Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (121 page)

Without such doubling, it would be difficult to account for the popularity of St Barbara among the altars and paintings of Cuban churches. Traditionally, Barbara had a particular concern for thunder, and latterly for gunpowder. She could thus stand in for the
orisha
Shango; he duplicated her powers over thunder, and despite being male and a notorious womanizer, he had conveniently once escaped from the wrath of his cuckolded brother Ogun disguised as Ogun's wife Oya (one can imagine the humour of the situation appealing to devotees as they lit their candles under the approving eyes of some missionary priest). In other settings, less riskily, Barbara could be identified directly with Oya.
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Equally surprising is to find St Patrick so prominent in many Vodou shrines (see Plate 61), until one remembers that he too had been a slave who had twice crossed the sea, the second time to freedom, and that he had particular power over snakes, like the
loa
(Haitian equivalent of
orisha
) Dambala Wedo. And so the evangelist and patron saint of Ireland, that land so ruined and distorted by English colonial rule, found new hospitality among other peoples whose lives had been stolen by colonial regimes.
⁵⁶
After such fertile and sophisticated amalgamations of symbolism, it is not surprising to find the Fon/Yoruba deity Ogou, a warrior with a strong sense of justice, joining identities with the warrior St James of Compostela (complete with Moorish corpses), and both of them in Haiti absorbing the identities of the island's heroes of liberation such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L'Ouverture or Henri Christophe. When it was forbidden to speak of Dessalines in nineteenth-century Haiti, it was always possible triumphantly to process around the town with an image of the original St-Jacques.
⁵⁷

Again and again, missionary Jesuits and friars proved their heroic commitment to spreading their Christian message throughout the world. The prolonged sufferings and ghastly deaths of Jesuit missionaries at the hands of hostile First Nations on the borders of the French colonies in Canada in the early seventeenth century rank high in the history of Christian suffering. Even the hazards of travel were a martyrdom in themselves: of 376 Jesuits who set out for China between 1581 and 1712, 127 died at sea.
⁵⁸
The perpetual trouble everywhere was European reluctance to accept on equal terms the peoples whom they encountered, even when Europeans distinguished between what they saw as varied levels of culture. Such attitudes meant that the missionaries were always loath to ordain native priests on a large scale or with equal authority to themselves. In Kongo, many clergy (generally from elite backgrounds) were so infuriated at being patronized or marginalized by European colleagues that they became a major force in articulating local hatred of the Portuguese. As in America, that old problem of compulsory clerical celibacy gnawed away at the credibility of the Church.

In step with increasing weakness in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, it was not surprising that when a Church infrastructure which remained overwhelmingly European fell into decay in any area of the world Christianity itself began to fade. It had been a remarkable achievement for comparatively ill-endowed Iberian kingdoms to put together world empires, but they faced mounting problems and increasing interference from other European powers, first the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands, and later Britain and France. The Catholic French to some extent filled the gap as the settlement of the Edict of Nantes began to enable the kingdom to recover its leading place in European life; during the seventeenth century, France assumed the role of patron of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire, and sponsored mission in the far north of America. In 1658, two French missionary bishops created a society of secular priests, the Missions Etrangeres de Paris, with a brief to work in the Far East, in Vietnam and later, where it was allowed, in the Chinese Empire - at first, as we have seen, being as much sources of disruption there as of growth (see p. 707). But as the power of Louis XIV met reverses at the hands of Protestant armies in Europe (see pp. 735-6), the initiative shifted from the Catholic south to Protestant central Europe and the British Isles. The final blow to nearly three centuries of Catholic world mission came in 1773 when the Catholic powers in concert forced the Pope to suppress the whole organization of the Society of Jesus; that was followed by the trauma of the French Revolution. It was now the turn of Protestant Churches to find a call to world mission.

