Gathered Into a Church

Uncovering how and where Indigenous and settler communities found common ground using newly public church records

Puritans in the American colonies created Congregationalism, a Protestant denomination where power rested in each congregation rather than a larger central body. As has often been told, the official Puritan mission included outreach to Indigenous people. This may appear as nothing more than forced conversion under colonization, but church records from Massachusetts--digitized and made public for the first time--reveal the authenticity of this Indigenous religious experience, as evidenced by commonalities between the Congregational way and some aspects of local Native American cultures. The records also show how the decentralized churches stood in contrast to a growing civil government in the colonies.

Lori Rogers-Stokes focuses on the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, a period bookended by King Philip's War and the First Great Awakening. She uses as her primary source the many records kept by individual Congregational churches of the time. These records, accumulated over generations, have been missing from the historical record, allowing overly simplistic accounts of this religious community to circulate. With church records now available, Rogers-Stokes reveals a more realistic picture of diverse congregations and contrasts their internal workings--which show inherent flexibility and a focus on a shared creation of community--with a developing civil government focused on consolidating power around white landowners. The result is a story that can expand how scholars write about this period, this region, and these communities, both settler and Indigenous.

LORI ROGERS-STOKES is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England'sHidden Histories. She is the author of Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard's Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls.