Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion, and Colonialism in Early New England (review)

In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company chose as its seal the now-famous drawing of a New England Native standing in a barren wilderness clutching a bow and arrow and saying, “Come over and help us.” Lesser known, perhaps, is an Indian peace medal from 1676 that similarly depicts a New England Native standing alone in a barren wilderness holding a bow and arrow, but the 1676 Native is speechless, has long hair, and two perfectly round breasts. It is precisely the meaning of this gendered transformation that R. Todd Romero wishes us to consider in Making War and Minting Christians. These images represent English perceptions of Indians as increasingly un-manly over the course of the seventeenth century, to be sure, but they also signal another change wrought by colonialism, warfare, and evangelization: the removal of the very things that allowed Indian men to live out either English or Indian masculine ideals in terms of subsistence, community leadership, and spiritual values.

This book is largely structured around Native and Anglo-American understandings of masculinity, religion, and warfare between 1620 and 1676. Although Native and English societies “shared some cultural ground” on these issues, “they rarely recognized such commonalities, often focusing instead on differences” (p. 20). Drawing from a seemingly exhaustive and close reading of English print sources, a number of material objects, and a variety of Indian oral traditions, Romero argues that “Native and Anglo-American conceptions of masculinity unfolded in counterpoint over the course of the seventeenth century and were central to the development of colonialism” (p. 7). To make his case, Romero draws from an impressive number of episodes and exchanges that illustrate the various colonial and Native approaches to the issues at hand. Natives demonstrated masculinity through strenuous physical games like hubbub, particular modes of speech-making, hunting, and warfare. For English colonists, manliness was demonstrated through patriarchy, particular kinds of labor (like farming), and warfare. Colonial officials sought to bend Native gender roles—particularly related to masculinity—to a thoroughly European ideal, even as they praised the few ways in which Indian masculine ideals already met English standards. Through colonial legislation and especially through the evangelization process and the resultant praying towns, John Eliot and other English missionaries and leaders tried to reshape Indian men and boys by curbing Indian games, encouraging them to grow gardens instead of fishing and hunting, cutting their hair short, attending church, observing the Sabbath, praying, accepting Christianity, wearing English clothes, providing spiritual leadership in their households, and fighting more like English men. “Manliness remained an important measure of the success of missionary efforts and colonization, ” Romero observes, because, in the words of the English minister Thomas Shepard, “it was necessary for the English to ‘make men’ of the Indians before they could ‘make them Christians’” (p. 74, emphasis in original). Ultimately, however, this project failed, and Indian men—especially praying Indian men—found that by the 1680s they had been stripped of the resources necessary (like land) to live as men by either English or Indian standards.

As a whole, this book is a nuanced and lively rereading of a time period that can often feel well traveled. As Romero convincingly shows, gendered language appeared everywhere, from the opening moments of English colonization of New England through King Philip’s War and even beyond (that Cotton Mather devoted a whole treatise to the topic of “Manly Christianity” in 1711 is just one such nugget). And there can be no doubt that Romero is right that Europeans constantly measured Indian cultures against their own (including manliness) and found them lacking. But in other cases the encounters that Romero proposes as “obviously gendered” (p. 5) are not so self-evident or convincing such as the opening few pages describing Giovanni de Verrazano’s...