Between his ordination by the Long Island Presbytery in 1759 and his death in 1792, Samson Occom developed an original, powerful, and largely overlooked theological perspective on the Indigenous peoples of North America. Almost all ministers in mid-eighteenth-century Anglophone North America believed that Native Americans were in an historical position akin to that of the Canaanites of the Old Testament who occupied the Promised Land on the eve of the Israelites’ return. According to this interpretive paradigm, Indians were an obstacle to God's chosen nation as it progressed toward its grand historical and eschatological destiny; they were historically important “only as the people Yahweh removes from the land in order to bring the chosen people in,” as Robert Warrior puts it.1 The theological consensus likening Indians to Canaanites dated back at least to King Philip's War. Earlier in the seventeenth century, a minority of puritan thinkers including John Eliot had entertained the notion that Native Americans might be nothing other than the “lost tribes” of Israel, a notion that resurfaced in American culture at the end of the eighteenth century. But in Occom's milieu the Canaanite interpretation prevailed.2Occom diagnosed two interrelated problems with this mainstream, Old Testament-derived view of English-Indian relations. First, it made no allowance for Indigenous self-determination, that is, for the fact that Indian peoples were, are, and should be the agents of their own histories.3 Second, Occom thought New Englanders’ belief in their own national chosenness made it impossible for them to see that, in certain important respects, Native Americans were more virtuous than English people and thus deserved to be emulated, rather than politically and culturally assimilated.After his break with his teacher Eleazar Wheelock in 1768–1771, Occom aligned himself with an obscure tradition of scripture-informed historiography that interpreted the situation of the North American “heathens” from the vantage of Paul's epistles rather than that of Exodus, the Old Testament prophets, and the Psalms. According to this Pauline view, God reserved a special historical role for the heathens or gentiles in the ancient and modern epochs that the ideologues of chosen nations were predisposed to overlook. Arguing from his own experience of conversion, Occom observed that New World gentiles were perfectly capable of accepting Christ without having to relinquish their non-chosen nationhood. This implied that the elect status of the New English Israel was much less significant than colonists liked to believe and could even be a moral and political liability insofar as it was taken by the English to warrant the mistreatment and exploitation of Indigenous people and African Americans. Since the supposedly elect English were unlikely to desist from such malfeasance, Occom thought, the tribes of southern New England were scripturally justified in establishing the separate and self-determining nation of Brothertown.4 There, Native ministers could further the work of redemption among their fellow gentiles while the community demonstrated to the world the innate virtues of humankind as practiced by a people who had never enjoyed the luxury (or suffered the pitfalls) of believing themselves to be “chosen.”Although Occom's early readers sometimes mistook him for an assimilationist, no one today doubts that he was an ardent exponent of Indigenous self-determination. Recent scholars including Lisa Brooks, Angela Calcaterra, and Kelly Wisecup have rightly emphasized how deeply Occom's understanding of self-determination was shaped by political and ceremonial practices whose roots antedated Northeast Native peoples' contact with European settlers.5 Less often noted is the fact that his ideas about self-determination also found expression in speech genres and conceptual idioms derived from theological debates in mid-eighteenth-century New England about matters of Christian doctrine, scriptural interpretation, and the historiography of redemption. Rather than exploring how Occom creatively intervened in these debates for Indigenist ends, scholars have often assumed that he was content to make use of—or even conceal his true beliefs behind—the linguistic “conventions” of the “New Light” theological “frameworks” that he “internalized” from Wheelock and other colonial ministers.6 This assumption is mistaken, and results from a longstanding tendency among historians of Native religion to distinguish unnecessarily sharply between theory and practice, or “theology” and “ritual,” in describing political and cultural differences between white and Native peoples. This tendency has prevented religious and cultural historians from seeing that theology was one of the many practices through which Native Americans exercised self-determination during the Revolutionary era.7Native religious history's in-house version of the notorious theory–practice distinction