How the Natick Indians Became Christians

[caption id="attachment_8984" align="aligncenter" width="753"] Native Christianity reached a peak in 1674. King Philip's War proved to be disastrous for the praying Indians. Many of them died or were forced into servitude or even slavery.[/caption]

John Eliot started preaching to Indians in the 1640's, but he didn't get his first convert until 1652. That convert was Waban. Waban himself was quoted in an award-winning scholarly article published in 1990.

After the great sickness [an epidemic in 1633-34], I considered what the English do; and I had some desire to do as they do; and  after that I began to work as they work; and then I wondered how the English came to be so strong to labor.

At the same time, one of the first things that the women of Waban's band wanted to learn from John Eliot was how to spin wool into cloth.

Taking that and other data that had been recorded prior to 1730, the historian, Harold Van Lonkhuyzen, comes to the conclusion that "Indians' individual motivations in first adopting Christianity... appear to have been highly specific, rather modest, and perhaps not at all what the missionaries might have wished."

This, of course, doesn't mean that the praying Indians of New England didn't gradually learn about the religion that was brought to them from across the Atlantic. But they didn't become complete Christians quickly. Van Lonkhuyzen puts it this way:

These Indians were eager to make use of European goods and technologies as a means not of abandoning, but of fulfilling their traditional way of life.

To put it simply, the Indians were selective. Aspects of Christianity that they came to embrace tended to have some kind of function in their traditional mindset. One example that Van Lonkhuyzen gives is the "considerable evidence that one of the major attractions of praying to God was the protection it offered from the sorcery of the powwows [that is, the shamans or medicine men]."

According to Van Lonkhuyzen, the Indian converts were "trying to enhance rather than abandon their traditional order [and] tried to take only what they wanted of the missionary program."