modern Europe. Specifically, she intends to illustrate the manner in which certain "discursive paradigms" were given new life in America. She argues that those paradigms often were altered in response to the challenges of the early American environment, but that all the while they retained a certain power and force that had animated them in Europe. Equally important to her discussion is the claim that by appreciating the "persistence of the material" we are able to understand how violence against Indians, sectarian battles, and the prosecution of blasphemy and other religious crimes were rooted in a common discourse, and ergo a common logic. Because material things, it would seem, remained important for English Protestants in America, this study aspires to speak at once about rhetoric and the material world. Juster thus treads a path charted by Ann Kibbey's The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (1986). Her analyses likewise echo important interpretations of Protestantism by material culture scholars David Morgan and Sally Promey. In a more general way her approach intersects with Thomas Rickert's recent Ambient Rhetoric (2013). In its perspective on materiality the book is more a rejoinder to than a collaboration with emergent feminist theorizing about culture and things as outlined in studies such as Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) and Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007).

The first discourse that Juster addresses is "blood sacrifice." Proposing that historians have underestimated the material focus of English Protestants she argues that colonial accounts of violence are rich with meditations on the body as sacrifice and sacrament. While noting a Protestant ambivalence to blood—Protestants were both attracted to it and repelled by it—she reasons that it nevertheless was key to English understandings of their encounters with Native Americans. The English "consumed" Indian lands and resources as they consumed native bodies. All were "sacrificial flesh" of one sort or another; and blood, especially, served as a symbol of that nourishing sacramental enterprise. Juster additionally proposes that consumption of the body by fire was related symbolically to the consumption of blood, so that the burning of religious others and especially of Native Americans—as, most dramatically, at Mystic during the Pequot War—was a species of blood sacrifice. The oft-cited allusion to Thomas Hooker asserting that the Indians at Mystic "should be bread for us" thus denotes an English Protestant sacramentalism than entrains in metonymy blood, fire, oven, bread, communion, Jesus, body, burnt sacrifice, hunger, wilderness, and consumption, among other things. In short, it is "a sacramental discourse of violence" (72).

The second theme explored is the "rhetorical paradigm for justifying violence against God's enemies" (75). The discussion focuses on shifting ideas about holy war, its relationship to just war, and the overlap between those two ways of imagining a campaign of violence. Juster cautions that there was no "pure" form of holy war in early modern England or in America and that, in fact, references to "holy war" in colonial writings were uncommon. Additionally, the constantly shifting colonial prioritization of one justification for violence over the other sometimes was less a matter of adherence to systematically reasoned principles than a performative reality prompted by the "heat of battle." That said, there was "a recurrence of certain key elements of the holy war paradigm" (108) in colonial literature, including approval of cruelty, the godly soldier, and calls for the extermination of enemies. There is ample evidence especially for the last of these, in the colonial depiction of religious enemies as Amalekites, the enemies of the Jews whom the Old Testament God ordered blotted out...