has sources in the work of New Indian Historians like Neal Salisbury, who argued in 1974 that seventeenth-century transcriptions of Eastern Algonquian confessions provide “no indication that the [Native] converts understood either the Word, except as it applied to themselves, or the most basic tenets of Puritan theology.” Proselytes may have affirmed theological orthodoxy under duress or for ulterior strategic purposes, but their words conveyed a “lack of intellectual content.” James Axtell would later contest Salisbury's approach to Native avowals of Christian doctrine, arguing that Northeast Native proselytes were perfectly capable of grasping “the essential articles of faith” and even converting to Christianity “without deceiving themselves, the missionaries, or us.” The main stream of scholarly opinion, however, is clearly on Salisbury's side, with more recent interpreters adopting an even sharper version of his distinction between the pragmatism of Native religion and the abstract intellectualism of Anglo-European Christianity. Whereas Salisbury had advanced the relatively modest claim that a few Algonquian-speaking Indians in New England had pretended to believe in Reformed orthodoxy for context-specific tactical purposes, scholars like Michael McNally and Rachel Wheeler claim that Native American religion was always characterized by a “practice orientation,” meaning that “Native religious traditions generally placed greater emphasis on practice than belief.” Early Christian Indians embodied this general cultural tendency, Linford Fisher argues, by staying true to “Native modes of religious engagement, which tended to be more practical and provisional” than “totalizing, Euro-Christian” ones.8If one accepts these generalizations, then Occom's theological writings are bound to seem tangentially related, at best, to the main thrust of Northeast Native religious, cultural, and political history. Those writings are often, after all, both highly theoretical and openly committed to the pastoral inculcation of “totalizing” Reformed doctrines about conversion, predestination, irresistible grace, and the like. Exceptional as he may have been, however, Occom has also proved hard for historians to avoid. His voluminous oeuvre and the many contemporaneous writings about him constitute an indispensible archive for anyone studying Native religion in eighteenth-century New England. Yet because Occom's writings engage in both theory and practice—or, to be more precise, both theoretical and non-theoretical forms of practice—scholars who rely on a sharp theory-practice distinction to describe differences between European and Indigenous religion often find themselves compelled to read him against the grain. Fisher, for instance, interprets Occom's 1768 autobiography as an illustration of how “Natives often became experts at milking the system” of missionary education, observing that Occom “recalled that as a child in the 1720s he and other youth attended sermons in part to receive the blankets that were passed out.”9 This reading supports Fisher's generalization that “Indians in the colonial period were far more focused on the efficaciousness [sic] of religious practices than they were with the abstract ‘truth’ of them” but only at the expense of turning a blind eye toward his autobiography's theological agenda. Occom's recollection about the blankets occurs under a section heading that reads “From my Birth till I receivd the Christian Religion”; the following section is titled “From the Time of our Reformation till I left Mr Wheelock.” Occom explicitly structured the autobiography in this way in order to guarantee that readers would see that, over time, he had come to understand that the merely pragmatic and instrumental attitude Mohegans used to have toward Christianity was inadequate. “[F]or these things [i.e. blankets] they woud attend”—but, Occom's point is, these things were not enough. Only later, when “it pleased the Ld … to Bless and Acompany” Native worshippers “with Divine Influences, to the Conviction and Saving Conversion of a Number of us,” did he and his fellow Mohegans really begin to understand the point of going to church. Occom's autobiography thus expounds a Reformed theology of grace as mediated by the Holy Spirit (“Divine Influences”) as distinct from what saw as the crude, trucking-and-bartering understanding of religious observance that Mohegan churchgoers had prior to “our Reformation.”10How, in light of beliefs like these, did Occom manage to devise a theoretical justification for Northeast Native political and cultural separatism? It is by answering this question that I hope in what follows to unpack Occom's theology of Indigenous self-determination. This approach has two main advantages over the policy of avoidance toward Occom's theology that other recent interpreters have taken. First, it allows more of Occom's religious writings to emerge as politically relevant and makes it possible to read