Samson Occom, the protagonist of Ryan Carr’s book, materializes an apparent paradox in the historical spread of Christianity: its capacity to bring about persuasive experiences of belonging even as it is, second perhaps to capitalism, one of the most deracinated ideologies on the planet. On one hand, Christianity, particularly in the Americas, was part of the ideological repertoire of white settlers who, as they disseminated their cosmology, often had a range of goals in mind other than the fates of Indigenous souls. On the other hand, that ideology features, as its content, universal reach and transcendent outcomes that contradicted the violence and prejudice of its furthest traveling spokespeople. What’s more, though, those doctrines shored up the false ruses of Enlightenment reason that colonists also advanced. In both historical form (conversion as conquest) and content (conversion as aspiration to transcendence), Indigenous uptake of Christianity can be seen to affirm the colonial transformation of the globe. Activists like 18th-century Mohegan Samson Occom took it up anyway, to the puzzled fascination of many secular critics and historians in the centuries since. This is the conceptual problem with which any scholarship on colonial spirituality must contend.

Among studies of the Anglo-American context, Carr’s book is one of the best so far. What distinguishes it is the hermeneutic modesty of its chapters. Its method throughout is to look at – read, but also just look at – documents, as many as possible, as directly and intimately as possible, and with as much openness and patience as possible, to what they say and how they say it, and only then to consider why. Across these sermons, letters, journals, petitions, and hymns, Carr’s yield is directly inverse to its modesty. The book, while insisting on the materiality of its methods, is powerfully theoretical. In reckoning as intimately as possible with Occom and his lived world, Carr makes palpable some impasses and aporias that we typically turn to the philosophers to explain.

Carr’s answer to the aporia of Christian conversion has a specific aspect and a general, more abstract one. Most generally, Carr proposes, Occom was disseminating not so much Christianity (fearful love of a suffering, resentful deity) but “religion”: a set of techniques that militate against what Carr calls alienation. I like that word, and I think Carr is right, but the impact of the claim is stronger when we keep in mind that Occom did not have that word to explain the value he saw in these technologies. Carr makes this proposition briefly in his introduction; the next five chapters recover (1) Occom’s selective preservation of Mohegan tradition in the context of settler colonial Connecticut on the cusp of statehood; (2) his interest in using plain speech to create different bonds with different listeners and readers during the tumult of the Great Awakening; (3) Occom’s provocation by the affordances of not claiming special chosen-ness by the deity; (4) his use of style to effect belonging across his written and spoken oeuvre; and (5) his creation of material artifacts, like his autobiography, to build communities, through their stated content and the fact of their circulation. These five chapters describe Occom’s intellectual pursuits and the conditions that precipitated them, and build toward the sixth, where Carr turns most directly to the concept of alienation. The Christian religion, Carr argues, offered the possibility of renewing one’s perception of a world where settler concepts of property were becoming more ubiquitous, even hegemonic – difficult, if not impossible, to see beyond.

This is a very powerful claim, not least because it avoids some of the sentimentalism common in early Americanist treatments of subaltern spirituality. Conversion, here, engages dialectically with material challenges. Carr’s account is mostly persuasive, though it might have been strengthened by conversation with scholarship on alienation’s specifically settler colonial expression, such as Robert Nichols’s (for example, his 2018 essay, “Theft is Property!” and a 2020 book of the same name) explaining theft as an instance of alienation that produces and transforms. Alienation often forces individuals into impossible choices, as Carr indicates in some of his unresolved closing examples of Black-Indigenous dispossession. These examples do not easily square with his introduction’s claims of “agency” on the part of his protagonists. Yet alienation’s explanatory significance glimmers sharply in these tensions internal to the book. A more thorough account of alienation’s productive transformation of agency might not reveal that it is always present in Indigenous conversion, as Carr (understandably) claims it is. Rather, it might suggest that conversion is attractive precisely because it addresses the limits to the agency that one feels; limits that, without Marx’s looming vocabulary of alienation, one might struggle, deeply, to name.

The book is so good, so patient, persuasive, lucid, up to this point that it feels petty to fault it. Alienation is a tricky concept—tricky (some would say impossible) to overcome; tricky, even, to comprehend. The book’s strongest treatment of responses to alienation is its discussions of hospitality that work against such estrangement. Here, hospitality is not just a form of condescending benevolence. Occom’s hospitality is a risky openness, material and intellectual, to the stranger, to an unknown other. This hospitality resonates in part, with the Kantian claims on hospitality contemporaneous to Occom, that were, in turn, torqued by Jacques Derrida at the end of the last century. Hospitality, to these thinkers, is always a risk, always a political act. And that risk was one of the elements of Mohegan tradition that mattered most to Occom as he considered the Christian teachings that seemed productively familiar to him. That such hospitality is an important part of Christian doctrine tends to be overshadowed by the aggressive antithesis to hospitality – occupation – through which European Christians expressed their commitments to the creed. One of their legacies is a doctrine organized around offense, debt, redemption, and debt’s transformative renewal. There is a sizeable iconographic infrastructure sustaining that legacy (a dead man hanging on so many walls, around so many necks). But imagine (as Carr often successfully invites us to do) approaching the theology without this aesthetic conditioning. Imagine learning freshly a set of stories that again and again feature the ambivalent surprises of encounters with unknown others; stories that, at each turn, reckon with the appropriate response or suggest how we might learn from an inappropriate one. Christianity emerges from Carr’s book a far stranger, more malleable collection of truths. His book is a renewal, not just to our understanding of an old religion, but to our literary-critical hospitality to the foreignness of all texts and the others who produce them.