The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (review)

I have been reading and writing about Christian missionary activity among American Indian peoples for close to forty years, and I cannot recall reading a book with so many insights regarding the precursors and patterns of that endeavor—in its Catholic and Protestant modes—and especially regarding the phenomena (not a single phenomenon) that we refer to as "conversion." In its dozen chapters The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas tells what motivated the colonial missionaries, what attracted and repelled the Indians, what were the demographic, commercial, and political contexts of their encounters, and how were evangelized meanings conveyed, received, misapprehended, and translated into something distinctly new. With its companion volume, Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, edited by Muldoon for the University Press of Florida in 1997, it should be required reading in the field of American missiology.

The editor and the various authors are keenly aware of the challenges facing those who yearned to replicate their faith in an unfamiliar land. Here was a New World whose very landscape had to be reconfigured with Christian nomenclature and forms. Here were people whose multiplicity of supernaturals permeated their lives and their environment and shaped the new Christian theology into something resembling polytheism. Missionaries staged theaters of conversion—in pageants, in architecture, in liturgy—and Indians often turned them upside down, in accepting as well as rejecting their import. Whether missionaries aimed to convert Indians one by one, or by the thousands, all at once, the effects seemed imperceptible, or contradictory. Whether the priests and friars competed with shamans—claiming to cure Indians of the invasive diseases introduced by the Europeans—or whether they shepherded Native youths into seminaries—educating them with the latest of European techniques—the process of change was slow, counted in generations rather than in months or years. Even populations confined to Praying Towns and Reductions found ways to hedge and escape. Indians had to be convinced of their innate sinfulness and the depravity of their traditional culture. They had to develop a sense of guilt. Catholic missionaries employed elaborate catechetical guides to Confession, not only to aid in an examination of individual conscience, but also to serve as a mechanism of spiritual acculturation for entire nations. But "sin" was a slippery semantic trope, nigh impossible to codify. The road to conversion was littered with misreckoned words.

And yet, in time, conversions accrued among the indigenous peoples of the New World, and despite the secular contexts, "religion was at the heart of their conversion experience" (p. 227). But to what effect? Did American Indians trade their native lands for a pearl of greater price? The authors contend that, rather than making Indian converts into better persons—more moral, more pious, healthier, better adjusted—"in the long run, missions contributed to the destruction of the overwhelming majority of tribes, either physically or culturally" (p. 211). In order to test that thesis, the authors of The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas would do well to read about the past few centuries of American Indian Christians, the descendants of those early converts.