Abstract
Many non-Indigenous people assume that secularism—the belief that religion and politics are and should be different spheres of life—is foreign to Native American experience. This partly explains why the topic of Native conversions in early New England has always been so controversial, since conversion implies the differentiation of religion from politics. Be that as it may, history shows that Indigenous peoples are well acquainted with secularism and have been debating it within their communities for centuries. This essay demonstrates proof of concept for a history of Indigenous secularism via a case study of Samson Occom, whose vision of Indigenous self-determination was informed by secularist ideas about sovereignty and conversion. It also offers a critique of scholarly romanticizations of Indigenous peoples' primordially “holistic” a-secularism. This romanticization is the product of a secular-colonial ideology which presupposes the otherness of Indigenous peoples when it comes to differentiating between religion and politics.
The documentary record of Native American religion in pre-Revolutionary New England is shot through with conversionistic discourse. The reasons for this are widely known: almost all Native Americans who knew how to write in this context were Christian, and to be Christian in pre-revolutionary New England was to regard conversions as decisive events for both persons and nations. Although attitudes toward the phenomenon of conversion varied among New England Natives, many spoke about it in much the same way that their non-Native counterparts did. First came the recognition by the proselyte of the corruption of the flesh by sin and the helplessness of the individual to overcome that corruption through willful striving. “I am a pitiful man. Who will save me from death’s body?” wrote one Massachusett student in the 1670s (Goddard and Bragdon 1988, 387). “I am not able to defend myself from the happenings of this world,” wrote another in the 1710s (431). Then came an acceptance of the Gospel promise and, simultaneously, submission to Divine law as manifest in Scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ. “Lord Jesus Condescend to work thy work within me,” implored Mohegan Joseph Johnson (1998, 125) in a 1771 diary entry, “put thy Law in my mind and write it upon my heart. Convert me to thy Self, … grant I may put my whole trust in thee alone.”
Yet although conversion appears to have been a major life-event for many Native Americans in early New England, appearances can be deceiving. Avowals of faith have frequently been faked down through the millennia; and, as Neal Salisbury argued in the 1970s, early Northeast Natives had especially strong motivations for pretending to convert. The Algonquian-speaking communities targeted for missionization by the New England colonies had been “devastated by epidemics,” dispossessed of their land “under the incessant pressure of English immigration,” reduced to economic subservience, and forced to subject themselves to “the political authority of the colonial government” (Salisbury 1974, 35). Indigenous converts in this context were survivors: suspicious, proud, and pragmatic. Such individuals were unlikely to have simply accepted the theory or practice of conversion at face value. Nor, however, were they likely to have provoked the ire of the colonists by openly rebuffing the missionaries who urged conversion upon them.
Following Salisbury, it has become standard historiographical practice to treat Northeast Native converts as unreliable narrators whose stories of spiritual transformation cannot be taken at face value. To be sure, there has been some dissent. James Axtell, in a rejoinder to Salisbury and other skeptics, argued that conversion was indeed a “decisive step” taken by “many Indians” with a clear conscience and “without deceiving themselves, the missionaries, or us” (1988, 100). For Axtell, the problem with interpreting Native conversions as merely pragmatic was methodological, since it reduced religion to politics “in the manner of cultural materialists” (118). Mindful of this risk, more recent historians of the Native Northeast have shored up the categorical coherence of religion in a variety of ways, most of which have been broad enough to accommodate Native American Christianity and pre-contact Indigenous traditions alike.
It is noteworthy, in light of this course-correction, that Axtell is today widely seen as a gadfly in the field, with his description of Indigenous conversions as “bona fide” bearing the brunt of many polemics (Fisher 2012, 89; Morrison 2002, 153‐158). One reason for this is that irrespective of the validity of his critique of “cultural materialist” reductivism, his own vindication of Native conversions seemed to rely upon a conception of religion that was unreflectively theological, rather than critical, historical, and scientific. His account, moreover, appeared indifferent to the discussions of cultural revitalization and tribal sovereignty that had by the late 1980s begun to take center stage in the emerging field of Indigenous Studies. Even though Axtell’s warnings against reductivism seem to have hit home, his effort to re-legitimize conversion as an object of historical focus has not succeeded. According to Fisher (2012, 89), focusing on the phenomenon of conversion betrays “a broader, Native-centered understanding of religious engagement,” which “shifts away from questions regarding ‘authenticity’ as it related to ‘conversion.’” To expect that conversions were central to Native religious life, writes McNally (2020, 7), is to blind oneself to the reality that “Native traditions…typically do not make claims that are universal in nature, or mutually exclusive from teachings of other religions.” The whole discourse of conversion, from this point of view, was a colonial importation with no known correlate in pre-contact Indigenous traditions. Native religious history should be understood as the story of these traditions and how they changed over time as communities sought to sustain pre-colonial lifeways amid the oppressions of settler colonialism.
Be this as it may, the fact remains that conversion was a major life-event for many Native individuals in early New England. Therefore, it seems risky to write conversion out of the history of Native American religion, even though McNally, Fisher, and others are clearly right that Native self-determination is central to this history too. My point here is not to supplant present-day political concerns for old-fashioned theological ones. Even though the doctrine of conversion as expounded in early New England was theological in the first instance, it also had complex political consequences which have generally been overlooked by those who advocate de-centering conversion on methodological grounds. It may come as some surprise that Joseph Johnson, whose spiritual diary I quoted from a moment ago, was a political separatist and a co-founder of the confederated nation of Brothertown, which survives and thrives to this day. For Johnson, following his famous father-in-law Samson Occom, the theory and practice of conversion were absolutely central to Indigenous history and particularly to the sovereignty of Native nations, which were to be conceptualized “both in Civil and Religious” terms (2006, 108).
Occom’s distinction between civil and religious authority would prove highly consequential for the Native peoples of the Northeast. On the basis of this distinction, he formulated a vision of Native political life that was, in certain key respects, secularist: premised upon the differentiation of religion from politics in the domains of political theory and religious observance (Bilgrami 2014, 5). For Occom, conversion was a political event as well as a spiritual one. Even as it entailed the submission of the believer to Divine sovereignty, conversion also facilitated (and even required) the autonomization of worldly politics as a flawed but still governable sphere of collective action categorically distinct from the kingdom of God. It is this process of autonomization that explains why the history of Native American conversions must be seen as overlapping with the history of a secularist conception of Indigenous sovereignty. From a secularist vantage, in turn, it becomes possible to appreciate anew—and in non-theological terms—why Native conversions matter and, moreover, why they should not be historiographically deprecated on the grounds that studying them distracts from the real history of Native sovereignty.
I should emphasize at the outset that the argument being advanced here is limited in historical scope, being in the first instance a historiographical rejoinder to recent attempts to de-center conversions on methodological grounds. Although the first part of the discussion that follows focuses specifically on Occom’s secularism, I am not claiming to have discovered in eighteenth-century Mohegan the true, hidden origins of tribal sovereignty. Occom was broadly influential among Northeast Native communities. But the argument I wish to make here is less about Occom’s influence than about how his political writings constitute “proof of concept” for a tradition of Indigenous secularist thought whose history has yet to be written. What the case of Occom proves is that secularism has been at least thinkable—even if it has not always or even often seemed desirable—to Native American people for a very long time.
Even though this historical claim per se is relatively modest, my contention in the second part of the article is that it furnishes sufficient warrant for calling into question the still-prevalent misconception that secularism is anathema to Indigenous life. In truth, as Wenger (2015, 68) argues, “[t]he legacies of settler colonialism have made Native Americans entirely familiar with religious-secular distinctions, and Indian people have often applied such distinctions within their own societies.” Following Wenger’s lead, I offer in Part Two a critique of the “secular-colonial” truism that Native politics is always-already saturated with religion. This truism may have some purchase on reality. But if it were universally the case, it would imply that someone like Occom was a cultural anomaly owing to his secularist beliefs. The truth, as we shall see, is much more complicated.
While some readers may find something counterintuitive in my claim that converting to Christianity opened a pathway toward secularism for Northeast Natives, others will recognize the resemblance between my position and recent arguments by Gil Anidjar (2006, 62) and others to the effect that “secularism is Christianity”—or, more specifically, that “secularism is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion” as a comparative category that could be conceptually abstracted from politics. Anidjar’s argument about secularism involves two claims: first, that there exists a widely overlooked relation of historical path-dependency between Christianity, the concept of religion, and secularism; and second, that this overlooked path-dependency undermines the popular belief that from a secularist perspective, one can talk comparatively about the various “religions” of the world in an impartial manner. Such an argument could support extending this article’s historical thesis in the following direction: not only did Native conversions in New England enable the emergence of Indigenous secularism, but converted Indigenous secularists also had a role to play in the emergence of “Indigenous religion” as a comparative category. If this were true, it could have serious implications for contemporary legal and political struggles on behalf of Native religious freedom, which have often required shoe-horning Native traditions into the secularist category of “religion” (Wenger 2009; McNally 2020). Were it to turn out that converted Christian Indians had themselves helped “invent religion” as a concept that could be retroactively applied to their peoples’ own non-Christian traditions, then this could risk undermining legal arguments on behalf of Native religious traditions that are often presented as having nothing to do with Christianity.
I have not extended my argument in this direction, however, because I am doubtful, or at least agnostic, about Anidjar’s claim about secularism’s path-dependency upon Christianity. I say this for two reasons. The first, briefly, is India—a nation whose history has inspired a fierce and still-unresolved debate about the extent to which secularism follows Christianity as a general rule (Bhargava 1998). My second doubt concerns whether the alleged path-dependency of secularism upon Christianity could ever justify the normative stance against secularism that Anidjar and many others have recently taken. While it is undoubtedly true that secularism was brought to America by Christian Europeans, and that both secularism and Christianity have been (and continue to be) forced upon Natives, and that most present-day secularists are oblivious to all of this, it does not follow that exposing secularism’s Christian sources necessarily amounts to a critical, let alone an anti-imperialist or anti-colonial position. Anidjar admits this much when he points out that his identification of secularism with Christianity is not meant to be exclusive nor “to suggest that formations of the secular did not occur in other cultures or that some cultures…are incapable of so-called secular progress” (59). My own concern, when it comes to using the genealogy of secularism as a warrant for anti-secularism, is more methodological, and stems from a worry that such a move can easily break faith with the “critical principle” and tread into the territory of the genetic fallacy (Williams 2002, 224).
Be all that as it may, I am happy to acknowledge the resemblance between what I am saying about secularism here and what Anidjar has said about it. His is a spectacular polemic, and I personally find much value in it. Again, though, I emphasize that the historical claim I am pursuing here is comparatively narrow, much narrower than Anidjar’s own. It is the fact that the claim needs to be made at all—that the very idea of Indigenous secularism seems foreign to the prevailing scholarly wisdom, if not to Native Americans—that comes as a surprise.
Occom’s secularism
In 1764, Samson Occom was forty-one years old, in the thick of a highly eventful ministerial career, and very busy. He spent January and February traveling with the “Great Itinerant” George Whitefield on a preaching tour of New England. In March, he returned to Mohegan, where he found himself enmeshed in a bitter intra-tribal dispute over the sachemship of Ben Uncas III, whom Occom, together with most of his fellow Mohegans, regarded as a puppet of Connecticut Colony.
At some point that year, Occom wrote a petition on behalf of the tribe to Sir William Johnson, England’s superintendent of Indian affairs in New England: We think we are imposed upon by our over Seers...they want to root us out of our land root & Branch, they have already Proceeded with arbitrary Power over us,—and we want to know from whence they got that Power or Whither they Can Maintain such Power Jus[t]ly over us…and the English intends to Continue him [Ben Uncas III] as a Sachem ovr us, but we have a Law and a Custom to make a Sachem over us Without the help of any People or Nation in the World, and When he makes himself unworthy of his Station we put him down—ourselves. ([1764] 2006, 144-5)
Although this passage has been cited (Lopenzina 2012, 212) as an example of Occom’s commitment to Mohegan sovereignty, there are actually two distinct understandings of sovereignty implied here. According to the first of these, the Mohegans’ right not to be governed by English people stems from the tribe’s relationship to “our own land.” This relationship is autochthonous and exclusive, establishing the authority of tribal government “without the help of any People or Nation in the World.” It is enough to say that a people persist on “our own land” in order to see why “a Law and a Custom” not to be ruled by foreigners should be valid.