those writings in a manner that honors Occom's stated intentions. Second, it avoids relying on the unnecessarily and, to my mind, unproductively sharp theory and practice dichotomy that has crept into recent scholarship on Native religion. This distinction has a long and complex history in the study of Native peoples dating back at least as far as the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss; but it is epistemologically tendentious, to put it mildly, and has too often been appropriated for essentialist purposes.11 I leave it to others—preferably, members of the tribes to which Occom belonged—to adjudicate whether or not he was acting like a “representative” Indian when he practiced theology. All I hope to show here is that his theological writings are part of the rich and complex history of Native American self-determination and illustrate how the meaning of self-determination changed over time as Indians like Occom appropriated learned discourses like theology as part of a repertoire of anticolonial practice. If, as Margaret Szasz writes, Occom is “seldom described as a sophisticated theologian,” this ultimately says more about the blind spots of scholarship than it does about Occom's own theological accomplishments.12 These were substantial, and have for far too long remained hidden in plain sight. “I was Born a Heathen and Brought up in In Heathenism till I was between 16 & 17 Years of age, at a Place Calld Mohegan in New London Connecticut”—this sentence from Occom's 1768 autobiography tells us a great deal that is relevant to the way he would come to do theology. Note first the place: “a Place Calld Mohegan in New London Connecticut.” This is a peculiar turn of phrase since Mohegan was most definitely a separate town, roughly twelve miles from New London up the Pequot (later Thames) River. Occom likely wanted to situate Mohegan within New London's sphere of influence to set his life story against the background of the famous revival of religion that took place there beginning in 1739–1740, when he was “between 16 & 17 Years of age.”13The New London revival is best known today for the bizarre auto-da-fé orchestrated there in 1743 by the itinerant preacher James Davenport, in which a variety of supposedly heretical books and a smaller number of luxury goods, including a pair of Davenport's own breeches, were ignited in a bonfire on the town wharf.14 It is not inconceivable that Occom was present on this occasion, which might explain why so many modern historians have credited Davenport with his conversion. This last point has been contested, but what matters here is that when Occom wrote his autobiography, he wanted people to know that he was a first-hand participant in New London's famous revival.15 This suggests that Occom was a pro-revival or “New Light” Christian as commentators have long observed. More than that, however, it indicates his willingness to align himself with a particular group of revivalists widely disparaged in mid-eighteenth-century Connecticut as enthusiasts. “Commentators used strong adjectives to describe the New London events,” write Harry Stout and Peter Onuf of the revival in which Occom participated: “they were ‘wild,’ ‘extravagant,’ and ‘indecent.’ The ‘thronging multitudes’ who participated in the carnage were ‘mad men’ consumed by their ‘flaming zeal’ and ‘enthusiastic fury.’”16 Occom was well aware that the New London revivalists had this reputation, but he believed that revivalism and enthusiasm could be sharply distinguished from one another. He makes this clear later in his autobiography when he describes how, soon after taking up the post of minister and teacher to the Montaukett Indians of eastern Long Island in 1751, he had recovered several parishioners there who had been led astray by a group of “Inthusiastical Exhorters'': And being acquainted with the Enthusiasts in New England… I woud read Such passages of the Scriptures, as I thought woud confound their Notions, and I woud come to them [i.e., the Montauketts] with all Authority, Saying, thus Saith the Lord, and by this means, the Lord was pleased to Bless my poor Endeavours, and they were reclaimd…17Subsequently, Occom writes, “there was a remarkable revival of religion among these Indians and many were hopefully Converted to the Saving knowledge of God in Jx.”18 Whereas Old Light critics of the New London revivals had decried them as expressions of enthusiasm, Occom here implies that enthusiasm is an obstacle to revivalism, not a cause of it. Those who participate in real revivals do so under the supervision of an “Authority” whose source is “the Scriptures.” Occom's attestation to a theologically disciplined form of revivalism and his expression of evangelical concern for the unconverted through an insistence on obedience to God's revealed word aligned him with a very specific theological position that had recently emerged in New England, a school of thought preoccupied with the “linking of a