20

Protestant Awakenings (1600-1800)

PROTESTANTS AND AMERICAN COLONIZATION

When the Western Church divided after 1517, Protestants might have envied Spanish Atlantic conquests, but they had too many preoccupations to follow friars and Jesuits into overseas mission. They were fighting for their existence against Catholics, and bickering among themselves in their efforts to establish what Protestantism actually was. When they did found colonies in the seventeenth century, it was mainly for their own religious self-expression, which in English North America was especially varied. The principal thrust of Protestant missionary work lagged behind the urge of Protestant states to colonize and did not appear until the eighteenth century. What beginnings of colonization there were in the sixteenth century all ended in failure. The English and Americans remember and mourn abortive efforts in what later became Virginia, sponsored by Queen Elizabeth's Protestant courtier Walter Raleigh in the 1580s, but they tend to forget that it was actually France that pioneered efforts at settlement to rival Spain and Portugal.

In 1555, the French set up a fortress near what is now Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, with the clear intention of supplanting the Iberians in a huge area of South America. Five years later, just as they began withdrawing from the continent as part of their peace deal with the Habsburgs at Cateau-Cambresis (see p. 676), they rashly tried a similar project in Florida, which lasted another five years before the Spaniards eliminated it and massacred its garrison. In both cases, Protestants were involved, although their role was exaggerated by Huguenot historians after the event, seeking out Protestant sufferings to add to their quota of persecutions back home. It was understandable that Protestants who found their position at home problematic should become involved in these new ventures, but the increasing fragility of French royal power from the 1560s ended any further French initiatives in America. Renewed French activity had to wait for the reconciliation achieved by Henri IV in 1598, and once more, although Huguenots became involved in the first successful American settlements in 1604, safely far to the north of New Spain, Louis XIII and his ministers quickly eliminated their influence. New France, the basis of the future Quebec and Canada, became much more monochrome in its Catholic religion than the home country - the opposite story to the English colonies, which took their shaky beginnings three years later.
¹

Like the French, the English had long fished in Atlantic waters and visited North American shores. Southern Europeans found these less enticing, particularly since the cold increased as the coastline stretched further north, and it was thus natural for northerners to take more interest in them. The English were to some extent distracted from America by their own more accessible Atlantic New World in Ireland: here they could plant true religion and steal land from people whom they were often inclined to regard in much the same light as the Spaniards did the native peoples of America. Both in Ireland and in America, the first English initiatives certainly employed Protestant rhetoric, presenting English colonists as fighting against miscellaneous forces of Antichrist, either papists or satanic non-Christian religions, but theirs was a rather political Protestantism. One intriguing possible way forward involved the Muslim ruler of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, who in 1603 proposed to his ally Queen Elizabeth of England a follow-up to the successful Anglo-Moroccan raid on Cadiz in 1596. They should jointly attack the Spaniards in their American colonies and set up their own, in which, given the hot climate, Moroccans would be more suitable settlers than the English. Although nothing came of the scheme, it is one reminder among many that Protestants might hate idolatrous Spanish Catholics more than they did iconophobic Muslims. It also suggests an interesting alternative history for the United States of America.
²

The first English efforts across the Atlantic were as short-lived as the French, but England had enough political stability and will to try again. After much loss of life and capital, an English settlement established a precarious but continuous existence from 1607, without Islamic help; it borrowed the name Virginia (after the lately deceased 'Virgin Queen' Elizabeth) from the earlier unsuccessful efforts at colonization. The Virginian settlers brought a clergyman with them and quickly made public provision for a parish ministry. So this was an official Church which identified itself with the established Church back home, although it continued more along the lines of the undemonstratively Protestant Church of James I than the growing sacramentalism promoted by William Laud (see pp. 647-51). Even after Charles I's execution in 1649, the colony stayed fiercely loyal to Cranmer's Prayer Book and episcopally ordained clergy, which made its relations with Oliver Cromwell's regimes difficult - it was one of two places in the world, the other being the rather similar colony on the Caribbean island of Barbados, where Anglicanism survived through the 1650s as an established Church.
³
Yet after 1660, the Virginian colonists' theoretical love of bishops was not ardent enough to lend much support to proposals to establish a bishop on their side of the Atlantic, let alone any system of English-style church courts. They made sure that their parishes were run by powerful 'vestries' of laypeople rather than clergymen.

