Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (review)

Religion was central to the history of the Americas from Columbus through the eighteenth century and beyond. The European conquest and colonization of the western hemisphere are incomprehensible without the crusading spirit of Spanish conquistadores or John Winthrop's biblical basis for a sacred duty to colonize North America. The Portuguese, the French, and the Dutch all cited religious justifications for their imperial aspirations. At the same time the nature of spiritual conquest varied according to the timing, the geographical circumstances, and the native populations conquerors and settlers encountered. Catholics and Protestants did not share the same view of their missionary duties, but in both cases the legacy of their different religious settlements had a lasting effect on the emerging independent republics.

These common threads would make a comparative history of religion in the Americas a worthy project. Nonetheless, and despite evidence about the frequent movement of people and ideas across those boundaries, disciplinary and practical challenges continue to pose obstacles for comparative analysis. Scholarly fields remain largely organized along national and linguistic divisions. Moreover, few scholars can undertake studies that require travel to archives in multiple countries and documentation in several languages. In their effort to encourage comparative analysis, Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett conceived of "Religious Transformations" as an opportunity to analyze religion in the early modern Americas "across disciplines and nations." Their efforts yielded further evidence about the merits of comparative analysis and the challenges that lie ahead for those wishing to pursue it.

In the inaugural keynote lecture, "Religions on the Move," Sir John Elliott offered a sweeping history of the Spanish and English American empires that provided a model for integrating religion with the history of conquest and colonization from a comparative perspective. Elliott outlined four broad areas for comparison: first, the transfer of Christianity across the Atlantic; second, the ways in which that enterprise transformed religion in the Americas; third, the role of religion in shaping the distinctive character of colonial life; and fourth, the impact of the discoveries on religion back in Europe. From this perspective, a unilineal story of the implantation of Christianity on American soil fails to reflect the numerous religious transformations in the course of the European conquest and colonization of the New World. The swift triumph of Spanish missionaries in converting native populations proved short-lived. By the 1570s, concerns about backsliding among converts and the spread of heresies led to the establishment of the Inquisition in Lima and Mexico City. Settlers in New England followed a different model of religious organization that magnified the weakness of the Church of England back home. In both Spanish and English colonies the initial optimism about realizing the dream of a New Jerusalem in America gave way to a growing pessimism about the prospects for avoiding the sins of the Old World. Elliott concluded by reconsidering J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's observations that religion lay at the heart of the fundamental differences between the societies that emerged in the Spanish and English territories. In the former, the monopolistic control of the Catholic Church encouraged the establishment of a hierarchical society dominated by a strong central authority, whereas religious toleration in the English North American colonies fostered notions of individual freedom, equality, and manifest destiny.

In addition to the inaugural lecture, seventeen presentations by scholars from different fields covered the most varied aspects of religion in the early modern Americas; there was also one paper on Japan. Seven participants were scholars of literature, six historians, two art historians, and one an anthropologist. All defended the value of interdisciplinary approaches to topics such as race and gender, literature, art, and architecture, as well as exploration, conversion, and witchcraft. The chronological span was equally broad. Presentations on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries slightly outnumbered those on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; several covered more than one century in the span of twenty minutes. There was an equal number of presentations on English North America and Latin America...