The other idea of sovereignty in play here is that of a government constituted and legitimated through the consent of those governed. The reigning opposition here is the familiar distinction between government by consent and “arbitrary power,” with the former requiring that the governing authority be attuned to the interest of the governed and continually “track” (Pettit 1997, 53–79) that interest as it changes over time. A failure of such tracking creates “arbitrariness,” at which point the right to choose how to be governed reverts back to the people: “When he makes himself unworthy of his Station we put him down—ourselves.”
What are we to make of the co-presence of these two ideas of sovereignty in one petition? Cultural syncretism surely affords part of an explanation, since it is apparent from the petition that Occom’s political thinking was porous to ideas borrowed from various sources. But it is not enough to say that Occom made a virtue of this porousness and leave it at that. In fact, Occom thought these two understandings of sovereignty, and only these two, formed a kind of non-accidental conceptual dyad. They were two ways of looking at the same topic, one that could only be seen in its wholeness from a point of view human beings were unable to attain.
Why this should be so is illustrated in an undated sermon on Galatians 5:1 in which Occom describes what sovereignty meant in the garden of Eden. Occom here relates how “Adam in his innocency … had free Liberty from his God to injoy the garden of Paradise … except one Tree in the midst of the garden that god reservd for himself, to let Adam know that God was his Sovereign and he had right to put him under restriction and Law” (224). The condition of Adam before the fall, according to this passage, had all the virtues of both the autochthonous and the pseudo-Republican forms of sovereignty alluded to earlier. The “Sovereign” governing Adam gave him a “free Liberty” grounded in a privileged relation to the land, a relation no other person could ever again enjoy. And he fulfilled the duty of the non-arbitrary sovereign to govern in such a way as to track the interest of the governed, “put[ting] him under restriction and law” based on a knowledge of what Adam was capable of and what was in his best interest. Finally, as an added bonus—perhaps in order to guard against the possibility that Adam would mistakenly find him “arbitrary”—God gave him perfect knowledge (“let Adam know”) of all the relevant information about his situation.
A little later in the same sermon, Occom clarifies the significance of God’s endowing Adam not merely with a privileged and exclusive relationship with the land, but also with the benefit of knowing his “sovereign” and his “right.” The fall from grace, Occom argues, was an end to knowledge: By Which Wickedness, he lost all his Liberty freedom and happiness, for by this great Disobedience he lost his garden and the Whole World, and lost the knowledge of god, and Consequently lost Communion with God, and forfeted every mercy at the hands of God, and was turn’d out of Paradice, for he had justly renderd himself unworthy of it, he is now broak, is become a Bankrupt, a vacaband.… (Occom 2006, 224)
When Adam fell from grace, he “renderd himself unworthy” of the benefits of living under an autochthonous, non-arbitrary form of sovereignty. He forfeited not only “his garden” but also his “knowledge of God,” thus finding himself deprived of the epistemic conditions necessary for a non-arbitrary relationship between himself and his sovereign to obtain. In the Garden, Adam had the privilege of knowing exactly who his sovereign was and whether that sovereign “had [a] right” to expect obedience; after the fall, his descendants would no longer be certain if the persons governing them had such a right. Of course, after the fall, God remained sovereign and it would remain incumbent upon humans to obey his revealed command. But it would forever remain part of humankind’s fallen condition to act in such a way as to prove that they did not really know God and that they had “lost Communion” with him. The pervasiveness of sin in the world was proof enough of that.
Occom’s discussion of sovereignty in Paradise casts new light on the two models of sovereignty at work in the letter to Johnson, each of which recaptured some of the governmental virtues that were lost when Adam estranged himself from God. Saying that the Mohegans should enjoy a primordial relationship to “[their] own land” or that they should expect to be governed in a non-“arbitrary” way were two distinct ways of saying what Indigenous sovereignty should aspire to achieve, if only imperfectly given the limitations of knowledge characteristic of human beings’ fallen state. In secular history, both idioms could be useful for Native people, but both were fallen and incomplete. So Occom clearly did think that Mohegans and other Native Americans enjoyed a special relationship to the land that justified their right to live there; but he also held that this land-based idea of Native sovereignty, grounded as it undoubtedly was in traditionary “law and custom” as well as the land, was conceptually incomplete and politically dangerous on its own. Occom’s innovation was to supplement a purely place-based idea of sovereignty with a critique of arbitrary power which drew from Mohegan “custom” as well as the theological anthropology outlined above. What this last element provided was an account of human knowledge as inherently fallen and imperfect; this obviated the possibility that any disposition of secular authority could ever be just without constant communication between members of the polity about what their consent amounted to.
This point about the political significance Occom ascribed to the fallenness of human knowledge can be brought out more vividly by considering a 1788 letter written by Occom on behalf of a Mohegan debtor, in which Occom’s anthropological views about human knowledge serve as a global standard for assessing both settler and Indigenous political regimes: John Dantuckquechen … had a Law Suit against him upon Suspission of Debt, and he [knew nothing] about it, till it was over… [N]ow is agreable to the Laws of this State or any State? that a [man] may be Suid, and the Case tryd & Desided, and the man that [was] Suid knows nothing from first to last, till the Execution Comes out against him…[I]s there no redress for the Indians, by the Rulers, if there is none, I do declare it, I had rather be amongst the most Wild and uncultivated Indians, in the Western Wilderness. (Occom 2006, 128)
The mistake made by both “the Rulers” of Connecticut and the “uncultivated Indians, in the Western Wilderness” is that they ignore human beings’ right to “redress” and to be “Suid” following norms of due process. It is because Dantuckquechen “knows nothing from first to last” about the existence and progress of the suit against him that the proceeding is unjust, not because the suit itself was baseless or the punishment undeserved. Why, exactly, was his lack of knowledge a problem? One reason has to do with the idea of “arbitrary power” raised by Occom in the Jones letter. Occom’s complaint that Dantuckquechen “knows nothing,” and is thus unable to bring about “redress,” presupposes that holding one’s “Rulers” accountable for governing non-arbitrarily requires knowing if a miscarriage of justice has occurred. Another problem with Dantuckquechen’s non-knowledge of his situation has to do with the way that non-knowledge deprives him of the opportunity to bring his conscience to bear on the transgression he was alleged to have committed: the opportunity to see for himself the rightness or wrongness of his actions independent of external coercion. In Dantuckquechen’s case, the status of being guilty (or innocent) was instead the result of external fiat, much as it had been according to the criticisms of “Romish” notions of indulgence and penitence excoriated by Luther and other early Reformers. Occom’s plea for due process in the case of Dantuckquechen (and, arguably, his plea for non-arbitrary government in his letter to Jones) can thus be seen as continuous with the post-Reformation redeployment of the concept of conscience as a new kind of check against governmental authority as embodied in ecclesiastical and civil courts.
