Making War and Minting Christians: Masculinity, Religion and Colonialism in Early New England (Native Americans of the Northeast: Culture, History & the Contemporary)

In this book, R. Todd Romero traces the interaction of notions of gender, the practice of religion, and the conduct of warfare in colonial America.He shows how Native and Anglo-American ideas of manhood developed in counterpoint, in the context of Christian evangelization, colonial expansion, and recurrent armed conflict.For the English, the cultivation of manliness became an important aspect of missionary efforts.Conversion demanded that the English "make men" of the Indians before they could "make them Christians," a process that involved reshaping Native masculinity according to English patriarchal ideals that the colonists themselves rarely matched.For their part, Native Americans held on to older ways of understanding the divine and defining gender even as they entered English "praying towns" and negotiated the steep demands of the missionaries.Evolving ideas of masculinity resonated with religious significance and shaped the meaning of warfare for Natives and colonists alike.Just