Politics, Profit, and Practice in Early American Religion

In Protestant Empire, Carla Gardina Pestana argues that religion was more important than any other “cultural practice” in colonization and the making of the British colonial world. Religion animated migration, justified conquest, “sorted people into migration streams,” and helped structure authority in the colonies (p. 6). If, at first blush, this seems an unsurprising thesis, what distinguishes this remarkable book is its scope—Pestana moves from Scotland to the Bahamas to Maryland with the apparent ease of the ballet dancer who makes all those grand jetes and developes look effortless—and Pestana’s insightful readings of relatively familiar episodes in American history, readings that tease out the religious underpinnings of episodes like Leisler’s Rebellion and King Philip’s War.

One of Pestana’s central interests is the religious diversity—and concomitant fractiousness—of the English Atlantic world. From the start, Pestana argues, the multiplicity and strife of English religious life was mapped onto English colonies. Although the Crown made some effort to ensure that only those loyal to the Church of England would migrate—in the 1630s, Charles I went so far as to order port authorities to interview all departing passengers about their religious affiliation—English colonies reproduced the range of English church life: Anglicans, Catholics, and separatists all found their way across the ocean. (Indeed, the desire for a little religious breathing room was precisely what motivated some dissenters to migrate.) The colonial world was, in fact, more religiously varied than England: neither Massachusetts Bay nor Jamestown, after all, was a religious tabula rasa; both were home to Native Americans who had their own religious traditions. The late seventeenth century saw an increase in religious diversity, as French Huguenots and German-speaking Pietists migrated, and as ever more Africans were forced to the English colonies, bringing with them traditional West African religious practices.

Despite the use of the cheery term “diversity,” Pestana does not imagine that the coming together of these many religious groups was without friction. Indeed, she finds religious tension lurking in political and military events that appear, at first blush, to have little to do with religion. Both King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion, Pestana argues, had religious undertones. New England’s Indians took up arms because they wanted to resist colonists’ encroachments on their land, but also because they wanted to resist the spread of European Christianity. In their attacks on colonists’ settlements, native fighters sometimes desecrated religious objects like Bibles. In turn, colonists experienced a religious revival of sorts during the war, with men and women embracing and finding solace in the practice of covenant renewal. Furthermore, Puritans interpreted the war religiously, narrating the violence in a providential key: the war was a punishmen, or a test, or both, and it could and should ultimately reaffirm God’s sovereignty and quicken the spiritual lives of godly men and women. Bacon’s Rebellion was similarly inflected. Governor Berkeley interpreted Bacon’s actions as a challenge to the divinely ordained monarchy, but Bacon would not let Berkeley lay sole claim to religious language—Bacon argued that he was trying to rescue the colony for the king, and insisted that the “most sacred Majestie” was his “Refuge and Sanctuary” (p. 136).

Pestana also identifies witch hunts as moments when the political and the religious intersected. Acknowledging that “no scholar has been able to come up with a perfectly satisfying explanation” for witch hunts (p. 151), Pestana focuses, in her discussion of Salem, on the political disruptions that preceded the frenzy: the...