Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World by Edward E. Andrews (review)

Over the last two decades, early American scholars have made repeated attempts to shift the focus of religious studies away from the actions of individual ministers and onto the marginalized groups they sought to catechize, including displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans. In Native Apostles, Andrews extends the work of predecessors such as Joanna Brooks (American Lazarus; Oxford, 2003) and Kristina Bross (Dry Bones and Indian Sermons; Cornell, 2004) both temporally and geographically; Bross treats the evangelization of these racialized groups in the seventeenth century and Brooks the eighteenth, but Andrews surveys both while simultaneously expanding their focus on New England and Pennsylvania southward, down the North American seaboard into the Caribbean, and westward, across the Atlantic Ocean to the West African coast. The sheer breadth of materials, the surprising number of indigenous and Christian spiritual traditions that he reviews might have doomed a lesser scholar, yet Andrews ranges effortlessly across the Atlantic and an array of religious denominations to foreground a tradition of sacred leadership that native Africans and Amerindians forged for themselves.

Scholarly narratives of interracial evangelism in Puritan New England typically begin with the labors of John Eliot, but Andrews notes that “the first Christian missionary to Indians in Massachusetts was not John Eliot, but rather a Massachusetts native who traveled to a minister’s house in Salem, heard stories from the Bible, and then ‘went out amongst the Indians, and called upon them to put away all their wives save one, because it was a sinne’” (25). Because Eliot only traveled from his Roxbury pulpit to the Praying Indians at Natick once every two weeks, Andrews suggests that the native evangelists he ordained “were usually on their own” (53); as Andrews demonstrates repeatedly, in a wide variety of geographic and denominational contexts, “native preachers often outnumbered the white ones working beside them” and exercised more control over the work of evangelization than the European figures whose labors have been disproportionately well preserved in written records (7). A prevalent belief that Amerindian or African preachers could persuade their countrymen to Christianize more effectively than white ministers led Anglican, Moravian, and Congregational clergymen to rely on the oratorical skills of racialized preachers.

This logic—as well as a belief that Amerindian or African bodies would better withstand the rigors of itineracy and creole climates—was the justification for sending Philip Quaque to preside over spiritual affairs at Cape Coast Castle, appointing black teachers in the Charleston Negro School of South Carolina, and sending Native American ministers such as David Fowler to the Iroquoian nations. Andrews provides a number of excellent case studies, but his most important contribution to scholarship might be an appendix that identifies 275 African or Amerindian preachers; his list helps to demonstrate that appointing native religious leaders was a pervasive trend rather than an occasional practice. With Native Apostles, Andrews has reconstructed the lives and motives of these preachers. His book is an essential companion to Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening (Oxford, 2012), a study whose breadth will ensure its place on the bookshelf of any serious student of religion in the early modern Atlantic world.