This brings us to an important question in assessing Occom’s views of Indigenous sovereignty: did the tribes of the “Western Wilderness” have a concept of conscience of the kind relied upon in Occom’s own political writings? There is no question at all whether Occom thought Native Americans in their “uncultivated” state had consciences, which he surely did (2006, 214–8). But to have a concept of conscience, one would need recourse to something approximating the anthropology of knowledge sketched above, according to which humans’ epistemic faculties were compromised by Adam’s having “lost the knowledge of god” he first enjoyed in Eden, a knowledge that could only be recovered in the individual’s final confrontation with God after death. Only an “uncultivated” person could think that a judicial proceeding conducted without taking this set of ideas into account could possibly yield a just outcome.
This supposition finds clear support in Occom’s most famous piece of writing, the sermon he delivered on the New Haven Green at the execution of the Wampanoag convert Moses Paul on September 2, 1772, shortly after his conviction for murder. “[W]hat could you say for yourself?” Occom asked Paul at a climactic moment of the sermon, for you have been brought up under the bright sun-shine, and plain, and loud sound of the gospel… You have not sinned in such an ignorant manner as others have done; but you have sinned with both your eyes open as it were, under the light even the glorious light of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.—You have sinned against the light of your own conscience, against your knowledge and understanding. (Occom 2006, 189)
Occom’s references here to Paul’s “knowledge,” “understanding,” and lack of “ignorance” compared to “others” (presumably, other Indigenous people) denote the kind of knowledge that only one “brought up under…the gospel” could have. What only such a person understands is the epistemology of fallenness I have been describing. Paul had access to the rudiments of this epistemology, and so he had a concept of conscience: not just an internal moral compass, but the knowledge that he had one and that it was imperfect relative to the knowledge of God characteristic of Paradise and the hereafter. Knowing about these two kinds of knowledge, and the eschatological relationship between them, was a necessary condition of being able to sin “against the light of your own conscience,” since the latter involved acting as if one did not know about the inevitability of the Last Judgment. Thus, Occom did not think he was saying anything Paul did not already know when, turning to the assembled crowd, he observed that “though this poor condemned creature will in a few minutes know more than all of us, either in unutterable joy, or in inconceivable wo, yet we shall certainly know as much as he in a few days.” The fate of Paul’s soul would be settled in his encounter with God. In the meantime, his sin was a public lesson in the conscientious management of imperfect human knowledge.
Occom’s execution sermon for Moses Paul is a grim document, as befits the text it expounds: “The wages of sin is death.” But when seen as part of a Protestant tradition of re-thinking individual believers’ relationship to the law, it can also be read as an expression of what Luther had called a “joyful conscience” (Sorabji 2014, 204). The true Christian’s realization of the imperfectness of human knowledge was paradoxically liberating, since it went hand-in-hand with the realization of the promise of redemption offered in Christ. Later, John Calvin would further demonstrate how this realization licensed humankind to make the most of their imperfect knowledge in the management of secular affairs (Walzer 1965, 37). The background of the Reformation helps clarify why Occom presents Paul’s sin against “the light of [his] own conscience, against [his] knowledge and understanding” as an abrogation of his political responsibility as well as his responsibility to God. As Occom told him, “The just law of man, and the holy law of Jehovah, call aloud for the destruction of your mortal life” (188). These two kinds of law worked in tandem in bringing Moses Paul to justice, but Occom believed they emanated from two different sovereigns, only one of which spoke through scripture, or what Occom called “the antient decree of heaven.” Knowing about Christ’s sacrifice was supposed to liberate Paul’s conscience by making it more accountable to the human management of human affairs, and to “the holy law of Jehovah.” Acting as if he did not know about that sacrifice was the gravest sin he committed.
On Occom’s understanding, then, he and Moses Paul enjoyed a freedom of conscience unknown to the “Indians, in the Western Wilderness.” Since these Indians knew nothing of Christ’s promise of eventually putting an fixing “eventually putting an eventual” end to humanity’s estrangement from God, they could not see that secular knowledge had to be ambivalently embraced as both morally compromised and politically liberating in the here-and-now. If they had such knowledge, they would institute norms of due process and assign greater legal value to the forms of self-scrutiny implied in the concept of conscience. These protocols of government and self-discipline were unknown to the unconverted Native communities of the “Western Wilderness” and ignored by the Mohegans’ colonial overseers, which made the two communities comparable to one another. Neither group acknowledged that the perfect sovereignty of God was different in kind from the sovereignty embodied in political regimes established by humans in secular time.
For Occom, becoming a Christian was how one learned to distinguish between political and religious authority, which was in turn a necessary entailment of any theory of Indigenous sovereignty worth having. As we have seen, Occom’s secularism motivated him to recover and sympathetically critique an indigenist notion of sovereignty rooted in Native peoples’ relationship to “our own land” by saying that notions of autochthony captured part of what Indigenous sovereignty could be, but that those notions needed to be supplemented with a discourse of free conscience. The sovereignty of Native nations, then, was not just compatible with the belief in the sovereignty of the Christian God; it could actually be strengthened by that belief, so long as one remembered that the sovereignty of human beings was based on the hazy and imperfect apperception of what was good for each other, whereas the law of God was expressed in the Gospel’s “bright sun-shine…and loud sound.”
