American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Anyone who delves into the literature on seventeenth-century English missionization in the New World will be struck by the remarkable gap between announced intentions concerning the conversion of Indian peoples to Christianity and the attempts that were actually made. This discrepancy becomes even more obvious when one compares the feeble efforts made by English colonists with the campaigns promoted by French and Spanish invaders to convert indigenous people. Why did the English make such half-hearted attempts) Why did they fall so far short of their stated objectives? To what extent can their failures be explained in purely religious or institutional terms? This paper considers, in a preliminary way , the history of missionization in early Virginia and Massachusetts and makes some observations on how mission history has been written. Its central premise is that American historians have suffered a kind of conceptual lag when compared with scholars who have studied the phenomenon of European missionization in other parts of the world. In particular, they have until recently viewed missionization in narrow terms, seeing it as an almost purely religious endeavor and failing to understand that it was closely linked with the struggle for political control. In fact, it is not too much to state that Christianization has been one of the most important political weapons in the arsenal of colonizing Europeans in almost every part of the world where they have gone for the last five centuries. When that is understood , both the proselyting efforts and native responses in early America begin to make more sense.