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

5. Protestant Ornaments and Popish Relics: Maine's Material Culture of Livid Religion

           Protestant Ornaments and Popish Relics Maine’s Material Culture of Lived Religion With Norridgewock destroyed and Sebastien Rale dead, 1724 was a transitional year for Christian religious culture in colonial Maine. By 1727 the effective end of Dummer’s War signaled a turn of the tide favoring the English, who now possessed the means, in times of peace and war, to pressure, subdue, or placate the Eastern Indians.1 As the pace of conflict slowed and then stopped altogether, Maine’s evergrowing Protestant settler population became more capable of unambiguously creating and defending its geographical borders. Peace was also secured through the world of frontier trade, with “truckhouses ” appearing at the St. George’s, Kennebec, and Saco rivers after a peace treaty was signed at Casco Bay in 1726.2 Religious borders also became more clearly defined as, after Dummer ’s War, the religious culture of Maine’s English settlements came to be more predictably and recognizably Protestant.This represented a shift from the years between 1688 through 1727, when religious culture was shaped by an eclectic heritage, warfare between Christians , and geographically entangled borders and New World empires. During those years, Maine’s Protestant Christians were exposed to an alternative religious physical and material culture, which included 211 pious objects and practices, different forms of worship, and different ways of viewing the role Christianity played in lived lives. Sometimes , these encounters elicited hostile reactions from frontier Protestants , who knew “the spice of popery” in object and worship when they saw it. Other Maine settlers recognized the power of sacred objects in ways that transcended confessional boundaries. Other Protestants , however, used these objects to make common cause with Native Americans or reimagined them to render them suitable for their own spiritual needs. The Protestant encounter with Catholic religious material culture illustrates the connections these observers made, consciously or otherwise, to a pre-Reformation European Christian culture that predated the establishment of Protestant New World communities, as well as Protestantism itself. Recognizing the importance that pious objects held for Catholics, Protestants could relay powerful messages of local influence and control by destroying such objects and openly ridiculing religious practices. Accounts of such acts demonstrate Protestant awareness of objects that were explicitly Catholic when they saw them, suggesting that frontier encounter reinforced the mnemonic power of a Catholic past that still shadowed even orthodox Puritans. Furthermore, knowledge of the world of Catholic material culture, works, and religious gestures could be put to use by frontier Protestants, who, far from dismissing it all as so much “popish trash,” used this knowledge at times for personal gain or, more cannily, to comprehend the nature of Catholicism’s persistent appeal to Native Americans, and to suggest ways to appropriate and subvert it in the service of Protestant frontiers well defended. The encounter with Catholic material culture was an omnipresent feature and took many forms in the life of Protestant John Gyles, a native of Pemaquid who spent nine years in captivity before returning to New England and becoming a prominent frontier culture broker and politician. Gyles’s account of his childhood captivity among the Maliseet Indians, “Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, &c,” describes some of these encounters. Records of his work as a culture broker (as a provincial representative of English interests to the Maine Indians) contain more. Taken together, the 212 The Spice of Popery texts that document Gyles’s interactions with material and physical Catholicism cover almost every angle of the Protestant perspective on this encounter. For John Gyles, fear of Catholicism and its associated influences hung heavily over the Pemaquid of his childhood. The community was poor, remote, and loosely organized in terms of its Christian culture . At a time when even ministers and officials far from the frontier recognized the successes French missionaries enjoyed among the Eastern Indians, the colonists who were struggling to eke out a living in a settlement as far east as Pemaquid were subject to regular reminders of these successes. Sometimes they witnessed them in action. In the “Memoirs,” Gyles tells of settlers of this notoriously unchurched town who had their own vaguely anti-Catholic defenses, warning each other against the “snares and traps” of popery.3 The anti-Catholic aspects of Gyles’s early religious training, which focused on supernatural suspicions, came to a head in the final exchange the captive had with his mother before they parted for good...