The secular-colonial
I acknowledge that the sketch I have just offered of Samson Occom’s secularism may seem a little bloodless and even hardboiled in its exhumation of certain “dry bones” of theology and political theory that are very dry and dusty indeed. If I have given the impression that Occom was a dry writer or orthodox thinker then I regret that because nothing could be further from the truth. Yet, there is a reason why I have been concerned here to shine some light on the drier side of Occom’s secularist conception of Native sovereignty, which stems from my desire to exert some resistance against a pronounced romanticism which has crept into recent discussions of Indigenous peoples’ ideas about the relationship between politics and religion in the early colonial period.
This new romanticism entails, on the one hand, a historical account about how the concept of religion impacted Indigenous lives and, on the other, a set of assumptions about how Indigenous Studies scholarship ought to respond to that history. When it comes to historiography, the romantics contend that Native Americans prior to colonial contact were possessed of a “holistic” worldview that did not differentiate between religion and other spheres of life. After their contact with Anglo-Europeans, some Indigenous people did begin drawing such a distinction, but only under pressure from the colonizers, whose imposition of the category of “religion” on Native ceremonial life “subtly undermined the communal and holistic ideals of that [Indigenous] tradition” (Wenger 2009, 6). The role of anti-colonial scholarship, on the romantic view, is to recover this holistic dimension of Native peoples’ outlook on the world and to emphasize how that holism got misrecognized and repressed by colonists (and subsequent historians) who insisted that religion and politics could be differentiated. In the following discussion, I use the term “neo-romantic” to designate this relatively recent configuration of cultural, methodological, and political suppositions in order to distinguish the scholarly trend I am talking about from other forms of romanticism or “noble savagism” regarding Native Americans with which readers may be familiar.
It is important briefly to contextualize the neo-romantic view against the background of intellectual and political developments that preceded its emergence in the 1990s and 2000s. This will help clarify the motivations behind the view, many of which are irreproachable despite the tendentiousness of the position to which they have given rise.
The rise of the neo-romantic position I have in mind can be traced back to the era of the Red Power movement, when the work of Indigenous scholars and activists began impacting mainstream historical work in ways never seen before. During the 1960s and 70s, a new wave of traditionalism emerged among Native intellectuals including the Standing Rock Sioux ex-Episcopalian Vine Deloria, Jr., who vociferously denounced both Christianity and secularism as colonial impositions. Non-Indigenous historians, for their part, became increasingly cognizant of tribal sovereignty and self-determination, and of the fact that Native peoples’ diverse understandings of these phenomena did not always align with the notions of self-government prescribed by the US Constitution and federal Indian law. They also sought to bring their work on the history of American colonialism into closer alignment with what Native people were saying about their own histories and traditions. Ethnohistorians popularized the hermeneutic method of “upstreaming,” defined as “the interpretation of historical sources in light of ethnological and folkloric materials collected in later periods” or, slightly more generally, as “work[ing] back from the cultural knowns of the present to the unknown past” (Richter 1992, 5; Axtell 1981, 9). For many non-Indigenous historians, Deloria himself became a guide to “the unknown past” of Native religious history, someone whose strictures against Euro-American Christianity and secularism could be deferred to when hazarding generalizations about what a “traditional Native religion” or “outlook” amounts to (McNally 2020, 7; Michaelsen 1983, 112).
These various developments go some way toward explaining why the “rationalism” that characterized works like Salisbury’s “Red Puritans”—which described New England missionaries as mystified by an “illusory” and “simplistic vision”—has been more or less swept aside in recent discussions of early colonial missions in favor of a new neo-romantic consensus (Salisbury 1974, 46, 54; Trigger 1991). Whereas Salisbury had argued that the error committed by the missionaries was one of mystification, this new consensus holds that the downfall of missionaries lay in their failure to revise the concepts they used to interpret Native cultures based on the realities they encountered on the ground. Most importantly, however much missionaries may have wanted to persuade Indigenous people that they should renounce paganism in favor of Christianity, they remained oblivious to the fact that the very idea of religion was foreign to Native American life (Wenger 2017, 102; 2009, 19), such that a “wholesale conversion” (Fisher 2012, 101) from paganism to Christianity made little sense. Nevertheless, the early colonists’ misapplication of the concept of “religion” was perpetuated by later generations of religious historians, who, “like missionaries before them…have drawn conventional boundaries around and between ‘religions’ as systems” and therefore “looked askance at the hybridities that abound in native Christianity, for such practices transgress the putative boundaries between religious systems” (McNally 2000, 10‐11). What the missionaries and religious historians alike have failed to realize, according to the neo-romantic critique, is that Native cultures are possessed of a deep “practice orientation” (McNally 2020, 7) as distinct from the prioritization of “truth” and “conformity” (Wheeler 2013, 48) characteristic of Euro-American religion and politics—as witnessed in the First Amendment (Michaelsen 1983, 112) and, even earlier, in the New England missionaries’ notion of a bona fide or “totalizing and complete” “conversion” from one religion to another (Fisher 2012, 55, 16, 8). The point, the neo-romantics emphasize, is not that Native conversions did not occur, but rather that from an Indigenous point of view, conversion did not require surrendering the fate of one’s soul to the absolute sovereignty of an omnipotent God. The reason for this is that Indians approached religion “more in terms of testing, sampling, and appending to existing customs and practices, rather than conceiving of religious change in terms of a wholesale renunciation of one set of ideas in favor of another.” Adapting to Christianity was something that New England Natives could accomplish “without intellectual or religious discomfort, no matter how foreign this possibility might have appeared to Euroamerican missionaries” (8, 88‐89). Even Samson Occom’s conversion experience demonstrates the general truth that “Christianity is but another venue through which Indigenous peoples continue their ongoing struggle for self-determination”; to “fully appreciate Native conversion,” then, is to see it as “an act of self-determination and an expression of sovereignty” (Brooks 2003, 55‐56, emphasis added).
