Figure I.2. The puritan Atlantic in the long seventeenth century.
They have focused not on the parched and parsed distinctions of authoritative dogma but the practices and performances of lived religion, of physical movements and textual presence. Those repeated practices connected the one to the many, sustaining multiple topographies that outlined overlapping cultural places in a single space.4 The emphasis on practice has revealed the centrality of the body and bodies in colonial interactions. Embodied experience provided a common origin point for human interpretation of the world, with specific explanations varying over time and among cultures. The four planes of the human body (front, back, and two sides) and the movement of the sun meant that many peoples have divided the world into four directions, although they varied in which one they designated as the principal direction. Although all humans comprehend the world through their physical bodies to create a common point of reference, the entire context for giving meaning to that reference, to those physical sensations, the naming of what an individual perceived and felt, was culturally dependent as well as being infinitely variable to each individual in a particular moment.5
This book is thus part of a growing scholarly conversation about the intersections of race, gender, religion, and the body in the Atlantic world. It also takes up the question of appropriate forms of narrative in interpreting the past, and of the fictions and violence that the archive visits on the lives of those millions whose names have been allowed to evaporate along with the breath that once spoke them. More concerned with an underlying ethos and the fluidity of religious practice than with specific and self-articulated connections between dissenting Protestants, this book’s framework of strongly puritan-influenced colonies takes a path that cuts across the topical boundaries that have often cordoned off subfields of the history of the early modern Atlantic: history of slavery and the slave trade, puritan studies, history and archaeology of northeastern Natives and of indigenous Caribbean peoples, and history of sexuality and the body.6
By peeling back the layers of conflicting definitions of bodies and competing practices of faith in the puritan Atlantic over a key period in the ideological attachment of inherited characteristics to particular skin tones, Faithful Bodies identifies local variations of that larger arc leading to the conflation of Christian and white and the concomitant overlap of Negro or Indian and heathen. Colonists’ perceptions of and interactions with indigenous peoples of the Americas and with West Central Africans shaped their definitions of ordered and disordered bodies to create local variations on transatlantic conversations about how to understand human difference and define its acceptable boundaries.7 While Virginian colonists developed a notion of Indians and Africans as no longer “potential Christians” who might eventually blend with English colonial society but rather as innately incompatible “hereditary heathens,” the debate unfolded rather differently in Bermuda and New England.8
English puritans in New England lagged behind Anglo-Virginians in conflating religion with skin color and defining Indians and Africans as categorically ineligible for membership in the body of Christ, while those in Bermuda created strong associations between freedom status and skin color but did not generally turn to Christianity as a differentiating factor. Although relative newcomers sometimes complained that slave owners in Bermuda did not make enough of an effort to convert the people they enslaved, generations of white Bermudians who had grown up alongside generations of Bermudians of color may simply have not seen the need to evangelize a group they considered to be within the Christian community. Many Bermudians of color claimed Christianity as their own even as they practiced and passed on some aspects of their generationally more distant ancestors’ religions. In New England, concentrated communities of Native Christians visibly contested the English circumscribing of “body of Christ” to fit along the lineaments of an English body. Most colonists after King Philip’s War (1675–76) did make the additional step of denying that those gathered communities were truly Christian, but some of the disdainful terminology in Virginia’s records—pagan, infidel, discussions of defilement from English bodily contact with Indians or Africans—was less present in New England’s records.
Bodies
A focus on embodiment and bodies enables a cross-confessional and cross-cultural exploration of seventeenth-century worldviews. The body of Christ is a central metaphor and entity that organizes Christian belief and practice. For Christians generally, Jesus Christ, the son of God, was and is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. Christ’s body as a historical human body was significant because it meant that he was fully human and truly suffered pain and death for the sins of all humanity. The body of Christ has also referred to the church, so that Christians are members of one body, the church. This metaphor of the body has carried multiple meanings at different historical moments because of its importance in Christian cosmology. Not only have people interpreted the body of Christ in various ways at different times and places, but they have had conflicting interpretations in the same time and place. The process of discerning these meanings is complex and does not end in neatly packaged answers, as the meanings themselves are often ambiguous. However, following these crisscrossing branches—much like following the path of neurons in the brain—can lead to unexpected synapses, moments of connection between seemingly disparate elements. A more apt analogy for the seventeenth century is one concerning veins and the circulation of blood; following all the interpretations of the body of Christ moves us through all aspects of religious culture in the English Atlantic, a motion that itself is vital to the functioning of the whole body.
Interpretations of the body of Christ among religious thinkers in seventeenth-century Europe and the puritan Atlantic reveal how people thought about community in a way that intrinsically involved religion as well as cultural readings of the body. As explained by Lewis Bayly, author of the widely used and reprinted spiritual manual The Practice of Pietie, “[A]ll the Faithful, though they be many yet are they but one mystical Body, under one Head, which is Christ.” One of the wondrous qualities of that body was that it could stretch across time and space and alter believers’ perceptions of both. Bayly wrote, “This Union betwixt the Faithful is so ample, that no Distance of Place can part; so strong, that Death cannot dissolve it; so durable, that time cannot wear it out; so effectual, that it breeds a fervent Love betwixt those who never saw one another’s Face.”9 It was a conceptual space that could be infinitely expansive or intimately focused on the inner workings of an individual soul. And yet, the idea was not malleable ad infinitum, because individuals’ physical and bodily understanding constrained their comprehension of how the body of Christ organized itself.
Sectarian allegiances shared a common trait with developing ideas about racial or ethnic difference in that both provided ways for people to define who belonged in their community and who had to be kept outside it. Separate strains of Christianity held differing ideals about what the ideal community should look like, how it should work, and who should be in it. The notion that it was possible to separate groups of people based on particular external dissimilarities that signaled intrinsic incompatibility led to the idea that only people in the same group could form a strong community. These two methods for dividing the world into those like and those unlike oneself did not exist independently. Understanding how the body of Christ structured English communities highlights the points at which sectarian and racial differences categorized people similarly, and the points at which those definitions diverged and ceased to overlap. Contestations over faithful bodies were central to the early modern Atlantic world, which was made through the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel race slavery; the increased contact between indigenous peoples of the Americas, Europeans, and Africans and their dissimilar gender systems; changing conceptions of authority and dependence; and conflict over religious differences.
The body of Christ metaphor demonstrates the centrality of religion in how seventeenth-century Christians saw and experienced their world and communities. This specific bodily metaphor affected the social organization of religious life for the people (mostly Europeans) who brought the idea into the complex new Atlantic communities