doctrine of divine sovereignty with the revivalist's demand that the sinner had the responsibility and the ability to repent now,” as E. Brooks Holifield writes.19 This was what was just then coming to be known as the “New Divinity.”All of the New Divinity ministers who influenced Occom studied with Jonathan Edwards at Yale. Like Edwards, they preached a religion of the heart or “will” and sympathized with the revivals. Most were friends and supporters of James Davenport but thought he had gone too far in New London. One of the primary goals of the movement was to specify how revivals could be theologically distinguished from enthusiasm; Occom himself pursued this goal retrospectively in his autobiography and can rightly be understood as part of the movement's second generation. A further goal of the New Divinity was to adapt and re-interpret Edwards's sometimes abstruse theology for more polemical purposes. The most famous New Divinity theologians, Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy, engaged in heated pamphlet wars with respected New England divines such as Moses Mather and Jonathan Mayhew. More often than not, New Divinity polemic hewed closely to positions staked out by Edwards although those positions were elaborated in new and sometimes scandalous ways.20Occom's initial exposure to Edwardsean theology and the first stirrings of the New Divinity occurred between 1743 and 1747. During this period immediately following the New London revival, Occom lived in Lebanon, Connecticut, where he was tutored in reading, religion, and other topics by Eleazar Wheelock. Wheelock was Edwards's student and a friend of Davenport's from his time at Yale. Though not much of a theologian himself, he was an important supporter of the New Divinity and introduced Occom to two of the movement's most eminent thinkers: Samuel Hopkins, who was arguably its intellectual leader; and Samuel Buell of East Hampton, who became Occom's most important ministerial mentor after he moved to Montauk in 1751.21 Ultimately, the connections Occom formed with Buell and Hopkins through Wheelock outlasted his relationship with Wheelock himself, which fell apart in 1770 following the latter's misappropriation of the funds Occom had raised for Moor's Indian Charity School.22Nowhere is Occom's indebtedness to New Divinity theology, particularly the work of Hopkins, more apparent than in the sermon he composed in 1772 for the occasion of Moses Paul's hanging. Literary historians have long noted this text's conventional deployment of tropes that had been part of the Reformed sermonic tradition for decades: the terrifying “wages of sin,” the all-sufficiency of grace, and the urgency of repentance.23 What has yet to be noticed, however, is the sermon's unmistakable reliance on New Divinity theology: specifically, on Hopkins's distinctive and highly controversial treatment of the “means of grace.” Hopkins's discussion of this topic in his Enquiry Concerning the Promises of the Gospel (1765) concerned the question of what could be achieved by unregenerate sinners who knew what the Gospel offered but had nevertheless refused Christ. Hopkins's claim was that, short of accepting the Gospel promise, such sinners could do nothing to reform themselves in the eyes of God; moreover, as Holifield explains, Hopkins asserted that “the unregenerate became ‘more vicious and guilty in God's sight’ the more knowledge they derived from the means of grace”—that is, in effect, from preaching, the sacraments, and the Word itself.24Hopkins's Enquiry incited a war of words among New England theologians, which Occom studied closely. Upbraiding Hopkins for assaulting the “common sense of mankind” with his “strange divinity,” New Haven pastor Jedediah Mills published a pamphlet accusing him of denying that “natural conscience'' had any moral or soteriological significance for unregenerate sinners under the means of grace while minimizing the sinfulness of people who knew nothing of the Gospel.25 Mills's criticisms prompted a stern rejoinder from Hopkins, who reasserted in The True State and Character of the Unregenerate (1769) that only those who were acquainted with the means of grace could be held accountable for rejecting Christ, or what he termed “unbelief.” Unbelief respecting the promises of the Gospel was on Hopkins's account a higher-order or “meta” sin whose commission “aggravated” all others: “all the abominations that have been committed by the worst of men, or that men can possibly commit, without being guilty of unbelief and rejecting Christ and the gospel, are incomparably less criminal and vile than this sin of unbelief, or not receiving but rejecting Christ, when he is revealed and offered to men.”26Occom's familiarity with this controversy between Hopkins and Mills is readily apparent in the published version of his sermon for Moses Paul, where at a climactic moment he offers a crystal-clear recapitulation and pastoral redeployment of Hopkins's “strange” new arguments about unbelief and the means of grace. Pointing out to Paul that he was lucky to have a “good education” and to know about the promises of the Gospel, Occom despairingly explains that his guilt has been “aggravated” by his knowledge of the means of grace, leading to the higher-order sin of unbelief: Alas! poor Moses, … Should God come out against you in strict justice, alas! what could you say for yourself? for you have been brought up under the bright sun-shine, and plain, and loud sound of the gospel… You have sinned against the light of your own conscience, against your knowledge and understanding …, against the old and new-testament… . O fly, fly, to the blood of the Lamb of God for the pardon of all your aggravated sins.27Occom's insistence that Moses Paul had committed “aggravated sins” owing to his exposure to the “bright sun-shine … and loud sound of the gospel” is Hopkinsian in both doctrine and diction. He seems to have been particularly impressed by Hopkins's definition of “unbelief” in The True State and Character of the Unregenerate as a higher-order sin resulting from “an impenitent rejecting Jesus Christ now, under the full blaze of gospel light and clear convictions of conscience.”28 It seems highly likely that Occom read this work some time during the three-year interval between its publication—also in New Haven, where Mills had published his Inquiry—and the Moses Paul sermon, which Occom delivered in September 1772 on the New Haven Green. Nor, indeed, would it be at all surprising if Hopkins had shared his views about unbelief and the means of grace with Occom in person. The two ministers had been personally acquainted since at least 1761 and probably much earlier, and we know from Occom's journal that he stayed with Hopkins at least once during his periods of itinerancy in the 1770s.29 These biographical clues, together with the textual evidence from the Moses Paul sermon, support the idea that by the 1770s, Hopkins had become a major influence on Occom's theological outlook. They suggest, too, that Occom had by 1772 come into his own as a New Divinity preacher. It may be, in fact, that his “bestselling” and oft-reprinted sermon on Moses Paul was and remains the most widely read work of sermonic literature that the New Divinity ever produced.30It took intellectual creativity for Occom to make New Divinity teachings relevant to the pro-Indian activism in which he became increasingly involved in the 1760s. Indigenous self-determination concerns the politics of nationhood, but the New Divinity had limited traction on eighteenth-century discussions about colonialism, political sovereignty, and the fate of nations. When New Divinity ministers discussed sovereignty, they were concerned not primarily with nationhood but rather with God's power of dividing humankind into the regenerate and the unregenerate. This was the most important distinction that existed between groups of human beings, and there was no “middle ground,” as Hopkins's arguments about the futility of unregenerate “strivings” implied.31 Occom himself sometimes spoke in these dichotomous terms. “[H]ere I Shall endeavour to repre[sen]t two Sorts of People yt are in the World, and Distinguish them one from the other—the one is Believer, and [the other] unbeliever,” he wrote in notes for a 1760 sermon; and, in another manuscript from around the same time, “there are but two [sorts] in the world, or only two Families, the Family [of] Christ and the family of the Devil.”32 For Occom as for his New Divinity colleagues, the division of humankind into “Believer[s]” and everyone else was absolutely primary; and, as a minister committed to the post-Edwardsean ideal of “disinterested benevolence,” he saw it as his goal to make as many people believers as possible.33 What made Occom unique among New Divinity ministers was that he pursued this goal in a way that supported a politics of Indigenous separatism and self-determination.Occom justified his peculiarly Indigenous form of universal benevolence in the idiom of covenant or “federal” theology: that is, in terms of “national election” or promises made by God to certain chosen groups of people. It was in this return to covenant theology that Occom parted ways most dramatically from his ministerial peers and mentors. As Joseph Conforti and Mark Valeri have noted, the New Divinity's commitments to disinterested benevolence, to the preeminence of grace, and to the fundamental sociological distinction between believers and everyone else, led its proponents to cast a jaundiced eye upon the New England tradition of splitting the world up into various covenanted and un-covenanted peoples.34 The title of a pamphlet published by Joseph Bellamy in 1769 effectively summarized the New Divinity's narrow construal of “covenant” as an agreement between God and the saved: “That there is but one covenant, whereof baptism and the Lord's-Supper are seals, viz. the covenant of grace; (proved