The Colonization of America: What Role Did Religion Play?

A variety of ideas and technologies fueled the European colonization and conquest of North America. However, religion played a central role in the process of North American colonization for nearly every European nation. European elites and decision-makers, as well as New World elites of European descent, attempted to use religion in two ways. First, they tried to use it as a moral justification for expansion and as a means of claiming legitimate authority over foreign territory. Second, the elite attempted to use religion to exert control over the people—including Natives, Africans, and Europeans—living on newly discovered lands. However, these attempts were mostly unsuccessful. The laity chose to operate outside of the religious standards set by the ecclesiastical and political authorities. Similarly, Native Americans refused to acquiesce to the demands and claims made by Europeans in the name of religion.

This is not to say that religion had no successes, or that religion was always a homogeneous structure with clear hierarchies and pathways of power. Many of the failures of religion relate to conflicts between denominations or between the political and ecclesiastical elite. Thus, it is perhaps more accurate to say that, while authorities frequently employed religion, it was, at best, an uncontrollable tool. This article will trace the use of religion in European expansion and elucidate the numerous ways in which it failed to achieve the goals mentioned above, starting from the earliest days of European travel abroad and continuing till the American Revolution.

Several authors have demonstrated the role of Christianity and religion in European attempts to subdue and control Natives from the earliest days of European expansion into North America. In her study of the early years of English expansion, Allison Games asserts that religion was “a centerpiece for some of the earliest justifications for colonization, especially in the context of the bitter English and Spanish rivalries of the late sixteenth century.”¹ These nations believed that it was in their best interest to prevent their Protestant or Catholic rivals from converting the population of the New World to their faith. In Selling Empire, Jonathan Eacott shows that the conversion of Natives to Protestantism was a crucial argument in favor of British imperial expansion into India and America in the late 1500s. Furthermore, since Christianity was considered to be a foundational part of European culture, persuading Natives to adopt the religion would allow Europeans to better integrate them into European societal, diplomatic, and commercial systems.²

Once Europeans decided to travel abroad, they had to find a way to control Native populations. The Native Ground, by Kathleen DuVal, provides examples of Europeans deploying religion to facilitate conquest and subjugation of the North American continent. When analyzing the expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado in the 1540s, she notes that the Spaniards hoped “to inspire fear with their signs of otherness” as well as “to awe and proselytize Indians with displays of spiritual power.”³ At first, this tactic was somewhat effective. The author notes that the Casquis tribe, with whom de Soto had allied, took an interest in the Christian God. However, the Casquis promptly turned Christianity against the Spanish when de Soto attempted to negotiate with an enemy tribe. Arguing that the bond between the Spanish and Casqui was sacred before God, the Casqui chief successfully leveraged the religious symbols he had just received to curtail the Spanish efforts at further expansion temporarily. DuVal even goes so far as to suggest that this episode may have been an intentional “manipulation” of the Spanish, rather than a heartfelt expression of faith.⁴ The author goes on to show that, despite their efforts to use religion to pacify the Natives, the Spanish were eventually run out of the Mississippi Valley when they failed to integrate themselves into the existing diplomatic systems.⁵

Moving forward chronologically, we find more instances of religion being employed to claim authority over Natives and Native territory in seventeenth-century New England. In The Saltwater Frontier, Andrew Lipman demonstrates the contested nature of early English claims to northeastern America and the littoral waters that were central to its development. While much of the book is dedicated to analyzing the often-ignored maritime culture of Natives in this area, the author does spend time discussing the affairs of the English and Dutch colonizers. While the Dutch mostly used economics to claim authority over territory, British claims were grounded in religion.⁶ Considering that the British would come to dominate this region, an analysis of their methods is of greater importance to this study.

In his book, Lipman explains that the Puritan settlers believed the lands of New England had been given to them by God. In the Puritan’s mind, the land near Massachusetts Bay, whose native inhabitants had been wracked by disease, would be turned into a “biblical commonwealth” with “learned and Christian places.”⁷ Unsurprisingly, the Natives that did remain in the area were not convinced by these claims. Furthermore, Lipman demonstrates the inconsistencies which riddled this theological justification to Native territory. In the end, despite their earlier refusal to do so, the Puritans sought some degree of consent from the Natives to occupy the land and engaged in the purchase of land on several occasions.⁸ When attempts to use religion to control failed, the Europeans increasingly resorted to violence to support their claims.