To be very clear: there is much to be admired in this neo-romantic approach, above all its foregrounding of the self-determination of Native peoples. No one wants to turn back the clock and bring back the kind of “rationalism” that characterized much work on Native history before the Red Power era, which was far too invested in historical-critical methodologies inherited from the nineteenth century to reflect upon the relationship between scholarship and Indigenous self-determination in the here-and-now. Such rationalism did not necessarily do Indigenous communities any favors—and may in some instances have hindered contemporary legal and political struggles being waged by tribal nations, struggles which often required telling relatively clear and unequivocal stories about tribes’ cultural and political histories. From the neo-romantic perspective, it might be seen as muddying the waters to highlight ways in which differentiating between religion and politics (or something approximating them) was and remains an aspect of certain Native peoples’ traditions—a possibility which I have gestured toward in the above discussion of Occom, and which is more fully explored in pre-contact contexts by Bragdon (2002, 18), Jennings (1975, 147-148), and others. The fact that neo-romantics have yet to deal with such countervailing interpretations of the available archaeological and primary-source evidence is probably in part ascribable to their commitment to maintaining clear through-lines of Indigenous cultural history from pre-contact times to the present day.
Perhaps this same commitment also explains why the neo-romantics have tended not to worry much about the ways in which their ideas about Indigenous peoples’ primordial holism might seem to run afoul of previous critiques of romanticism in the study of Native American lifeways, some of which are well known even to non-specialists. After all, does not the neo-romantic perspective on conversion traffic in a set of assumptions which bear a superficial resemblance, at least, to “savagist” assumptions famously diagnosed by Pearce (1965, 122-123) more than a half-century ago: assumptions about how the “essence of Indian religion” reflects the “specifically noncivilized virtues” of an “Indian mind” defined by “its emphasis upon the immediate and particular; its inability to abstract; its practical, hardheaded morality”? How, if it all, do neo-romantic characterizations of Native religion in terms of “hybridities” that “transgress…systems” or “in terms of testing, sampling, and appending” new beliefs and practices to old ones “without intellectual or religious discomfort,” differ from Lévi-Strauss’s portrait of the Native bricoleur whose “savage mind” discloses the “real principle of dialectical reason” in its “intransigent refusal…to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 245)? One might even be forgiven for wondering if there isn’t a hint here of “inverse ethnocentrism” of the kind notoriously described by Marshall Sahlins, in which “Natives” are imaginatively vested with a “utilist” or “bourgeois relation to reality” in contradistinction to superstitious “Western scholars” who “slavishly repeat the irrational beliefs of their ancestors” (Sahlins 1995, 148, 8‐9).
I canvass these various queries here not because I think all of them are worth pursuing at length but rather by way of illustrating how strikingly innocent the neo-romantics seem to be when it comes to the numerous quarrels that have been raised by prior critics of romanticism in the study of Native Americans. Then again, this seeming innocence may be a form of studied aloofness. Perhaps the neo-romantics would ask at this point what purpose is served by bringing up these academic controversies belonging to other times and places. They might say that doing Indigenous Studies today means not getting bogged down in methodological quibbles about how their ideas of Indigenous holism differ from those of earlier romantics; re-adjudicating such bygone debates does little to support Native peoples in their ongoing fight for self-determination. If this is what the neo-romantics think, then their position entails a remarkable willingness to constrain academic inquiry on behalf of politics, but I actually have no quarrel with them when it comes to letting one’s political priorities inform the way one does research. The problem with their approach is not that it is politically motivated but that the content of the political position on which it rests is self-contradictory and ultimately self-defeating. While the ambition of the neo-romantics is to foreground and further Indigenous self-determination, their efforts on behalf of this goal are vitiated by the same assumptions about holism that characterize their historiography. They succeed in giving some Indigenous perspectives on self-determination pride of place, but the only Indigenous voices they can hear are those which who conform to their romantic preconceptions: their cultural preconception about Native peoples’ collective worldview being essentially holistic; and their methodological preconception that speaking up on behalf of self-determination must entail the ethnographic disclosure of Indigenous lifeways that do not resemble “colonial” or “Euro-Christian” ones.
Let us revisit briefly the late Vine Deloria, Jr., the Indigenous intellectual to whom neo-romantic historians have perhaps most often referred as an authority on Indigenous religion. Deloria’s best-known book, God Is Red, is an eloquent call for a return to Native religious traditions that colonialism has put under threat. It is also a strident rebuke of Christianity—which “banish[ed] God from any possibility of relating to time and space, thus in effect precluding Him from interference with this world”—and of secularism, as witnessed by Deloria in the 1970s, especially in the de-ceremonialization of tribal governments, whose routine operations Deloria describes as “one of the dirtiest forms of human activity in existence” (2003, 291, 248). In what may be the book’s most widely cited sentence, Deloria argues that “[t]here is no salvation in tribal religions apart from the continuance of the tribe itself” (194). One can easily see how such a statement might support the idea that Native people are holistic and thus a-secularist in their common attitude toward religion and politics. Yet the statement is open to multiple interpretations. Following Kristen Carpenter, one might read Deloria as suggesting that “Indian religious claims” are also political claims since they are “about preserving tribal societies from extermination” (2012, 397). And this seems entirely plausible: Indigenous religions are political in the sense that, by nurturing the lives of adherents, they help guarantee the survival of the communities where Indigenous politics actually happens. But one could also read Deloria’s statement as supporting the more general and a-historical proposition that Native Americans just are not the sort of people who think of religion and politics as differentiated. An example of such a reading is offered by Michaelsen (1983, 112) who takes Deloria as an authority when claiming that, whereas “the framers of the First Amendment understood God to be separate from the world, the religious from the secular, and public life from private life…such views are foreign to an outlook in which religion permeates all of life.”
