Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews

Abstract

Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. ix, 326 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). In his first book, Edward Andrews combines meticulous historiography and compelling storytelling to produce a tour-de-force that should interest both specialists and non-specialists alike. In an important sense, Native Apostles does for the history of Christian missionaries throughout the Atlantic World what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker did for the transatlantic history of labour in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Revolutionary History of the Atlantic (Boston, 2000). Though there were hundreds of Amerindian, African, and African-American missionaries operating throughout the early modern British colonial world, we know very little about them until now. Yet by the nineteenth century, the majority of people working in various Protestant world missions were not British. Indeed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved pivotal for the colonial globalization of Christianity. Pursuing investigation of these sociohistorical developments and the question of how or indigenous converts and evangelists figured within complex and contested processes of sociocultural interpenetration and change requires a nuanced transatlantic approach. There were likely many more native apostles--including women--than evidenced by the document trail, yet Andrews uncovers a revealing and robust archive, including a plethora of self-authored materials by Christians themselves, which he treats as auto-ethnographic texts of considerable significance. Conversion processes and cumulative generational developments of non-European clergy meant that Black and Indian evangelists throughout the early modern world figured profoundly in evolving transatlantic debates about race and the future of Christendom. Chapter one examines missionary and conversion efforts among Amerindians in seventeenth-century North America, from the first (unsuccessful) English effort to employ evangelists in early seventeenth-century Virginia to the mid-seventeenth century praying towns of eastern Massachusetts and southern New England. The first Christian missionary to Indians in this area was a convert--not John Eliot, as is usually taken to be the case. Indigenous Christians emerged as strategic, thoughtful interpreters of Christianity, espousing variable conversion stories and shepherding a changing field of dynamic bricolage in religious praxis. Native evangelism was fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions, including a view among some of Christianity as a vehicle for revitalizing ancestral religion. Disciplining and managing orthodoxy, resistance to indoctrination, the unpredictable affordances and effects of diseases, and King Philip's War in the mid-1670s all represented considerable challenges to the Christian project. Puritans had a near monopoly on Protestant evangelization in the British Atlantic world during the seventeenth century, but the ascent of Anglican missionary competition began with the turn of the eighteenth century, as discussed in Chapter two. The Anglican approach was more top-down, manifesting in an early attempt at sending a converted Yamasee Prince to the Carolinas for mission work, but this effort floundered, producing no converted Cherokee or Creek royalty. This experiment was also partly inspired by transcolonial evangelical work in India, yet the lack of real early success in the Atlantic world prompted Anglican regrouping and led to dispensing with their trickle-down model. George Berkeley hatched a plan to build a theological school for formally training Amerindian evangelists in the 1720s that never came to fruition, even after the idea resurfaced two decades later in the Barbados Codrington College effort designed to train slave preachers. These developments reflect new ways of thinking about and taking advantage of conversion, as well as the recursive influences of Christian evangelism vis-a-vis both Native Americans and Blacks. …