Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic by Heather Miyano Kopelson (review)

Faithful Bodies is an unsettling book. As such it is a success, given that it aims to unsettle familiar categories in the fields of early American history and literature. Heather Kopelson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama, begins with the radically simple premise of refusing to accept the familiar narratives of English/Native contact as asymmetrical or unilateral, and instead conjures a colonial world where categories of faith and identity are evolving and contingent. A signature of this approach is Kopelson’s disavowal of the typical language used to describe deities: she instead refers repeatedly to “other-than-human persons,” which foregrounds “a parallel comparison between religions with and without extensive written theologies” (9). Over the course of the monograph, this perspective allows Kopelson to trace the gradual association of “white” with “Christian,” and “negro” or “Indian” with “heathen.” As Kopelson demonstrates, this transition is more historically inflected and later in emerging than scholars of the period usually assume.

Making this argument is an ambitious task and, as Kopelson herself points out, requires working through and across various subfields of early American and Atlantic studies, including the “history of slavery and the slave trade, puritan studies, history and archaeology of northeastern Natives and of indigenous Caribbean peoples, and history of sexuality and the body” (6). As the title of the book implies, this last category, the body, is central to the work Kopelson does to unsettle familiar English/ Native religious categories, enabling instead the “cross-confessional and cross-cultural exploration of seventeenth-century worldviews” (7).

The book’s first section offers three case studies of faith communities: one community in Bermuda and then two communities in southern New England, one Native and one English. To return to the embodied material practices of New England puritanism and the notion of the church as one body in Christ via the practices of peoples of color in Bermuda and New England renders them simultaneously less familiar and more legible, and serves as one of this book’s most striking interventions. From a methodological standpoint, too, Kopelson challenges those who balk at the difficulty posed by reconstructing the lives of seventeenth-century people of color from a “European-dominated archive that frames their lives as unknowable and unintelligible” (28). It is possible that some readers will be dissatisfied with Kopelson’s more aggressive interpretations, but the effort is laudable.

After establishing this framework, the book’s middle section considers “how English puritans categorized physical difference and related those categories to inner characteristics,” before turning to a series of “late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century performances that disrupted English puritan notions of faithful bodies” (104). Quakers, Catholics, Algonquians, and Bermudians of color, in various ways, offered “bodily performances [that] created alternate spaces that cut across English puritan definitions of the body of Christ and the body politic” (125). Given the enduring political investment in these notions, it is useful to consider how these ideas have been disrupted. Yet, what emerges over the course of these chapters is the gradual substitution of race for faith as the salient prerequisite for incorporation into an English body politic. This conflict emerges after King Philip’s War, when white Puritans in New England came to see “the categories of ‘Christian’ and ‘Indian’ [as] inherently incompatible” (191). Conversely, in Bermuda, being a slave and being a Christian were not incompatible, and indeed, these two forms of identity could be mutually constitutive.

The final section of the book explores intersections of faith and race as they bear on sexuality, procreation, and marriage. Kopelson’s attention to the language of laws against interracial sex hinges on a careful philological consideration of the word “abominable,” with the surprising conclusion that, in context, the abomination lay more in the act of fornication than in the racial identities of the perpetrators. The argument then turns from the language...