pilgrims in america --7/20/26

20 Jul 2026

pilgrims in america --7/20/26

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection-- from Contested Continent by Peter C. Mancall. Pilgrims coming to the new land of America in the 1600s had a three-part mission:

"In the 1620s, representatives of three very different groups of European migrants–English Protestant dissenters from the Church of England, Spanish Franciscans, and French Jesuits–sought to spread Christianity across North America. Each hoped to spearhead efforts that emphasized faith more than economics. They employed different methods, none more dramatic than the Franciscans who hauled the contents of an entire church from Mexico City to Santa Fe. They also at times relied on miracles, including, in the Southwest, the spectral appearance of Maria Agreda, a bi-locating Spanish nun whose body never left her Spanish convent but whose presence, so Christian believers claimed, helped to bring Natives to the joys of baptism.

“While the desire to spread Christianity was widespread among European monarchs and governments, the French and Spanish expected that the major burden would fall on professional religious, especially Catholic missionaries who had taken vows of poverty and celibacy. Royal subjects in Spain and France, Catholic nations riven by religious disputes, saw the Western Hemisphere as a new field for converts who would be transformed by those who had made the expansion of Roman Catholicism the central purpose of their lives. Dominicans and other Catholic missionaries had been working among Indigenous Americans since Columbus dispatched Fray Ramon Pane, of the Order of St. Jerome, to Hispaniola to convert Tainos. Religious missions to the west, like other Catholic missions to the east, aimed to bring those ignorant of Christian scripture into the faith. Jesuits and Recollets (or Recollects) embraced the same goal, though persistent religious tension within France and the undesirability of the St. Lawrence Valley to potential colonises hampered their efforts.

“To advance what they saw as their god's work, they worked alongside European soldiers and colonists. They saw themselves as the spiritual heirs of medieval Crusaders who had gone to war to advance the cross.

Pilgrim by Gheorghe Tattarescu

“By contrast, English dissenters crossed the Atlantic with a competing, but just as fierce, agenda. They claimed they were eager to convert Indigenous to their avowedly anti-Rome Protestant interpretation of Scripture. But they saw themselves as a religious minority persecuted by the Church of England. As a result, their quest differed from chat of Catholic missionaries adhering to the idea that the ruler's faith demanded strict allegiance (cuius regio, eius religio).

“In sending emissaries abroad, the Protestant dissenters known as puritans and the Leiden emigrants, often called ‘Pilgrims’ after a reference by Governor William Bradford, had a three-part mission: to halt the spread of Roman-style practice in North America; to spread what they saw as proper religious ideas to Indigenous Americans; and, in the process, to show the world–including English women and men who never emigrated–how the entire body of Christ could live godly lives, which the dissenters believed was no longer possible within the Church of England. These migrants saw Roman Catholics as in thrall co a clerical hierarchy chat promised salvation for those who would follow steps laid out by a priest. By contrast, these intellectual heirs of theologians like Martin Luther and John Calvin eschewed the idea of a divinely chosen elite able to provide guidance. Instead, they turned to books, including many that dwelled on the question of predestination. They spent countless hours interrogating themselves and others about possible signs of salvation.

“For all their differences, European Catholics and Protestants in the Western Hemisphere had two things in common. Both were beneficiaries of epidemics that had devastated Indigenous communities. And both took steps to sacralize a landscape they saw as godless, using the rhetoric of pilgrimage to justify their conquest and enhance their nations' struggles against other Europeans.”