from the word of God) and, the doctrine of an external graceless covenant … shewn to be an unscriptural doctrine.” In publishing such pamphlets criticizing Moses Mather and other latter-day practitioners of the old federal theology, Bellamy and his New Divinity collaborators continued the attack on the Halfway Covenant that their teacher Jonathan Edwards had reinitiated in Northampton twenty years before.35Occom was no friend of the Halfway Covenant, and he agreed with his New Divinity colleagues that the doctrine of national election was, basically, a dead letter. Yet he also understood that covenantalism was deeply entrenched in Anglo-American intellectual and political culture and that it was not likely to be dispelled by mere theological fiat. Even for those Anglo-Americans who agreed with Bellamy and other Edwardseans that New England “chosenness” had no basis in scripture, it was still possible to remember the myth of national election as part of a shared cultural legacy. For white New Englanders who valued this legacy, universal benevolence could be seen as the next logical step in a people's glorious history.36 But for Indians, the situation was different. By most eighteenth-century interpretations of federal theology in the American colonies, they were “Canaanites in the Promised Land” or, per the widely cited Ephesians 2:12, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise.” Or, to put the point slightly differently and in a way that would have better conformed to post-Edwardsean skepticism about the doctrine of national election in general: Indians were not and had never been a people chosen by God.Occom took this idea on board, along with the New Divinity's emphasis on universal or disinterested benevolence. But he also recognized that the theology of benevolence was problematic from the point of view of Native peoples. The idea of universal benevolence could not be part of their historical self-understanding in the same way it could for Anglo-Americans: since Native nations had never been chosen by God, they could not participate in white New Englanders' glorious metamorphosis from elect nation to benevolent empire. This, Occom realized, meant that the historical significance of Native nationhood was still an open question. How could the fact of never having been chosen be understood as a feature of Native Americans’ collective past? And how could such a collective identity be pressed into the service of Indigenous self-determination and universal benevolence in a colonial context?The claim that Occom thought of Indians as an unchosen people may come as a surprise to some, since there has emerged in recent years a tendency among some scholars to speak as if Occom thought Indians were a chosen nation.37 To be fair, the historians who ascribe this view to Occom have tended not to be primarily focused on his theological views or their intellectual-historical context. When David Silverman, for instance, writes of Occom's hope that Indians “would rise from the depths of colonial exploitation to become God's chosen people and God's messengers,” he appears not to be making a claim about the history of covenant theology but rather illustrating, in a more figurative way, the sense of pride and commitment that Occom and his compatriots felt about Brothertown and other projects of Native self-determination. The idea that any group of human beings could do anything to “transform themselves” into God's chosen people would have been anathema to Occom, who, like other New Divinity theologians, took a hard line against covenants of works and in favor of the absoluteness of what he termed God's “free grace & sovereign mercy.”38 In presenting Native Americans as a people that had never been chosen, Occom kept faith with post-Edwardsean skepticism about the very idea of national covenants, even as he heuristically retained an analytical distinction between chosenness and unchosenness in order to gain argumentative purchase on urgent problems of colonial politics.One way of seeing how Occom deploys this heuristic distinction is by considering the form of address he uses in his sermons. Occom's belief in Native unchosenness implies that his sermons are not jeremiads. The prophet Jeremiah, after all, belonged to a nationally covenanted people. Though distant and aloof from other Jews by virtue of his prophetic calling, he was still a member of God's chosen nation. In Occom's time, the jeremiad tradition still thrived in the “New English Israel,” but Occom did not identify with that tradition because he presumed his people had never been chosen.39 This is evident in the Moses Paul sermon in the way Occom addresses his ministerial colleagues as “reverend Gentlemen and fathers in Israel.” After speaking to the condemned Paul, Occom begs leave “to speak a few words to you, tho’ I am well sensible that I need to be taught the first principles of the oracles of God, by the least of you”; nevertheless, he continue