Sacred Violence in Early America is an ambitious, chronologically and geographically sweeping overview of four aspects of sacred violence, or “violence that is motivated and justified in significant part by religious aversion and/or desire” (6). Juster discusses each of the aspect's medieval background, its changes during the Reformation, and its manifestation in England and, especially, in the early English mainland colonies (which usually means puritan New England). She notes that “many” of the book's “individual findings . . . have been known to scholars for a long time” (5).
The first chapter, “Blood Sacrifices,” is the most original. Expanding on a number of scholars’ theses, Juster claims there was “a fundamental ambivalence at the heart of the Reformation's assault on the notion of blood sacrifice” (31). Protestants insisted that Christ's sacrifice was not repeated at the Eucharist, as the Catholics claimed. Yet English ministers, for example, advocated visualizing aspects of Christ's suffering in sacramental meditations. That advocacy, according to Juster, shows a tension between doctrine and desire, reflecting the “enduring power of sacramental longings for real flesh and blood in the post-Reformation world” (51). America provided new fuel for this putative sacramental longing largely through the European encounter with Indian ritual cannibalization and through the violence between Indians and colonists. What Juster does with her evidence can often seem a stretch. Space allows only a simple example. An English writer described how Virginia Indians stuffed the mouths of slain English soldiers with bread. Juster claims that it “was simply not possible after the eucharistic wars of the Reformation” for the writer not to be making “some reference, however subliminal, to the body and blood of Christ” (48). If the reader finds this invocation of an inarguable subliminal reference persuasive, one could well find the chapter persuasive. Checking Juster's sources in this chapter, as elsewhere, is prudent. Space again dictates a simple, short example: “puritans,” according to Juster, grew “concerned” by “the end of the 17th century” that envisioning the broken Christ at the Lord's Supper was leading to “idolatry” (27). Her source's date is not the late seventeenth century, but 1592, and the concerned “puritan” (singular, not plural) was in fact the fierce anti-puritan Lancelot Andrewes.
The chapter “Holy Wars” focuses mostly on the Old Testament eliminationist rhetoric of the New England puritans’ wars with Indians and the brutal real world concomitants to that rhetoric. Scholars have explored this. Juster's contribution is in the way she places the rhetoric in the context of contemporary English debates about the relationship of religious wars to just wars. She distinguishes between moderate proponents of religious wars, who anchored those wars in just war theory, and the extremists who had a “willingness to consider extreme measures” and emphasized “that God's soldiers as well as his generals be godly men” (87). Juster likens the extremists’ point of view to the crusaders’ and calls it the “Holy War paradigm” (108). Since the colonists faced pagans, America offered long-lasting, fertile ground for holy-war kinds of justifications and all the violence that went with them.
Chapter three is titled “Malediction” to indicate that it is about slanderous speech in general, although it focuses mostly on blasphemy. Juster sketches blasphemy's European history and traces it in England through the Ranters and the Quakers, while registering the transatlantic association of unbridled words with social and political disorder, as well as with unruly physical appetites. It should be noted that the “moderate Presbyterian Establishment” did not try to keep the Quaker James Naylor from being executed for blasphemy, as Juster claims; they wanted him dead (160). Nor was Mr. Baxter Baptiz'd in Bloud (London, 1671) an anti-Quaker satire (161–163). It was a fraudulent attack on Baptists who exposed it. Although Baptists in Massachusetts were convicted for breaking various laws, blasphemy laws were not among them (180–181).
The final chapter, “Iconoclasm,” reviews transatlantic iconoclasm and sacrilege. Juster makes one striking original claim. While New England Indians and colonists alike mutilated enemy corpses in their wars with each other, to the colonists, Indian corpses were “analogous to the statues of saints” (246) and thus “icons to be smashed” (229). Juster presents no one saying this. Instead, she cites English pamphlets that satirically had London's famous Cheapside cross speaking when puritans destroyed it. Juster finds a “referential counterpart” in the colonists’ scalpings and their dismembering of King Philip's body (228). As evidence, this seems like very weak tea. She has another go at making her case via grisly raids on Spanish Florida mission towns by fifty South Carolina English and 1500 pagan Indian allies in 1704. “Catholics burning on crosses at the hands of Protestants,” Juster writes of a raid, “makes a mockery of the notion that iconoclasts destroyed things only, not people” (236). Juster's Spanish source does not mention Protestant torture, but has graphic descriptions of torture by their Indian allies, which crackled with Christian/pagan hostility, including during this raid. The source states only that the “enemy” did this particular torture, but notes that it was in retaliation for the deaths of seventeen “pagans” and quotes the English commander telling a protesting Spaniard that he could not control his torturing allies. How Juster arrives at “the hands of Protestants” from a source pointing to pagans she does not share, quite apart from whether Protestants hypothetically burning Catholics on crosses would be best thought of as iconoclasm.
The conclusion lays out Juster's overarching thesis. “For Protestants,” according to Juster, “idolatry was the ur-sin.” Her other themes, of blood sacrifice, transubstantiation, crusades, and malediction, she claims, “were symptoms, or manifestations, of idolatry” (malediction was a symptom insofar as all sin stemmed from loving anything above God, but her inclusion of crusades in this context makes the New England puritans idolaters, which seems less a scholarly judgment than a partisan theological one). Idolatry, according to Juster, represented “the persistence of the material in the face of Protestant resistance to the presence of the sacred in the created world.” Moreover, in America “the material dimension of religion was more palpably present” than in Europe because “an old aversion to the material confronted a new material reality that was bigger, stranger, more fecund” (246–247). Be that as it may, Sacred Violence is an original, thought-provoking book, perhaps more significant in its ambition than its execution.
