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In an age when cultures increasingly come into contact (and often conflict) with each other, what can we learn from the early missionary efforts of European Christians in the “New World”? Plenty, according to Rachel Wheeler, associate professor of religious studies at Indiana University and author of To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast. But what we learn is complex, ambiguous, and often surprising.
In a lecture co-sponsored by the Seminary, the Moravian Historical Society, and the Moravian College History Club on October 18, Dr. Wheeler compared two distinct models for mission work among the Mohican in the 18th century. The Stockbridge, Massachusetts mission was founded in 1734 by Congregationalists under the leadership of the Rev. John Sergeant with support from the civil authorities, with the intention of “reducing the native population to civility” – which, in practice, meant turning them into English Protestant farmers. Puritanism being a religion of the written word, it was understood that the Indians would first have to learn to read (no small leap, given the oral nature of Indian cultures). “Progress” was measured by the number of converts made, the number of English-style farms brought under cultivation and houses constructed, and other similar benchmarks.
By contrast, the Moravian mission at Shekomeko, New York, was not the product of a concerted effort by civil and religious authorities, but of one man’s passion for the Gospel. In 1740, Christian Henry Rausch started the mission simply by talking with individual Indians. In any case, the German-speaking Moravians had very little power in the English colonies, and had themselves always been a diverse group with limited attachment to specific cultural norms. What bound them together was a vivid sense of spiritual power as exemplified by Zinzendorf’s “blood and wounds theology,” which squared surprisingly well with Mohican understandings of Manitou, the power behind all things. In fact, the Moravians encouraged the Mohicans to think of Jesus as Manitou, and to look for signs that the Holy Spirit had already been at work in their midst before the arrival of the missionaries. From the beginning, the Moravians encouraged the indigenous leadership of the Indians, and formed committees for various purposes that were composed equally of Indians and missionaries. Moreover, the Shekomeko mission, unlike the more statistically minded Stockbridge settlement, produced and preserved a large number of spiritual diaries by individual Mohicans, emphasizing their status as, not “Indians,” but fellow believers.
By current standards of cultural sensitivity, the Moravians did everything “right,” while the Congregationalists did almost everything “wrong.” Yet descendants of the Stockbridge mission still form a recognizable community, now in Wisconsin, while the Shekomeko community disappeared without a trace. What happened? Over time, according to Dr. Wheeler, the Moravians, like their contemporaries, came to define the Mohicans as a separate cultural group, and one that therefore needed to be improved and surpassed by “civilization.” The Mohicans at Shekomeko, their own religious beliefs having been largely assimilated to Moravianism, had few internal resources with which to resist the encroachment of the prevailing white culture. The Stockbridge Indians, on the other hand, maintained their identity largely by becoming outwardly assimilated in terms of dress and other external trappings while retaining what they viewed as central Mohican cultural norms, and in so doing came to play a leading role as intermediaries among other tribes and cultures.
Dr. Wheeler concluded her remarks by noting that her work raises provocative and sometimes troubling questions about how the Gospel can be propagated in a variety of cultural settings without doing violence to them – questions that are at the forefront of conversations about Christian mission in our own time. |
