The product of conferences, speaker series, and workshops, Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas ambitiously melds transatlantic and hemispheric perspectives. Comprised of ten chapters prefaced by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett's opening essay, the book seeks to grasp “the complexity and variety of the colonial world as it augmented, transformed, and challenged a range of Christian beliefs” (20). “Colonial” here refers almost exclusively to the “Ibero-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant” presences, a decision taken to counter the “exceptionalist paradigm” that extols the latter settlements for bearing “modernity to the New World” while accusing the former of promoting only “repressive Catholic regimes” (22). This focus has certain methodological benefits, witness Ralph Bauer's demonstration that both protestant and Catholic reformations regarded Native religions as diabolical, but that this shared perception played out differently overseas. The Spanish, he shows, labeled Indians the victims of their own maleficence and strove to extirpate indigenous practices, whereas the English deemed themselves to be the sufferers and channeled this understanding devotionally towards expunging their own sins. Nevertheless, the volume covers less ground than it might have. The Portuguese empire appears only in Júnia Furtado's essay, which—against the volume's directional grain of east to west—tracks two priests' embassy from Brazil to Dahomey. The collection entirely omits New France, where Catholic missionaries could rely on far less imperial protection than their compatriots in New Spain enjoyed. Too, “Protestant English America” in practice means “Puritan New England,” which emphasis flattens the pluralism that helped shape the Anglo-American religious world. The volume thus affords fewer opportunities than it might have granted to essay comparisons within each major tradition as well as across them. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.
This problem stems from the introduction's failure to articulate a coherent framework for assessing—or, for that matter, defining—the transformation of Christianity that functions as the work's “central organizing principle” (20). No one delimits either the subject or scope of the presumed “transformation.” What combination of theology, institutional arrangements, proselytizing, moral comportment, and worship are we discussing? How much did any of these components change, and to what degree did their alterations constitute a “transformation?” Along a spectrum of revolution from stasis—e.g., protestant colonists' commitment to sola scriptura—to mutability—e.g., the willingness of some friars to accommodate kivas in doctrinas' shadows—where do the authors' specific observations fall out? Moreover, the book's argumentative bias (fortified by the title) takes transformation as a reality to be assumed rather than a hypothesis to be proved. In the event, individual articles provide considerable evidence of continuity as well as change. David Hall, to cite one example, rehearses how much instances of godly rule in America owed to the “‘dilemmas'” (112) that the puritans inherited from Europe's reformed protestant culture. Consequently, the contributions leave some of the introduction's claims hanging. None address either the modernity paradigm or the assertion that Africans and their descendants “actively transformed Christianity” (20) in the Americas.
The anthology is most successful in presenting insightful, if individual, lines of inquiry. Theresa Toulouse contests reading Cotton Mather's Pietas in Patriam as an expression of New England's declining religiosity by arguing that Mather's rhetorical strategies evinced not the institutional separation of church and state, a “hallmark” of secularization (251), but a refiguration of providentialism that brought mundane politics into its domain. As a subtext, she warns against using secularization theory to interpret eighteenth-century Anglo-America. Matt Cohen deconstructs “piety” and “reciprocity,” stock terms for distinguishing between New English and Algonquian spiritualities, to assert that each group's religious sensibilities may have been simultaneously less monolithic within each tradition and more similar across cultural lines than the deployment of such essentializing words would suggest. The intensity with which friars in New Spain sought martyrdom, documented by Asunción Lavrin, underlines the risks that Catholic evangelists—including, of course, the Jesuits in New France—routinely took to carry the Gospel beyond the realms of effective imperial control. Anglo-American protestants, by contrast, seldom dared to wander into “Indian Country”; one wonders what might have happened had they gambled their lives more readily. Sandra Gustafson's marvelously evocative review of Ciceronian and Augustinian versions of republicanism fittingly caps the project by linking religion with state power and suggesting an agenda for future research. That Anglo-American republicanism was, unlike its Latin cousins, able to posit Indian polities as models to emulate, the Natives' “barbarism” notwithstanding, augured the ascendance in the United States of a civil society in which the state ruled without the church but deemed religion essential for securing public comity. Gustafson concludes by urging further work on the continuing “tension between religious claims to transcendent authority” and the state's assertion of “immanent authority” (264), inquiries that can be informed by historical knowledge of religion in early modern America.
Taken as a whole, the book underlines the importance of interpreting religious developments within political contexts. At local levels, power relationships helped determine how much, if at all, native peoples might absorb Christian memes. More globally, the degrees to which the Spanish and British empires transported their domestic versions of church-state cooperation had momentous consequences for their American successor states. As Sir John Elliott explains in his magisterial overview of “Religions on the Move,” Spain implemented a coherent system that brought political stability yet left the new Latin republics fewer resources to manage the transition to independence successfully. By contrast, Britain's failure to fully establish its national church, combined with the protestant emphasis on each individual's liberty to access God directly through Scripture, grounded a religio-political matrix highly conducive to achieving stable republican governments. Elliott's judgment does not recapitulate the trope of “progressive” Anglo-America versus “regressive” Spanish America. Rather, it underscores how employing comparative frameworks can illuminate previously hidden congruences in protestant and Catholic feeling while also affirming that the different trajectories described by American and Latin American republics have issued substantially from their respective religious heritages.