The escalating use of violence climaxed during the events of King Philip’s War. This war, which took place between 1675 and 1678, is considered by many to be the deadliest conflict in the history of colonial America. In The Name of War, Jill Lepore examines King Philip’s War from a cultural and sociological perspective. She argues that the war was provoked by the perceived cultural differences between Natives and colonists. The events of the war also helped to sharpen these differences in the minds of both parties. However, many of the differences Lepore discusses are related to religion or the systems of morality that are derived from it.

Lepore argues that English settlers fought King Philip’s War because they wanted to protect their identity “as Christians and, most fundamentally, as Englishmen.”⁹ This intertwining of Christianity and Englishness is a theme that reappears throughout the work. By providing several examples of the brutality of land-based battles, such as the Great Swamp Fight, and an analysis of how the war entered into the historical record as a conflict about identity, Lepore debunks the assertions of other authors, such as Lipman, who suggest that King Philip’s War could be understood as “a sequence of maritime events.”¹⁰ Lepore also shows how the colonists contextualized the war through the lens of religion. Some members of the Puritan clergy argued that the Indians were sent by God to “chastise the colonists for their failure to convert their heathen neighbors.”¹¹ At the same time, prominent clergymen, like Cotton Mather, characterized the Indians as devil worshipers whose wicked ways made the conflict inevitable. In interpreting war as divinely ordained or as a message from God, clergymen were able to justify the war and the brutality which it produced.¹² While Lepore notes that it is impossible to find a coherent moral, legal, or religious justification for the war, it’s clear that religion, and the various ways in which it was interpreted and manipulated, played a vital role.¹³

The work of Susan Juster further evidences this point. Her book, Sacred Violence in Early America, shows how four theological paradigms from the Old World (blood sacrifice, holy war, malediction, and iconoclasm) sparked “sacred violence” when they reemerged in the New World. These episodes of sacred violence include allusions to biblical wars of religion in colonist’s discussions of warfare with Natives.¹⁴ By using this framework, colonists were able to see themselves as committing “loving violence,” which was sanctioned by God.¹⁵

As a means of justifying violence against Natives and encouraging the laity to risk their lives in battle, religion does appear to have been a valuable tool. While religion, broadly speaking, failed to achieve its goal of controlling the populace and pacifying peoples, the use of religion in warfare and violence on the North American continent is perhaps one exception to this trend. However, even in this instance, there were small ways in which religion failed to accomplish its goals. Most notably, this includes the occasions in which Natives attacked the colonist’s “spiritual Achilles’ heel” during King Philip’s War. During this conflict, the Natives launched verbal and symbolic attacks on Christianity that stoked the colonist’s fears of being abandoned by God during the war. These attacks ranged from mere jibes and taunts to mutilating colonists and their Bibles.¹⁶

We must also acknowledge the success of religion in asserting authority over slaves. In Laboring Women, Jennifer Morgan discusses the commodification of African women’s reproductive capabilities for the purposes of the slave trade. From the very beginning, the author notes that religious concepts were used to create a sense of “difference” that justified enslavement. According to early European visitors to Africa, black women had an easy time giving birth. This supposed lack of pain, in contrast to the trauma of childbirth for European women, excluded Africans from the Christian community.¹⁷ For Europeans who had often conflated race, sex, and religion since the earliest days of Mediterranean expansion, this way of thinking likely seemed logical.¹⁸

While this is a success for religion, it was relatively short-lived. DuVal notes that as slaves converted to Christianity, the English had to abandon the lack of Christian religion as a defining characteristic of “enslavable” people in the 1660s. This shift was the beginning of Europeans using physical differences, rather than cultural ones, as their justification for slavery and the mistreatment of non-Europeans.¹⁹ Of course, this shift, as well as the conversion of slaves, was not universal or immediate. Juster suggests that “for most of the colonial period converting slaves was considered an act of subversion rather than an act of mercy or piety.”²⁰

