New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

Chapter 4 explains Indigenous Americans’ complicated responses to Christianity. Much Indigenous spirituality involved dreams and rituals rather than public professions of faith, and Indigenous Americans did not proselytize. Christian missionaries, in contrast, insisted on conversion; to them, it was a matter of saving souls. Indigenous Americans reacted to this missionary zeal in a variety of ways. Some converted, some resisted, and some found ways to incorporate elements of Christianity into their traditional spiritualism. Because the pressure to convert moved in only one direction, European communities maintained their religious cohesion, but Indigenous communities suffered deep internal divisions. Indigenous traditionalists often regarded Christian converts as cultural traitors. In New England, this religious dissension among Indigenous communities helped create an atmosphere of tension that led to King Philip’s War (1675-76). Meanwhile, Spain’s Catholic missionaries, in the spirit of the Inquisition, applied even greater pressure to convert and met with even more successful resistance, as evidenced by the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Notwithstanding these dramatic and violent episodes, Indigenous Americans’ response to Christianity “often lay somewhere between total acceptance and total rejection” (92).