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Parts 2 and 3 make even more of the close ties between religion, diplomacy, and war within early America.  Carrying the story through the eighteenth century and into the1830s, Bourne rightly highlights Indians' fundamentally spiritual understandings of political and military matters.  Whether making war or peace, traditional sacred rituals and innovative religious reforms (some Christian, some not) played crucial roles in the efforts of Shikellamy, Neolin, Pontiac, Joseph Brant, Handsome Lake, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, William Apess, and a host of other Native leaders to help their peoples adapt and survive.  Meanwhile, for their part, Euro-American missionaries often became key political operatives.  For instance, Bourne recounts the career of Samuel Kirkland, who, amid the pressures of the War for Independence, functioned less as a pastor and more as a patriot go-between among the Oneidas.

In all of this, Bourne remains interested in glimpsing those cultural moments when he believes early America produced racially inclusive spiritual communities, places where religious influence freely flowed in both directions.  "Exceptions to the general rule of conquest and annihilation," 18th-century towns such as Jonathan Edwards's Stockbridge, David Brainerd's Crossweeksung, and the Nanticoke Reformer's Juniata Junction serve as reminders that the sorry tale of racial separation and antipathy of later generations hadn't always been the case.  For Bourne, the crucial point of no return was the War of 1812: "its unleashing of interracial horror on the northwestern and southeastern frontiers, its justification of indiscriminate conquest in the name of patriotism, and its bringing forth of opposed prophets and apostles—ended all practical hopes for a mutual brotherhood and a shared nationality."  In its wake, not even the Second Great Awakening could foment a robust opposition to Indian removal in the 1820s and '30s.  As a result, the nation went forward with eyes averted from Native suffering but nevertheless the unique cultural product of the long interaction of contending faiths.

By turning our eyes toward the multiple religious dimensions of European-Indian relations in early America, Russell Bourne has clearly done an important service.  His work adds to a growing consensus that religious explanation, exchange, and transformation were critical elements in much of the contact between Native Americans and Europeans.  What is not so clear to me is whether employing these stories to account for the shape of "American civilization" is especially helpful.  At a time when American historians are becoming more interested in emphasizing the unexceptional character of our nation's past (particularly when seen in a global context), Bourne's work seems to hearken back to an earlier era of scholarship (say the 1950s) when the quest for defining the American national character was much in vogue.

The irony here is that he wants to alert us to the presence and persistence of cultural and religious pluralism in America.  Yet the book is peppered with adjectival uses of "American"—American preachers and prophets, American design, American exceptionalist, American considerations, American evangelist, American faith—that convey an image of a single and rather fixed idea (though rather fuzzy) of who and what that was or is.  Bourne describes numerous individuals whose religious and cultural makeup were changed over time (some of them were "Americanized") but fails to treat "American" in a similar fashion as an evolving, dynamic cultural construct with multiple meanings.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47