The last of these claims strikes a false note—but in what sense exactly? It would be easy enough to say that the proposition itself is essentialist; but this would be overly coarse, since it is true, after all, that Vine Deloria maintained the same basic position, and accusing Deloria of essentialism seems inappropriate. This is because Deloria, in his strictures against secularism, was not offering an ethnographic description about what Native Americans “are like.” He was instead taking a stand on Indigenous identity—that is, making a normative intervention amid a conflicted field of opinion about what Native identity should be. This much is evident in the vitriol which Deloria directs toward non-traditionalist tribal leaders whose idea of “leadership” consists solely in “the ability to win elections”; and in his “predict[ion]” that “within a decade people serving on tribal councils will have to have a full traditional ceremonial life to get elected” (Deloria 2003, 248, 41)—a statement which only makes sense on the supposition that a great many Native Americans already distinguish between religion and politics. Far from advancing an essentialist claim about what Native people “are like,” then, God is Red set out to argue that too many Indigenous people were already too secularist and to express a desire that they should become less so.
It is far from clear that the historians who cite Deloria as an oracle of Indigenous peoples’ primordial a-secularism are aware of this distinction—or of any other of the numerous debates about secularism and traditionalism that are currently unfolding in Native nations, in Indigenous Studies journals, and even in the mainstream American press. A selective overview of these debates indicates that, in some quarters at least, the pendulum of opinion has swung quite dramatically away from the hard-core traditionalism that has made God is Red such a favorite among the neo-romantics. Just as forcefully as Deloria decried the de-ceremonialization of tribal politics in the 1970s, Melanie Yazzie has denounced the culturalism that has come to predominate within more recent Native political discourse, observing that “within some contemporary Indigenous resistance movements we can see…culture, authenticity, and tradition serving as mechanisms for lateral discipline of more radical or militant approaches” (Yazzie 2020, 106). Another important departure from Deloria’s anti-secularism and parochialism can be found in the published speeches of current US Interior Secretary Haaland (2019), who has argued that the patriarchy which passes as traditionalism in her home Pueblo of Laguna is itself a reaction to colonial domination, and about how her exclusion from Pueblo government due to her gender identification motivated her involvement in New Mexico electoral politics.
Lastly, and most importantly for present purposes, I would draw attention to Audra Simpson’s recent work on “ethnographic refusal,” which opposes Deloria’s quasi-evangelical publicization of Indigenous traditions on the radical level of utterance itself. Whereas Deloria, two years before God Is Red, had published a book titled We Talk, You Listen to explain Native traditions “from the inside” so that “non-Indians, using a tribal point of view, can better understand themselves and their relationship to Indian people” (Deloria 1970, 13), Simpson (2014, 105) proposes that “to think and write about sovereignty … involves an ethnographic calculus of what you need to know and what I refuse to write.” The theory and practice of ethnographic refusal are intended by Simpson to disrupt any form of knowledge-production about Indigenous peoples which uncritically assumes that they want outsiders to know about their traditional cultures. This would have to include neo-romanticism, which relies heavily on “upstreaming” ethnographic truths derived from contemporary Indigenous sources backward into historical time (Brooks 2003, 55; McNally 2020, 7). Simpson’s writings on ethnographic refusal stand as yet another instance of the kinds of Indigenous intellectual and political work that neo-romantics have avoided in their search for Native informants who can help them pin on Indigenous people in general the ethnographic attribute of “holism.” More than that, however, Simpson’s work on refusal implies a theoretical approach to the topic of Indigenous and settler-colonial identity formation that can help us sort out why the neo-romantics persist in this project.
Ethnographic refusal has been theorized in various ways, but one way of specifying its methodological intervention is to note its alignment with other theoretical approaches to the concept of identity which emphasize the normativity of identity claims, which always involve taking some kind of stand, and are never only a neutral description of what people are like. In the present context, the normativity of identity descriptions applies not only to ethnographic discourse about Indigenous peoples, which often affects those peoples in undesired ways, as Simpson argues, but also to the role played by ethnographic descriptions of Native Americans in the formation of non-Indigenous or settler-colonial identities. “It was to satisfy their need to be at home, to have a historical link with the past of the new place, rather than to be ‘immigrants’ or ‘settlers,’” Simpson argues, that the Anglo-European colonists defined “against their notion of ‘the Indian’…their new identity and nationhood as Americans” (2014, 78).
What I wish to suggest by way of closing is that this process of “home”-making, of building a so-called “usable past” for the settler-colonial self, is being sustained by the neo-romantic historians of Native American religion, whose present-day alienation from their own societies’ foundational commitment to secularism has found an expressive outlet in the valorization of the holistic—which is to say religion-undifferentiating and thus a-secularist—worldview of the colonized “other.”
To anyone who has read Orientalism, this diagnosis of holism as a projection of the secular-colonial self will not seem especially original since (as Anidjar points out in the essay cited earlier) it was Said who first delineated there how the intertwined histories of colonialism and secularism came to shape the peculiar form of alienation that characterized the habitus of Western intellectuals in their encounters with the non-Western Other. Still, the various ways in which alienation from secular-colonial identity has manifested itself in the historical study of Native Americans by non-Native Americans has received remarkably little attention from Native Studies scholars. I suspect that this has partly to do with those scholars’ understandable resistance to the imposition of interpretive frameworks built for non-Indigenous contexts on Native Americans—a resistance which, as Simpson elsewhere observes, has perhaps most often been directed toward Marxism (Simpson and Smith 2014, 17‐22), but which has also frequently been directed toward “theory” more generally (Shoemaker 2001, vii-xii). But partly it has to do with the peculiar history of American secularism itself, which since the days of the early Republic has devised a number of unique and cunning ways of covering its own colonial tracks. I have in mind above all the myth—propagated most spectacularly in the fictions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also in more workaday fashion in the dicta of innumerable history teachers, TV pundits, and armchair freethinkers—that Britain’s North American colonies were themselves resolutely a-secularist or “theocratic” up until the time of the Salem witch trials or even the Declaration of Independence. This indelible ruse of nationalist reason furnishes an appropriate mythological backdrop for the oedipal overthrow of overzealous “colonial” religiosity by the secularist framers of the US Constitution; but, even more importantly for our purposes, it also obscures the role secularism actually played in Britain’s northern colonies as a framework for settler identity formation, a set of guidelines for colonial governance, and a way of distinguishing colonial polities from those of Native Americans.