It is also apparent that, while religion provided an excellent early justification for the slavery that facilitated European expansion, it failed when it was employed to control the lives of slaves. In Laboring Women, Jennifer Morgan also discusses how slaveowners “struggled to police the physical and political boundaries of their property and attached economic and social meaning to African women’s bodies.”²¹ The policing the author discusses is specifically related to women’s reproductive lives and, by extension, their family structures. She shows that some Anglican clergymen were concerned about the “promiscuous disorder” of enslaved individuals living in Carolina in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Specifically, this “disorder” included cohabitation and sexual relations outside of marriage. Morgan argues that this “disorder” was an expression of “autonomous emotional choices” that “represented hard-won freedom from interference and Christianity.”²² While this is clearly an example of the slave-owning elite trying and failing to use religion as a means of control, this instance also provides an example of power struggles between the elite and clergy. The aforementioned Anglican clergymen were refused when they sought to provide religious instruction to slaves. Thus, while the religious and political elite often worked together, this is an occasion in which cooperation between the two groups broke down. The slaveowners attempted to use religion to control, whereas some parts of the clergy sought to further Christianize the black community for reasons which the author does not make clear.²³

Shifting away from the issue of slavery and towards an analysis of the Europeans that executed the process of colonization, one can see additional examples of religion being used to influence and control. In The Web of Empire, Allison Games argues that cosmopolitanism was essential to the success of the Englishmen who facilitated English expansion into world markets and colonial territories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cosmopolitanism, as Games defines it, is the ability to operate in unfamiliar spaces and adapt to the culture of others.²⁴ However, the English were aware that this open-mindedness could lead to changes in a person’s character, especially in their faith. The author notes the degree to which the English feared the potential conversion of their citizens when they were traveling abroad. Since the head of state in England was also the head of the church, changing faiths was tantamount to renouncing one’s nationality. Despite the emphasis placed on the importance of retaining one’s Protestant faith, Games finds evidence that several Englishmen did convert.²⁵ Once converted, these individuals were, at best, of no use to the English state and, at worst, a direct threat to the state’s interests.

The centrality of religion in the efforts of the British state to control its populace abroad can also be seen in Game’s discussion of clergy in the mid-seventeenth century. She states, “In their commitment to Protestantism, ministers provided the most visible and visceral symbol of England that the English overseas might identify.”²⁶ She also notes that those who owned trading posts hired ministers with religious views similar to their own. Ideally, these ministers would then instill those views onto the colonists and traders abroad. However, the instability of the English Civil War and the nature of overseas travel hampered the effectiveness of religious ministers being used in this way. Those who went abroad tended to be naturally curious. This fact, coupled with the ardors of overseas travel and the lack of oversight, led to many ministers experimenting with unorthodox theologies or engaging in other divisive behavior.²⁷ The deployment of these ministers also backfired on some occasions, such as when ministers injected morality into situations that would otherwise be purely about profit or personal gain.²⁸ Thus, we see an excellent example of religion being pushed by the elite, but failing to achieve its goals when faced with the realities of the broader world.

Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire,* by Mark Hanna, provides more examples of religion deployed in service of the goals of European elites. At first glance, this book may appear to show a success story for religion. Theology was successfully used to combat piracy in the early 1700s.²⁹ However, the problem of piracy itself had religious origins. Hanna traces the roots of piracy in the New World all the way back to the second Earl of Warwick, Robert Rich. The Earl operated a private navy that plundered the Spanish, who he viewed as the agents of the antichrist, and provided maritime defense for the colonies.³⁰ Later, Hanna discusses the rise of Red Sea piracy, which was draped in religious rhetoric and anti-Islamic sentiment. While the author largely attributes this increase in religious fervor to anger over Barbary raids, it’s entirely possible that the earlier rhetoric of the Earl of Warwick helped to legitimize the justifications provided by pirates and their supporters.³¹ Regardless, it’s clear that Red Sea piracy, which undermined the British trading empire, was primarily inspired by religious interpretations that did not arise under the auspices of the ecclesiastical and political authorities in England. Thus, Red Sea piracy is an example of religion being an uncontrollable tool, which often undermined the aims of the European elite who originally deployed and promoted religion in the New World.

