Review: Tears of Repentance

Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England #

By Julius H. Rubin

University of Nebraska Press, 2013

Rubin, Julius H. Tears of Repentance: Christian Indian Identity and Community in Colonial Southern New England. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. ISBN 9781496245397.

The "praying Indian" has long been trapped between two bad options in the scholarship: either conversion was cultural annihilation dressed up as salvation, or it was a mask worn by people who never really changed. In my estimation these readings are flip sides of the same coin; both deny the convert any interior life worth taking seriously. Julius Rubin rejects the pair of them. His Christian Indians are agents who took what Reformed Protestantism offered, used it, and built durable communities with it. In this review, I will argue that Tears of Repentance delivers the fullest single account we have of Christian Indian community formation in southern New England, and that its real weakness lies not in the argument but in the positioning; Rubin restores a Native agency the field had already largely recognized, and he does not argue with the scholars who got there first.

The argument runs through a specific mechanism. Rubin contends that Native converts in southern New England took up what he calls the penitential sense of life, the Reformed habit of reading affliction as divine instruction and the self as an object of relentless scrutiny. Paired with a rational theodicy of misfortune (a framework for explaining why the innocent suffer), this gave communities under catastrophic pressure a way of making sense of epidemic, land loss, and war without conceding that they had been defeated. The result was not assimilation but hybrid ethnic identity, organized on kinship lines and capable of reproducing itself across generations and across migrations.

A sociologist in the archive #

Rubin is a sociologist of religion, not a colonial historian, and this book is unmistakably continuous with his earlier work on religious melancholy in Protestant America. The penitential sense of life is a category he developed studying Anglo-American Protestants and has now carried into Native New England. That import is the book's originality and its central risk at once. It gives Rubin a precise analytic vocabulary for interior religious experience, of the kind historians of Native Christianity often lack; it also raises the question of whether a category built from the psychology of English Puritans can describe what Wampanoag or Mohegan converts were doing without smuggling in its origins. The category, in short, takes on a life of its own.

The evidence base is substantial. Rubin works the Eliot Tracts, conversion narratives, missionary correspondence, and church and census records from Mashpee, Mohegan, and Tunxis. He is strongest in the demographic and membership records, because they let him track community formation rather than infer it from missionary claims. The conversion narratives are harder, since they survive only as transcribed, translated, and edited by the missionaries who elicited them. Rubin knows this and reads against the grain, but the mediation never fully dissolves, and a reader can reasonably suspect that the interiority he recovers is sometimes the missionary's rather than the convert's.

Missions, migrations, and the long arc #

The organization proceeds case by case. Rubin begins with the praying towns of John Eliot and the Mayhew mission among the Wampanoag, then turns to the pattern of religious paternalism that governed eighteenth-century Christian Indian communities. Samson Occom anchors the middle of the book, with Mohegan and Montaukett evangelicalism after the Great Awakening. From there Rubin moves to the Stockbridge Mahicans and the New Jersey Brotherton Indians, then to the Moravian missions at Shekomeko and Pachgatgoch, whose theology and communal practice differed sharply from the Congregationalist norm (and thereby make a useful control case). The final chapters follow the post-Revolutionary migrations that produced New Stockbridge and Brothertown.

That last move constitutes the book's most valuable contribution. By carrying the story past the Revolution and into removal, Rubin shows Christian Indian communities as ongoing political projects rather than as remnants. The closing engagement with the sentimental "Poor Sarah" tradition names the trope the whole book writes against: the dying, pious, solitary Indian convert whose virtue is her disappearance, extinction rendered as edification. Rubin's communities do not disappear. They move, argue, split, and persist.

A crowded field #

The trouble is that Rubin is not the first to say so. James Axtell and Neal Salisbury opened the question decades ago. David Silverman had already shown Wampanoag Christianity as boundary work rather than surrender; Lisa Brooks had reframed the literate Native Northeast; Jean O'Brien had dismantled the extinction narrative in Firsting and Lasting; and Linford Fisher's account of the Great Awakening among Native communities appeared the year before this book. Rubin's engagement with that scholarship is uneven, and the framing sometimes presents as a new intervention what the field had largely settled. The book would read differently, and better, if it argued explicitly with Silverman and Fisher rather than around them; the lacuna here is historiographical, not evidentiary.

The prose presents another obstacle. The book runs long, and Rubin's sociological register grows heavy in stretches where narrative would carry the point more efficiently. Case studies accumulate without a sustained comparative argument pulling them together, so the reader performs a synthesis the author could have supplied.

Verdict #

A serious, useful, imperfect book, in my estimation. Rubin has produced the fullest single account of Christian Indian community formation in southern New England across the whole colonial and early national span, and the migration chapters alone justify the volume. The theoretical import of religious melancholy genuinely illuminates, and scholars should argue with it rather than dismiss it. But the historiographical positioning remains weak, and specialists will find the central claim about Native agency familiar. Read it for the case studies, the records work, and the long chronology. Historians of colonial New England, scholars of Native Christianity, and anyone working on Brothertown or Stockbridge should have it; newcomers to the field should start with Silverman or Fisher and come here second.