Godly violence opens with a highly charged assertion: ‘between 1636 and 1676, Puritans exerted enormous energy towards killing countless humans’ (p. 1), an assertion simultaneously amplified and muddied in the next sentence: ‘They frequently showed a mundane disregard for civilian or soldier through warfare, impressment, imprisonment, mutilation, pillage, destructions of homes and crops, forced relocation, land confiscation, stripping civilians of clothing, slavery, forced transatlantic relocation and the ritualized display of the dead.’ Is it pertinent to point out that, with one exception, none of these refer to killings?

On the one hand, Rowley wants to complicate the meaning of ‘military providentialism’ (a phrase he has coined) by juxtaposing theories of ‘just’ war with the religiously inflected violence he emphasises. Doing so takes him back to Calvin as well as to various Puritan writers and their modern interpreters. After much back-and-forth about these matters in the opening chapters, he describes five episodes of violence that occurred in seventeenth-century England and New England: the battles of Naseby and Dunbar and the taking of Drogheda on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other, two episodes that involve Native Americans, the ‘Mystic Massacre’ (1637), the name he gives to an attack by colonial militia on a Pequot fort in southern Connecticut, and the ‘Great Swamp Fight’ (December, 1675), an episode in King Philip’s War when colonial forces attacked a Narragansett ‘fort’ in Rhode Island. In neither of these particular attacks was the death toll ‘countless’, a word that is best understood (in any context) as expressive. Although most of the men, women and children in the Mystic ‘fort’ died, a follow-up attack on another Pequot fort began with negotiations that enabled the women and children to emerge before the fighting began. And, although some Pequot were enslaved, this was not chattel slavery. Most of those who survived the ‘war’ were absorbed by adjacent Indian bands.

When Rowley discusses providentialism, distinctions flourish until, finally, ‘military providentialism’ emerges as the causal framework for each of the case studies. That ‘providentialism’ can become an exultant celebration of victories credited to divine providence is undoubtedly true. But the providentialism that flourished among seventeenth-century Puritans also encompassed defeats, disasters and the devotional practice of seeking ‘signs’ of one’s state of grace. In the case of the Pequot ‘war’, a triumphal providentialism was voiced after the war ended – indeed, some years later – and mostly in a single text. The vengeful temper of some of the colonists in 1675–6 was very real, to the point of causing small-scale atrocities, some of it inflicted on Native Americans who had converted to Christianity or at other moments on their Native enemies, who also dismembered colonial bodies. Military providentialism does not seem especially pertinent to the atrocities committed by the colonists, especially since, for several months, the Indians were victors and the colonists, the defeated. As is well known to Americanists, the ministers in Massachusetts (the most beset of the colonies) disagreed on how to interpret the war, some viewing it as God’s means of punishing the colonists but others (as victories began to happen) as his means of punishing the Native Americans.

Rowley keys his narrative to another concept, a coercive ‘hegemony’ exercised by Puritans in England and New England, to which he adds an argument – borrowed from Michael P. Winship – that Puritan-style hegemony was declining by the 1670s in New England. The assertion that Puritanism on either side of the Atlantic was intrinsically coercive is akin to ‘countless’ in its tone: morally satisfying, but factually useless. In New England, the ‘congregational’ version of church governance, the rights-centred system of law, and the dispersion of social and political authority disrupt the connections between coercion and ‘hegemony’. It is certainly the case that changes were unfolding in the second half of the seventeenth century, but our understanding of this period in New England has shifted since the 1990s, with decline giving way to modes of renewal, an argument summarised in part i of Douglas L. Winiarski’s Darkness falls on the land of light: experiencing religious awakenings in eighteenth-century New England (Chapel Hill, NC 2017).

Does Christianity permit or encourage violence? Interconfessional violence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and, before this, in France and elsewhere, would seem to indicate that it can encompass irrational fears of idolatry and the like, always with the Hebrew Bible in the near background. But it seems a mistake to regard ‘puritans’ or puritanism as singularly aligned with ‘military providentialism’. Always, of course, there are extraordinary figures – in this case, Oliver Cromwell, who paid a heavy price in the 1650s for his version of providentialism. In King Philip’s War the colonists also paid a heavy price. That they were eventually victorious was due in part to the support they received from several Native ‘bands’ that sided with them, as did most of the Christian Indians. Situations of this kind are as challenging to interpret in today’s world as they were in the seventeenth century.