Holy waters: religious contests and commitments in the Mississippi River Valley, 1780-1830
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
“Holy Waters” is a historical study of the Christianization of the Mississippi River Valley between 1780 and 1830. The geographic scope encompasses the swath of settlements, towns, villages, and hunting grounds along the Mississippi River from its confluence with the Missouri River near St. Louis to where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans. In this region Native American disinterest and Catholic institutional presence and ritual practice thwarted and complicated Protestant efforts to impose evangelicalism, while Anglo-American, nominally Protestant demographic gains destabilized Catholic dominance. When Protestants from New England and Catholics from Europe established rival missions in a competition for souls, Mississippi Valley inhabitants—whites, Africans and African Americans, and Native Americans—rejected their doctrinal rigidity in favor of religious flexibility. By highlighting Catholic and animist vitality and exposing the intense and complicated contest for religious dominance in the region, “Holy Waters” challenges the narrative of inevitable Protestant evangelical victory and expands the story of American religious history. ☐ In the decades surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, Protestant and Catholic leaders vied with each other to inject their religious worldviews and habits into the Mississippi River Valley. The fervor of the Second Great Awakening alone could not, and did not, sacralize the region. Catholic and Protestant organizations in Europe and the northeast U.S. dumped massive resources into the missionizing project. The missionaries they placed on the ground fed back tales of moral depravity and religious ignorance to pull on the heartstrings of the lay faithful from Hartford to Bordeaux. Organizational leaders leveraged the missionaries’ depictions of spiritual destitution to secure funds, religious objects and texts, and personnel, which they funneled back into the Mississippi River Valley. ☐ Catholic and evangelical Protestant missionaries were equally skilled, and equally opportunistic, in penning accounts of their ministrations designed to compel generosity back home. Less obvious in the missionaries’ and their backers’ reports to donors were the myriad ways that those who lived in the Mississippi River Valley undermined, stalled, redirected, and amended the proselytizers’ schemes, opting for religious flexibility, and often religious laxity, over doctrinal purity. Many of the inhabitants of the region cultivated a religious suppleness that enabled them to embrace part, but not all, of their religious purveyors’ messages, as well as to incorporate rather than reject alternate forms of Christianity. This pragmatic ecumenism was not grounded in enlightened notions of tolerance and religious liberty, nor was it based on a liberal theology that all paths lead to God. Rather, it was a practical project, hammered out in daily living. For some, religious flexibility aided economic pursuits or strengthened social ties. For others, it offered access to educational benefits. For still others, curiosity and spiritual hunger drove religious expansiveness.
Description
Keywords
Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, Missions, Mississippi River, Pragmatic ecumenism, Religious conflict