The entrenchment of secularism as a feature of colonial Anglo-American identity and society has its historical sources in certain well-known ideological upheavals characterizing the British empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prominent among which was the emergence of a new variety of English nationalism rooted in imperial expansion, on the one hand, and, on the other, in Puritan dissent with respect to the established Church and the crypto-Papist political tendencies associated with various anti-Protestant monarchs in Britain and abroad. This new form of nationalism was characterized by a widely held belief that can be roughly ventriloquized in the following way: what makes “us” special as English people is our ability to differentiate between Divine and political sovereignty, unlike any number of less fortunate, un-“chosen” nations elsewhere in the world.
One of the clearest and most influential expressions of this proto-secularist-cum-nationalist identity occurs in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, which famously advocates extending toleration to everyone except Catholics and “Mahumetans” on the grounds that their religions, are constituted upon such a bottom, that all those who enter into it, do thereby, ipso facto, deliver themselves up to the Protection and Service of another Prince. For by this means the Magistrate would give way to the settling of a forreign Jurisdiction in his own Country, and suffer his own People to be listed, as it were, for Souldiers against his own Government.([1689] 1983, 50)
In courses on the Western political tradition, this passage has attained iconic status as a “teachable moment” in the emergence of the modern secular self-understanding: Locke’s anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim prejudices are embarrassing, according to the conventional wisdom, but today we can take a modicum of pleasure in their quaintness since his main points about toleration were basically right. Locke’s delusion about Catholics and Muslims not being able to differentiate between civil and religious “Jurisdiction[s]” seem less quaint, however, when one finds it reproduced in contemporary writings by non-Indigenous people about Native Americans sharing “an outlook in which religion permeates all of life” (Michaelsen 1983, 112). True, the valuation attached by the secular-colonial subject to the a-secular Other has “more or less reversed itself, from a shocked contempt for primitive superstition verging on devil worship, to an envious awe for a holistic spirituality” (Jenkins 2004, 2). All the same, the work of secularist identity formation continues apace, with every assertion of Native Americans’ primordial holism reaffirming that it is “our” lot to think that religion and politics are different.
Recent commentators have laid many sins at the foot of secularism, understood variously as a political doctrine, a spiritual outlook, or a way of life. But regardless of what you think of secularism itself, it seems uncontroversial to say that in the colonial context, it has repeatedly been weaponized via a series of double standards whereby non-Natives, in their dealings with Indigenous peoples, have not found it compulsory to hold themselves to their own professed political norms. For example, when discussing the governance of colonial towns, New England Puritans in the seventeenth century generally “endorsed a ‘two kingdoms’ approach to church and state” according to which “the church could not employ ‘temporal’ authority, nor the temporal kingdom the ‘spiritual’ authority of the church” (Hall 2019, 25). It is well known that this proto-secularist self-understanding went hand-in-hand in New England with a virulent anti-Catholicism that only grew more intense over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in the paroxysms of nationalist rhetoric which attended the implosion of France’s North American empire at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War (Berens 1978, 37‐59). Yet whereas English colonists derided French papists for blurring the lines between civil and spiritual authority, much like Locke in his Letter, they held Native Americans to a different standard. Their destiny was to be brought into Christ’s kingdom, but never to enjoy sovereignty in a “temporal” sense. In a dark foreshadowing of neo-romantic assumptions about how the world for Indigenous peoples is suffused with spiritual meaning, the belief of the Puritan colonists was that religion was all the Indians needed. As John Cotton advised in the 1630s: “as you partake in their Land, so make them partakers of your precious Faith; as you reap their Temporals, so feed them with your Spirituals” (Cotton 1634, 19). Such statements, which are littered throughout the archives of early New England, reflect what Tinker (1993, 29) described as the “conflict of interest” characterizing missionary adventures in the New World: despite knowing perfectly well that Divine and “temporal” sovereignty were different in kind, most New England missionaries acted as if converting Native people to Christianity necessitated “subject[ing] them to Puritan rule and intentionally depriv[ing] them of their independence,” that is, setting up a theocracy over Indigenous communities only. It was, Tinker rightly suggests, the missionaries' proto-secularist nationalism, and not their zeal for theocracy per se, that lent an air of plausibility to their proposals to extinguish Native Americans’ “temporals” on behalf of their “spirituals”—despite their conviction that maintaining separate spheres of temporal and spiritual authority was the best course of action for a Godly people like themselves.
The point of all this, it is worth re-emphasizing, is not that early New England missionaries were oblivious to the secularism that already existed in Indigenous societies. If that were the case, then Roger Williams would be the hero of this story since he, ever the maverick, maintained that the Narragansetts maintained the “exact form” of church-state separation: “their Kings or Governours called Sachimauog, Kings, and Atauskowaug, Rulers, doe govern: Their Priests, performe and manage their Worship” (Williams 1643, 120‐121). This, however, was probably a projection inspired by Williams’s reading of More’s Utopia (Teunissen and Hinz 1976, 285). Just like the hypothesis that Indigenous people have always had a holistic worldview, it remains unproven and is probably unprovable. It is to Williams’s credit, however, that he avoided turning church-state differentiation into a double standard in his dealings with Native peoples. Such double standards have rarely if ever worked in Indigenous peoples’ favor; and, as we have seen, the idea that Native Americans cannot be secularists like “us” has underwritten innumerable schemes of political and scholarly entrepreneurship through which non-Natives have set out to consolidate their religious, political, and academic authority vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, in the writings of people like Occom, and across the Americas today, Indigenous secularism is definitely “a thing.” For anyone who would stand in solidarity with Indigenous self-determination without presuming to dictate the particular form it should take, this seems worth keeping in mind.
Footnotes
Author biography
Ryan Carr received his PhD in American literature at Yale and currently teaches in the Center for American Studies and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He works at the intersection of Indigenous Studies, literary criticism, and transatlantic religious history. His first book, Reading Samson Occom: Stranger-Love and Self-Determination, explores the Northeast Native traditions of diplomacy and hospitality that Occom was raised in, and how he adapted those traditions to life as an evangelical minister and political separatist.