Susan Juster. Sacred Violence in Early America.

Abstract

As scholars from across disciplinary fields continue to wrestle with religiously inspired violence, a small but growing body of literature has begun to bring to the fore the history of religion and violence in North America, including John D. Carlson and Jonathan Ebel’s edited volume From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (2012) and John Pahl’s Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (2010). Susan Juster’s Sacred Violence in Early America not only joins this list, but easily establishes itself as the most detailed treatment of sacred violence in British colonial America, more specifically what would become the United States. While defining what we mean by violence always presents challenges, modifying the term as “sacred violence” only complicates the matter further. Juster offers a concise but certainly complex definition: “violence that is motivated and justified in significant part by religious aversion and/or desire” (6). She insists that she is “less interested in distinguishing religious from other forms of colonial violence than in describing the combustible mixture of sacred and profane fears and desires that led English men and women to behave—at some times, in some places—in such a savage manner toward their enemies in the New World” (7). However, the significance of the book resides as much in the tensions that emerge around traditional forms of sacred violence as in consistent applications of those forms in North America.