So far, I have cited examples of Europeans using religion to control people, both European and Native, living in the colonies. However, the ecclesiastical and political elite in the New World also attempted to use religion to exert control over local, New World populations. Despite common perceptions, there is significant evidence to suggest that early America was not a land of religious freedom and religious tolerance. For example, several colonies passed laws against blasphemy and profanity in the 1630s and 1640s. According to Juster, the people of this era felt that words could have physical effects on the world. Thus, the leaders of colonies such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia instituted religious, non-secular legal codes that sought to regulate the speech of the populace. In some colonies, these codes were created under the direct supervision of clergy. Despite the best efforts of the clergy, Juster notes that “heretical ‘weeds’ had cropped up almost as soon as the first towns were planted.”³²

Religion was also used in attempts to control many matters related to sex and sexuality. Yet, even in this realm, religion failed to achieve its goals. The work of Richard Godbeer evidences this point. In a 1995 article, titled “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” he examines the case of Nicholas Sension, a Connecticuter who intermittently solicited same-sex relationships between the 1640s and 1670s. While the Puritan clergy preached that such acts should be fervently condemned as a “sodomitical” form of “sexual uncleanliness,” Godbeer shows that much of the laity held viewpoints that were less extreme. In his words, “New Englanders were pragmatic in their responses to sodomy, focusing on practical issues rather than moral absolutes.”³³ The author supports this argument by noting that Sension had no official action taken against him until 1677, despite living in a Puritan society which supposedly condemned his sexual practices. Even then, he avoided physical punishment or fines and instead had his estate placed in bond.³⁴

The notion that men, especially affluent men of social standing, could escape the religious controls that the Puritan clergy attempted to place on them is further supported by the work of Elizabeth Reis in Damned Women. Using the framework put forward by Judith Butler, which asserts that gender is constructed through “performative acts,” Reis seeks to explain why women were frequently targeted with accusations of witchcraft.³⁵ She argues that, due to the nature of Puritan theological teachings, women tended to see themselves as “completely worthless, virtually unredeemable, slaves of Satan.”³⁶ More broadly, it was thought that men occasionally did bad things (such as commit sodomy), but women were bad. This belief arose despite official Puritan theology asserting that the souls of women and men were equal from a religious and spiritual perspective.³⁷

Thus, while it’s clear that religion failed at controlling men, one could argue that it was successful in controlling women. In agreement with Reis, Juster also remarks on the use of religion as a tool to control the female populace.³⁸ However, much like in the case of controlling slaves, this victory for religion was short-lived. According to Reis, people of all genders began to see Satan as less of an immediate threat by the early eighteenth century. She considers this to be one manifestation of the cultural trends associated with the transition to the “Age of Reason,” where religion, despite the efforts of the clergy, increasingly receded from people’s lives.³⁹

Clare Lyons’ study of British colonial cities in the eighteenth century further demonstrates the failure of religion to control the populace and the declining role of religious doctrine in people’s lives. Looking at Philadelphia, she notes that an increasing number of individuals engaged in sexual practices outside of the monogamous tradition advocated by the church. Similarly, she shows that extramarital, cross-racial relationships abounded in Kinston, Jamaica.⁴⁰ With religion failing to exert control, new forces of a more political nature would seek to exercise influence, beginning in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.

The American Revolution fundamentally changed the dynamics of colonial America. Thus, it serves as the logical endpoint for this analysis of religion’s failure to control colonial populaces and facilitate easy European expansion. However, it’s clear that from the earliest days of colonization, political and ecclesiastical elites attempted to use religion to pacify peoples in their efforts to pave the way for further growth. As colonies on the North American continent became increasingly sophisticated and self-sufficient, the ecclesiastical elite in the New World also attempted to use religion as a control. In both instances there were some successes, but overall, religion failed at these goals.

Bibliography

DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Eacott, Jonathan. Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Games, Alison. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Godbeer, Richard. “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1995): 259–86.

Hanna, Mark G. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Juster, Susan. Sacred Violence in Early America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

LaFleur, Greta. The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1999.

Lipman, Andrew. The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

Lyons, Clare A. “Cities at Sea: Gender & Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century British Colonial City, Philadelphia, Kingston, Madras & Calcutta.” In Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, edited by Deborah Simonton, 427–40. London, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Footnotes