Reviews of Books

Richard Cogley is himself a man with a mission. The reputation of John Eliot has suffered in recent decades, and Cogley has written this new study of early missionary efforts in southern New England to challenge some of the more extravagant charges leveled at the "Apostle to the Indians." Cogley is dissatisfied with previous treatments of Eliot and his mission, which virtually ignore other praying towns in favor of well-known Natick, fail to consider Eliot's intellectual evolution, and, especially, misrepresent missionary work as a tool of English imperial expansion. The result is a well-researched and provocative counterpoint to the often politically charged literature on the subject.	1
Cogley wastes no time in taking on Eliot's modern detractors, most notably Francis Jennings. Claiming that critics have held the English settlers to higher standards of missionary idealism than they ever professed, Cogley outlines a more authentic interpretation of Puritan expectations for Indian conversions. No one came to New England with mass christianization of the Indians as a priority or even a realistic expectation. Most seventeenth-century missionary activity was predicated on a passive "affective model" (p. 5): attracting proselytes through interaction with virtuous English examples. English settlers did not anticipate great success. Only a handful of the English seriously entertained the conjecture that Indians were descendants of the "lost tribes" of Israel—Eliot was not one—with its implications for missionary duty. The general European acceptance of the ancient Tartar origins of Indians meant that, according to biblical prophecy, their redemption would have to wait until the mass conversion of the Jews—and there was as yet no sign of that. Certainly there were some early Indian converts, but the predominant expectation that conversion of the Jews would precede the christianization of the heathen—what Cogley calls the "Jews-then-Gentiles sequence" (p. 15)—as well as the Indians' general "failure to conform to the affective model" (p. 22) were the chief reasons for the delay in an active mission, not Puritan hypocrisy.	2
Indian initiatives in the mid-1640s prompted the English to develop a more aggressive missionary policy. Formal submissions from Narragansett and Massachusett sachems to the Bay Colony government seemed to validate the "affective model" and at the same time abet the colony's expansionist designs against upstart Rhode Island. A missionary effort at this moment not only seemed to offer a good chance of success but also an opportunity to rebut enemies in England, who charged that Puritans had made no serious efforts to christianize the natives. Thus Cogley agrees with Jennings that the decision to launch the missionary program was in part propaganda but denies that the submissions were forced from the Indians. Rather, he argues, the Indians had their own good reasons for doing so, including protection from traditional enemies and intratribal power politics. At any rate, none of the colony's initial directives for a mission to the Indians bore fruit until Eliot made his first efforts in 1646.	. . .