Although the history of Britain’s overseas missions properly begins in the American colonies, one can read extensively in the history of early American religion without encountering either missions or missionaries. While acknowledging the pre-revolutionary dynamism of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) and the Anglican- dominated Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), early American historians place far more emphasis on the efforts of revivalists like Whiteheld and his fellow evangelicals, depicting the Church of England’s missions as of secondary importance. As we are often told, the growth of Protestant Christianity in British America—especially those parts that became the United States—was a voluntaristic, market-driven phenomenon, a decentralized (and decentralizing) project fundamentally different from the clerically dominated initiatives that we associate with missionary movements in subsequent phases of Britain’s expansion.
One consequence of this inattention to missions has been to encourage an ‘exceptionalist’ interpretation of early American Protestantism, and to dissociate the Christianizing of British America from the spread of Christianity in Britain and the other parts of the British Empire. In several respects, this tendency is misleading. Not only was British America the crucible of what Andrew Porter has called an ‘Atlantic system’ of international missionary endeavour, both for the Church of England and for its dissenting competi- tors, but the Christianizing of British America was itself the product of an evangelical culture far more similar to its missionary counterparts than is sometimes realized. Indeed, if we accept the essential ‘ambiguity of the term ‘‘mission’’ ’ for the entire sweep of British imperial history—as Norman Etherington has urged—it becomes evident that the religious history of which Whiteheld and his fellow evangelicals are a central part is but one chapter in a larger story of British missions and missionary enterprise.
As in the nineteenth century, Protestant missions to indigenous peoples featured prominently in the rhetoric of Britain’s early modern expansion. In the well-known formulation of John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon on board the Arbella, New England envisioned itself ‘as a Citty upon a hill’, a biblical commonwealth whose Christian example would reform the world. Although Winthrop was thinking chiefly of Archbishop Laud’s England, many writers directed their proselytizing energy towards the Indians. ‘The people of America crye out unto us . . . to come and helpe them,’ wrote the younger Richard Hakluyt in 1584. In his instructions to the Virginia Company, James VI and I enjoined settlers bound for the new colony to ‘well entreale’ the Indians ‘whereby they may be the sooner drawne to the true knowledge of God, and the Obedience of us’. A hundred years later the SPG’s charter included native conversion among the society’s main objectives, and during the eighteenth century Protestants on both sides of the Atlantic regarded ‘Christianizing the Indians’ both as a sacred duty and as a necessary expedient for checking the power of Catholic France.
If Britons everywhere affirmed the desirability of spreading the Christian gospel in Indian country, the reality was often different. Outside southern New England, where Puritans established a series of ‘praying Indian’ towns during the seventeenth century, Anglo-American missionaries encountered frequently insurmountable obstacles, including native resistance, Jesuit competition, and the insistence of both Anglicans and Dissenters that Indians be ‘reduced’ to civilization before they could be converted to Christianity. During the 1740s David Brainerd achieved temporary success through his Indian mission in New Jersey, but early death ensured that his efforts did not outlive him. More typical was Moor’s Charity School for Indians in Lebanon, Connecticut. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock in 1754, the Congregational school counted among its graduates Sampson Occum and Joseph Brandt. However, Wheelock regarded the venture as a failure; when the school moved to New Hampshire as Dartmouth College in 1769, it largely abandoned its original emphasis on Indian education. Even the Moravians who followed Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf to eastern Pennsylvania achieved only partial success. Despite winning several hundred converts during the 1740s and 1750s, they found that most Indians rejected their message. As Jeremy Belknap reported to the Scottish SPCK following his 1796 mission to the Oneidas, the Indian who adopted English ways and creeds found himself (or herself) living in two incompatible worlds: ‘He is neither white man nor an Indian; as he had no character with us, he has none with them.’
Although Indian missions rarely conformed to their benefactors’ expectations, Christianity still had far-reaching implications for native culture. In the eighteenth-century European contests for influence on North America’s ‘middle ground’, religious affiliation was often the basis for military and diplomatic cooperation—a fact nicely illustrated by Joseph Brandt’s tripartite character as Mohawk sachem, Anglican missionary, and British oYcer.9 Even when Indians resisted formal Christianization, they incorporated elements of Christian worship into their own practices and beliefs. As a group of Moravians reported of a mission to the Indian village of Goschgoschuenk on the Allegheny River, several prophets who preached against them ‘claimed to have been to heaven, and one said he had seen the Christian God’. According to both Protestants and rival Catholic orders, the Indian penchant for selective borrowing was a principal reason for the unusual success of the Jesuits, who sought converts not through the outright suppression of Indian culture but by accepting, at least provisionally, some analogies between native beliefs and Christian doctrine. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick such efforts helped create an indigenous Mi’kmaq Catholicism that included catechisms written in native hieroglyphs, feasts of patron saints with significance for local culture, and special formulas for baptizing infants, all of which survived Britain’s annexation of the region in 1713 and are still practised today.
Despite the persistence of native religion (or perhaps because of it), the resources that British and colonial missionaries devoted to indigenous conversion were relatively meagre compared to what they expended along the Atlantic seaboard. Although this was especially true of dissenting churches and denominations, whose decentralized structure provided few salaried positions other than service as a parish minister, even the Anglican SPG, which sent more than 600 missionaries to America during the eighteenth century, showed a ‘limited return’ for its efforts in Indian country. In response to episcopal queries during the mid-172os, southern Anglicans were virtually unanimous that Indians rejected Christianity. At the Mohawk Castle in central New York, one hapless priest wrote that Indians who attended his chapel went away ‘laughing’; others tried to disrupt services by beating drums; and those who did convert—mainly women—led lives that were too debauched (in English eyes) to admit to communion. If SPG missionaries were the ‘good soldiers of Jesus Christ’, as White Kennett told the Society’s London sponsors in 1706, both they and their dissenting rivals achieved their greatest triumphs east of the Appalachians.