Race, Religion, and Identity
Techniques of differentiation based on skin color, religion, and gender were not new to the seventeenth century, nor did Europeans have a monopoly on them. Neither the seventeenth century, nor the eighteenth century, nor the sixteenth century is the origin point for a calcified notion of biological race. Indeed, the search for that origin point distracts our attention from the ways in which categories of difference have functioned at specific times and places.38 European intellectuals did spend many pages trying to figure out the cause and meaning of human difference during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as their societies came into contact with peoples in Africa and the Americas, but their answers drew upon religion as well as upon skin color and freedom status. The latter markers of categorization were not the only or most important ones to which English colonists turned in the middle of the seventeenth century. Religious affinity was often a more significant component of identity in the period.
From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Europeans increasingly defined difference racially rather than religiously, but their concept of race remained inflected by religious ways of marking difference. English and other European descriptions of Jews used rhetoric about their existence as a visually different race and linked supposed character traits to physiognomy. The English likened Spanish and French Catholics to the indigenous people with whom they interacted. Thus framed, the separation between Protestants and Catholics frequently overshadowed variations among particular strains of English dissenters. That evolution of difference drew on elements of a transatlantic intellectual culture but was also rooted in local circumstances. Differences in religion often provided a language for Europeans to express their perceived superiority over Africans and indigenous people of the Americas, superiority that could have bodily characteristics. Upon encountering southern Algonquian settlements inhabited only by the dead or dying, some puritans in the 1620s and 1630s interpreted Natives’ susceptibility to European disease as a sign that the English were meant to rule over the land.39
The religious and racial currents of categorization ebbed and flowed across each other in more than one place. European theologians wrote treatises on the origins of Africans and Indians according to biblical accounts.40 Puritan divines and enthusiasts in Old and New England picked up on some of those themes of the origins of all people. Some put forth the idea that Natives were one of the Lost Tribes and the eastern coast of North America the new Israel, as support for their decision to leave England. This theory of Indians’ Israelite origins also encouraged metropolitan support for the colonies. By supporting the colonies, the English in Old England would be supporting Indian conversion, which would help bring about the second coming of Christ and the millennium. For others, Indians were Gentiles and could only experience mass conversion after the conversion of the Jews. A few might be eligible for conversion before the millennium, but their origins precluded their attainment of Christianity before that series of events.41 The discussion hinged on the issue of America’s relative place in Europe’s sense of space, and whether America was a long-separated part of the same whole, or an entirely different entity whose full incorporation into the European Christian world required the end of this world.
The indeterminacy and tension between different categories of belonging and affinity (race, region, gender, and religion) is what makes attention to identity a useful means for unraveling the complexities of seventeenth-century social structures. Identity emphasizes the significance of religious affiliation as a means to determine insider/outsider status, as determined primarily through practice in addition to any explicit, articulated theological stance. In this context, the term points to the ways in which people related to each other and created categories of difference. Individuals and groups took what was soft, malleable, and contested, and described it as if it were hard, intrinsic, and non-negotiable, even as they maintained multiple allegiances.42
Puritan spiritual concerns reorganized the priorities of state, class, race, and gender as grounds for drawing boundary lines between insider and outsider. Religious concepts shaped ideologies of race and gender in case law regulating unlawful sex. The moments of contention caught in the court records record the struggle over believing bodies and their proper regulation—how people ought to behave. These moments permit the reconstruction of localized communities and small-scale relationships, the particularities of small groups of people. But this microlevel of reconstruction has greater implications. English colonial courts’ struggle to discipline individual bodies of fornicators was part of a larger process of creating and using categories of subjection, domination, and privilege. Individuals disagreed over the boundaries of the community and how to determine who might belong to it. They turned to the critical factors of race and religion to define those boundaries and to make them appear inevitable and unchangeable, rather than contingent on context. Many English Protestants who dissented from the established Church of England came to accept race as a dividing line in the religious cosmos despite their commitment to the idea that the only religious separations should have to do with the soul and spirit.
The book is divided into three parts. In “Defining,” the chapters explore the overlapping spaces in the puritan Atlantic. The first chapter follows Bermuda’s Atlantic connections to the Caribbean and to Africa in order to begin telling the full story of the definition of bodies on the island. The first African and indigenous Caribbean inhabitants of Bermuda shaped the land and coast, entreated other-than-human persons, and began to make place out of uninhabited space. The next two chapters map the contours and characteristics of Algonquian communities in southern New England and of the puritan body of Christ in Bermuda and New England. Part 2, “Performing,” considers an array of religious practices that in some way challenged English puritan conceptions of the body of Christ. It begins with the uncertain welcome the English gave Natives and Africans into the body of Christ as they debated the parameters of that body. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two groups, English Quakers and Irish Catholics, whose ritual performances and embodied existence interrupted any sharp and easy one-to-one mapping of racial and religious boundaries. Christian communities formed by people of color are the focus of the next two chapters. “Praying Indians” in New England reminded the English that “Christian” was not limited to “English” or even “European.” References to religious instruction in indenture contracts for African and Native children offer a window onto their efforts to gain entry to the body of Christ, a membership that, in English eyes, grew more conditional as the association between darker skin color and servitude strengthened. The third section, “Disciplining,” focuses on three aspects of legal performance that regulated sex in the body of Christ. Unlawful sex was a key vector of ideas about race, religion, and the boundary between insider and outsider. Chapter 9 surveys concepts of, and language about, sinfulness and uncleanness in English and European references to interracial sex. This language was based in religious attitudes about all sex outside marriage, not interracial sex in particular. Substantial Bermudian case law, the focus of chapter 10, revealed a shift in the status of women of color. Through the seventeenth century, women of color were sinners whose sexual activity fell under the purview of community regulation, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century their disappearance from unlawful sex cases signaled their primary definition as property. The appearance of race and specific religious affiliation in English colonial laws regulating sex was irregular. The last chapter focuses on the lesser-known and later appearance of racial language in sex law in Massachusetts and Bermuda, moving beyond Virginia’s more frequently discussed 1662 and 1691 statutes. The 1662 Virginia statute doubled the fine for fornication between “any Christian” and “a negro man or woman,” while the 1691