The Spice of Popery: Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier

6. “The Lord . . . Will Greatly Reward Me”: The Religious Dimensions of Wordly Goods

          “The Lord . . . Will Greatly Reward Me” The Religious Dimensions of Worldly Goods In Maine’s contest to establish a dominant Christian culture, even commonplace objects were recast for religious purposes.The elevation of the mundane into the sacred, in the form of inherited land and goods, was one of the few practical measures to curb persisting religious incursions that Maine’s English settlers could control. In their hands, this control moved from the purely reactive into the proactive by offering goods to Catholic convert children who renounced their new religion and returned to live out their lives as Protestants. Applying strictly religious eligibility tests for receiving property and goods via inheritance was a prerogative of Maine parents, or, in their absence , male siblings. The province’s Protestants used inheritances to save souls from religious corruption, reconstitute families and their associated God-ordained hierarchies, and exercise whatever power they could to ensure that the land of the Province of Maine, as claimed by Massachusetts, flourished in the name of Protestant kings. Still, as with many other elements of frontier religious culture, the approaches and outcomes varied. Many colonists made the distribution of family wealth contingent not only on return to New England, but on a renewed commitment to Protestantism. Others had a more complex 243 response that took into account not only their own religious scruples but the wishes of their religiously errant loved ones and their particular life situations. The religious culture of Maine was imprinted with vast and varied experiences and circumstances that contextualize a complicated world where religious identity and belief extended beyond faith-based identities, religious objects and places, and imperial boundaries established by European religious rivalries. The impulse to extend sacred significance to worldly goods such as land and money was born of an ongoing post-Reformation im244 The Spice of Popery pulse described by Robert Scribner, who observed that “evangelical forms of consecration reemerged and multiplied, and were applied to a wide variety of objects: church foundation stones, new or restored churches, pulpits, fonts, organs, alters, bells, [and] cemeteries.”1 In this formulation, land took on particular religious importance. Christian explorers and would-be colonizers marked the regions of the New “The Lord . . . Will Greatly Reward Me” 245 Figure 11. Jesuit Joseph Aubery’s 1713 map shows Maine from the perspective of Wabanaki settlement and French religious influence. Courtesy of the Newberry Library. World they claimed by erecting crosses, which, despite Protestant disdain for religious symbols, stood as universally understood icons of European presence and intentions. As Christian settlements progressed , the land became marked with more overt religious symbols. The most apparent were church structures, church yards, and cemeteries , which sacralized the landscape by involving, as Scribner points out, “the dead as well as the living” in the colonial enterprise.2 The Jesuit Joseph Aubery recognized the powerful interplay between spirit and landscape when he mapped Maine from the French colonial perspective to press post-Utrecht land claims that favored their interests.3 Aubery’s cartographical interpretation of Maine is conspicuous for its overt Catholic symbolism infused in the visualized landscape, which the Jesuit considered to be sacralized by the presence of Catholic missions. The pictorial representations of the missions themselves, which depict the Maine settlements as peripheral to Abenaki country, loom large in comparison to the small dots representing the English settlements of Kittery, York, Wells, and Falmouth .4 Tellingly, Aubery’s depiction of the English settlements shows no buildings at all, let alone those connected to religion. Lacking the exterior symbolism of Catholicism, meetinghouses would not have stood out as particularly “churchlike” to a Jesuit (except, of course, Sebastien Rale, who knew the settlements firsthand) or any Catholic who had never seen the community. From a Catholic perspective, they lacked the overt sacred connections between land and structure. Maine Protestants, however, had their own concepts of land’s ties to God. For Puritans in particular, land was made sacred through its connection to the God-ordained family patriarchy and hierarchy.The acquisition, mastering, and passing on of land to new generations were also indications of Providence’s favor.Thus inherited lands and property became sacred in their own right, passing from one generation to the next, and allowing families to follow divine mandates to thrive, multiply, and use settlement of the land to spread their influence . In Maine, however, family members lost to captivity and other borderland vagaries...