Virginian Anglicanism was thus made safe for gentry who appreciated a decent and edifying but not overdramatic performance of the Prayer Book, and the colony continued much more reminiscent of the hierarchical countryside of Old England than any of the other more northern English ventures. These northern colonies saw the early Stuart Church of England as too flawed to be truly God's Church. America was often not the first choice of these settlers when they looked for somewhere to build a purer community. Some migrated to the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands, as discontented English godly folk had done since the middle of Elizabeth's reign, but however godly the atmosphere in this properly reformed Church setting, there was little land to spare, and rather too many Dutch people. Ireland offered better possibilities, but by the late 1620s Charles I had an unfriendly eye on potentially subversive settlers from England; when in 1632 his aggressive Lord Deputy, the Earl of Strafford, arrived to lead the government in Dublin, he even made major concessions to Irish Roman Catholics. So the best alternative was in the new lands of America.

The godly ventured far to the north of Virginia, in an area of forests and deep sea inlets soon named New England. The first colony in this northern region, Plymouth in what later became part of Massachusetts, was founded in 1620, by separatists who made no bones about their wish to isolate themselves completely from corrupt English religion. This group, since the nineteenth century commonly given the celebratory title the 'Pilgrim Fathers', had first migrated as a single congregation to the Netherlands, but now sought a less restricting place, to become a 'civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation'.
⁴
For all its subsequent fame in American mythology, the settlement remained small and poor, for not many wished to join the Pilgrims; they made their brave voyage in the years before the group around William Laud achieved power in England. Notably, for all their intense practice of piety, there was no clergyman among them for the first nine years of Plymouth's existence; the sacrament of the Eucharist was not among their devotional priorities.

The impulse during the 1630s was different: the 'Arminian' innovations of Charles I's regime encouraged many gentry, clergy and ordinary people who had no inclination to separatism to risk the long Atlantic voyage. Up to the 1630s there were fewer English in North America than in North Africa, with its thousands of English slaves, Muslim converts, traders and adventurers. Now that quickly changed. In that decade perhaps as many as twenty thousand emigrated to the New World - rather more than the entire contemporary population of Norwich, early Stuart England's largest city after London.
⁵
Some colonists established themselves far to the south in islands in the Caribbean, financed by Puritan grandees who saw these as useful bases for harassing the Spanish colonies, in the manner of the great Elizabethan Protestant captains like Francis Drake. Most did not: they followed the earlier separatists to New England and in 1630 founded a new colony of Massachusetts, taking under their wing an ailing earlier venture in that region sponsored by the prominent Puritan minister of Dorchester John White.
⁶
The New England leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Company was generally less socially prominent than in the Virginian and Caribbean enterprises - ministers and minor gentry - and those in charge now proposed to migrate to the colony themselves rather than stay in England. This was a measure of their commitment to starting England afresh overseas. From the beginning, they were a 'Commonwealth', whose government lay in the hands of the godly adult males who were the investors and colonists.

The first governor chosen by the investors, John Winthrop, was like his Puritan contemporary Oliver Cromwell an East Anglian gentleman of no great local standing who had survived financial and family crisis in the late 1620s. Winthrop's family had a tradition of cosmopolitan Protestantism stretching back to the 1540s. Rejected in his attempt to secure election to Parliament to promote the godly cause, he devoted his talent for leadership, previously confined in the roles of justice of the peace and minor royal official, to a grander enterprise.
⁷
His associates included a number of university-trained ministers ejected from or not prepared to serve in Laud's Church, and as early as 1636 they founded a university college in Massachusetts to train up new clergy. Significantly, they placed the new college (soon named Harvard after an early benefactor) in a town named Cambridge - back in England over the previous century, Cambridge had been a much firmer centre of Reformation than Oxford. Equally significantly, they took care to furnish Cambridge with a printing press; the third book printed was a new version of the Genevan-style metrical psalms already so familiar in the parish churches of England. They ignored the other component of English worship, Cranmer's Prayer Book, which the Laudians had now tainted irredeemably by their ceremonial adaptations of it.