Tears of Repentance is a well-researched study of how and why Native Americans actively embraced or rejected the Protestant forms of Christianity proffered by Europeans in New England in the colonial period. The title is, of course, borrowed from John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew's Tears of Repentance (1653), which includes twenty-two conversion narratives of Native Americans. A sociologist of religion by training, Julius Rubin here uses the approaches of historical anthropology and ethnohistory in an attempt to restore Native Americans as historical agents in their own right, rather than as passive victims of European occupation. Rubin argues that, when accepted, evangelical pietistic religion transformed native religious identities and communities by giving rise to the hope that converts would be favored by the Christian God, who would relieve their suffering and provide this-worldly benefits of health and prosperity, while strengthening them to more effectively resist the negative aspects of colonialism.
The study is divided chronologically into three periods: (1) the seventeenth century in New England, focusing on the missionary activities among the Wampanoags of John Eliot and Thomas Mahew Jr. in southeast Massachusetts and on Martha's Vineyard; (2) the eighteenth-century missionary work of John Sergeant among the Mahicans in Stockbridge, Gideon Hawley among the Mashipees, David Brainard among the Lepapes in New Jersey, and the Moravian missions at Shekomeko and Pachgatgoch, and the native convert Samson Occom's evangelizing among the Montauketts; and (3) the early republican era when the Stockbridge community moved to Oneida in an attempt to create New Stockbridge and the Brothertown experimental utopian community.
In scope, Tears of Repentance is among the most ambitious studies of the Native American's lived religious experience to date. Rubin successfully culls the extant sources for the voices of Native Americans or other traces of their encounter with Christianity. Nevertheless, there are a few awkward moments. For instance, shortly after noting that concepts like “conversion narrative“ and “religious melancholy“ were “too limiting“ to capture the lived reality of complex human agents (x), he goes on to claim that “Christian Indian identity from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was forged in the crucible of religious melancholy” (6–7).
Part of the problem is no doubt a result of Rubin's having authored two earlier studies focused on religious melancholy—Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) and The Other Side of Joy: Religious Melancholy Among the Bruderhof (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). It was apparently hard for him to abandon this concept. However, this problem is compounded by Rubin's premature assumption that “we will never know with certainty the emotional economy and feeling rules that characterized Native cultures before the period of contact and colonization” (40). While technically true since there are no pre-contact written texts, had Rubin culled the earliest sources available, including The Jesuit Relations, and expanded his purview to include Roman Catholic encounters, he would have found many examples of ritualized weeping among Native Americans. It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine with any precision how Native Americans adopted and adapted particular aspects of pietistic protestantism, including the ritualized shedding of tears, if one does not dig into all of the available sources. Did Native American converts to Roman Catholicism shed the same or different ritualized tears? Rubin does not ask.
It is telling that Rubin's extensive bibliography does not include Joel Robbins's Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), although he includes a related study, Keane Webb's Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Real engagement with the studies of Robbins and Webb would have provided useful comparative case studies, as well as raised important methodological issues and research questions that Rubin does not pursue. Rubin is absolutely correct when he asserts that the study of religious emotions and emotional regimens is crucial in understanding the dynamics of identity transformation, the emergence of a sense of the individual in societies where this concept did not exist, and in forging a new religiosity. However, without an adequate understanding of the particular emotional regimens found in Native American religions, one is reduced to reading into the affective displays of converts, including ritualized weeping, the dominant culture's assumptions, values, and interpretations of their meaning.
Rubin may confidently conclude that Christian Indians from the first praying towns through the Great Awakenings “appropriated the model of the melancholy saint who wept tears of repentance for the sins of their people” (307), but this reader is not so sure. I suspect that much more of interest and import was going on when Native Americans shed ritualized tears in public assemblies than Rubin assumes. Tears of Repentance is well-worth reading, but it raises as many questions as it answers.
