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Gods of War, Gods of Peace: How the Meeting of Native and Colonial Religions Shaped Early America
by Russell Bourne
Harcourt
425 pp.; $28

Once our Native American and European forebears began discovering one another half a millennium ago, little stayed the same.  Their separate pre-contact worlds gradually gave way to a host of new realities.  Trade networks, political alliances, disease environments, agricultural techniques, and cultural identities all were transformed in the centuries after Columbus.

Did this refashioning of old worlds include the sacred realm? A widening stream of recent books and articles would have us think so.  Upon encountering new places, products, and peoples, Europeans and Euro-Americans took stock of what the new discoveries meant for them and their faiths.  Their growing consciousness of the Indian "Other" influenced how they made sense of the world.  Meanwhile, the religious worldviews of Native Americans felt the jarring effects of the European presence.  Over time, peoples on both sides of the cultural divide reconstructed religious outlooks in the wake of meeting one another.

Russell Bourne's Gods of War, Gods of Peace gives bold expression to that thesis and links it to nothing less than the formation of a distinct American civilization.  Targeted for a general readership and written in a sweeping narrative style with no footnotes, the book asserts that the collective encounter of Indians and Europeans in North America is best understood as "a confrontation of two historic and still evolving religious systems, with immense consequences for the different cultures."  Far from playing the peripheral role often assigned to it, religion was central to the interactions of Europeans and Native Americans precisely because religion was central to the way both civilizations understood reality.  The story of their contest of faiths, as Bourne tells it, was no simple tale of conquest.  Instead, both peoples' religions took hits but managed to go with the flow and survive.  What emerged in the end (the mid-19th century) were substantially changed but still separate cultures, "resulting in a strangely uncombined, uniquely American civilization."

To reach that conclusion, Bourne constructs a version of early American history that features a series of preachers and prophets whose voices and visions gave expression to the divine will and to human yearnings. He is especially attracted to cultural bridge-builders, those who in word and deed held out the possibility that Natives and newcomers could live in harmony.  Hence, the three chapters of part 1 give center stage to Squanto, Hobomock, Roger Williams, Hiawatha, Jean de Brébeuf, and John Eliot.  In one way or another, all of them inspired hopes for the creation of "equitable biracial communities."

On the Euro-American side, what set apart men such as Eliot and Williams from the vast majority of their Puritan peers was their choice to "integrate themselves with their new homeland—that is, to become Americanized."  What Bourne means by "American" is not entirely clear but seems to include a respect for the natural environment and its indigenous peoples, opposition to any forms of forced conversion, and a willingness to preserve at least certain aspects of Indian cultural practice in the process of Christian evangelization, and for the sake of peace.  Such "Americans" were far too few in 17th-century New England to keep the peace.  The Pequot War in the 1630s and King Philip's War in the 1670s were notoriously bloody affairs, not least because participants on both sides interpreted the conflicts as divinely sanctioned battles between competing gods.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47