The infamous Mystic massacre of 1637, during which the Connecticut militia under the leadership of John Mason set fire to a Pequot fort, burning alive approximately five hundred men, women, and children trapped inside, constitutes a paradigmatic moment in American colonial history. Textbooks routinely use the Mystic massacre to illustrate the genocidal levels of violence that settlers in England's North American colonies wreaked upon the continent's natives. Mason's notorious assertion that “God was above them, who laughed his enemies and the enemies of his people to scorn, making them as a fiery oven,” can be seen as illustrative of how the English dehumanized the Indigenous people they encountered.

Susan Juster places the Mystic massacre in an alternative light, by analyzing the religious rather than racialized context of Mason's account, in her fascinating and instructive new book Sacred Violence in Early America. Without disputing the evidence that the English treated Indigenous enemies with greater violence than they treated their European enemies, Juster explains this differential as sourced in Christian traditions of holy war. English colonists called for the extirpation of their enemies in conflicts like the 1715 Yamasee War, the 1676 King Phillip's War, and the 1636 Pequot War not because Native groups were racially different, but because they were considered heathen. “Aversion born of religious prejudice was every bit as deep and deforming in the early modern world as racial prejudice is in ours” (121), she reminds readers. After reading Sacred Violence, I will not teach the Pequot War again without making that point.

Overall, Juster's book presents a cultural history of New World Protestant religious violence during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Resisting narrow parochialism, Juster locates that New World (mostly New England) violence within the meaning systems of Old World religious debates. In each of her four chapters, on blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm, Juster spends equal time tracing European origins as American applications, paying careful attention both to continuities and to divergences. Ultimately, she concludes, the violence of English colonization should be understood as the “final bloody chapter of the Reformation wars” (13). Definitional ambiguities challenge this argument, since, as the example of the Mystic massacre demonstrates, acts of violence could have multiple aspects. They could be economic, racialized, and religious, all at once. Juster uses the term “sacred violence” to mean violence that is motivated “in significant part” (6) by religious factors, which leaves plenty of wiggle room for additional factors. This strengthens her approach, since it would be hard to believe, for example, that English perceptions of Indians as “black creatures,” in Mary Rowlandson's words, played no role in the way that the English made war against them. Juster's capacious use of the term “sacred violence” stops well short of overgeneralizing the entire conquest of the New World as “one vast holy war” (124).

In Juster's later chapters on malediction and iconoclasm, she turns her focus from warfare to the violence of language, and physical violence against inanimate objects. In the case of malediction, Juster is also interested in the physical violence wielded by governments against their people. The colonies passed far stricter anti-blasphemy laws than the mother country. Whereas in England only repeat offenses led to capital sentences, in colonies from Virginia to New Haven the first episode of misspeech could get you hanged. At least theoretically, malediction was a hanging offense. In practice, punishment was downgraded to mutilations like tongue-boring, branding, and whipping to the point of flaying. This softening of punishment was part of a general trend away from sacred violence in the eighteenth century. By 1750, Protestant experiences of sacred violence had migrated in large part from the physical to the textual, Juster concludes.

Several intriguing subthemes run through all four chapters, helping to tie the thematic approach together. Throughout the book, Juster highlights the way that metaphors of consumption and sexuality operated in Protestant discourse about sacred violence. Her cultural analysis of subjects such as the cannibal motif within the language of blood sacrifice, or the erotic aspects of the “sins of the tongue,” is tight. There were many “aha!” moments for me in reading this book. I was delighted when Juster confirmed my suspicion of the sexual undertones in Christian discourse describing the tongue as a little “member” given toward sin (134). Other readers will no doubt find their own favorite nuggets. The book is probably too dense to appeal to most undergraduates, but my only real quarrel is with the press for choosing to illustrate a book about Protestant violence with a cover image of Aztec human sacrifice. Maybe Juster can persuade Penn to rethink the cover when the paperback comes out. I vote for John Underhill's famous engraving of the Mystic massacre.