Head, which is Christ.” One of the wondrous qualities of that body was that it could stretch across time and space and alter believers’ perceptions of both. Bayly wrote, “This Union betwixt the Faithful is so ample, that no Distance of Place can part; so strong, that Death cannot dissolve it; so durable, that time cannot wear it out; so effectual, that it breeds a fervent Love betwixt those who never saw one another’s Face.”9 It was a conceptual space that could be infinitely expansive or intimately focused on the inner workings of an individual soul. And yet, the idea was not malleable ad infinitum, because individuals’ physical and bodily understanding constrained their comprehension of how the body of Christ organized itself.
Sectarian allegiances shared a common trait with developing ideas about racial or ethnic difference in that both provided ways for people to define who belonged in their community and who had to be kept outside it. Separate strains of Christianity held differing ideals about what the ideal community should look like, how it should work, and who should be in it. The notion that it was possible to separate groups of people based on particular external dissimilarities that signaled intrinsic incompatibility led to the idea that only people in the same group could form a strong community. These two methods for dividing the world into those like and those unlike oneself did not exist independently. Understanding how the body of Christ structured English communities highlights the points at which sectarian and racial differences categorized people similarly, and the points at which those definitions diverged and ceased to overlap. Contestations over faithful bodies were central to the early modern Atlantic world, which was made through the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel race slavery; the increased contact between indigenous peoples of the Americas, Europeans, and Africans and their dissimilar gender systems; changing conceptions of authority and dependence; and conflict over religious differences.
The body of Christ metaphor demonstrates the centrality of religion in how seventeenth-century Christians saw and experienced their world and communities. This specific bodily metaphor affected the social organization of religious life for the people (mostly Europeans) who brought the idea into the complex new Atlantic communities of the English colonies. Ideas around the body of Christ existed in a world in which many kinds of bodies held power and the control of bodily intimacy was an essential part of social and familial hierarchies.10 Different concepts of the body influenced and reflected other understandings of religion. In southern New England tribes that were part of the Algonquian cultural group, religious specialists called powwows and war leaders called pniesok both garnered their mandate to lead from demonstrations of the ritual expertise needed to navigate a world populated by numerous other-than-human persons. Communication with those powerful beings who shaped life in many ways, an action required for the health of the community body, often required leaving the bounds of the physical body. West Central and West African peoples maintained networks between the dead and the living through power objects that allowed spiritual forces to take up temporary habitation in chosen individuals. Access to power structures depended on showing one’s connection to other-than-human persons, the numinous entities whom older scholarship has often termed “supernatural” beings.11
Studying religion in this fashion emphasizes relationships between and among individuals, communities, and the divine, and thus supports a parallel comparison between religions with and without extensive written theologies. The English were not the only ones in the colonies who had a sense of order inspired by belief in divine power. Africans who had been enslaved and forcibly transported across the Atlantic and by way of the Caribbean came from societies with beliefs about how humans ought to interact with one another and with the divine. Indigenous peoples had different religiously shaped visions of how social relationships should be organized, which affected how they responded to invasions of their homelands. Asking similar questions about Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Americas makes it easier to catch the swirling currents of belief and practice among groups of people, and to see how their respective maps overlay each other.
Confessional Spatiality
The puritan Atlantic helps push our understandings of the interplay between the physical and mental worlds of Atlantic actors, between intense local knowledge and a strongly crafted perception of confessional spatiality. Seventeenth-century English Protestants understood their religious communities through the metaphor of the body of Christ, so that both visible congregations of the faithful and the invisible community of the saved throughout the world were part of a body of which Christ was the head. They described churches and groups of individuals as specific members of that body: limbs, sinew, or blood. Communities in far-flung locales considered each other to be members of the same body. This body of Christ was linked to, but not the same as, the body politic. The points of overlap and disjuncture between these two bodies reveal the contours of how people determined the boundary between themselves and others, between insider and outsider. Although generally perceived to be rigid and restrictive, the puritan body of Christ proved more permeable to racial differences than the body politic because of the emphasis on voluntary membership. Relative distances did not always match the geography of the physical world in the cognitive space of the puritan Atlantic. The conceptual space of the body of Christ changed the mental maps of those who inhabited it, even as the inhabitants’ actions created that space and changed the relationships between themselves and others. It was a way of organizing society on the local level and simultaneously a means of understanding the vast physical space of the Atlantic.
In addition to Rhode Island and Bermuda, several colonies and locales outside the New England colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut were part of the puritan Atlantic, an idea that does not depend as heavily on self-identification as does the “Protestant International,” a confessional network that understood itself to be fighting against a worldwide Catholic threat.12 The distinctive culture influenced by “hot” Protestants existed to at least some degree in Providence Island, the Bahamas, Antigua, Barbados, and parts of the Chesapeake, Long Island, and New Jersey. That shared culture changed dissenting Protestants’ perception of space by creating intimate links between physically far-flung places, and by making geographical neighbors into strangers. These locations have separately received scholarly attention, but considering them together as part of a shared confessional spatiality allows for more attention to the fluctuations of dissenting English culture in the Atlantic world more broadly.13 Although this book is not a survey of all possible locations in the puritan Atlantic, it takes the first steps to consider how spatial connection linked a few key places.
As the puritan English in southern New England and Bermuda tried to create new societies, they brought a particular kind of order to their communities—godly order was meant to be paramount. While Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Bermuda differed from each other in significant ways, they more closely resembled each other in key aspects than they did other English colonies. As a group of dissenting colonies colonized by the “hotter” sorts of Protestants seeking reform beyond that instituted by the Church of England, they were definably separate from the British plantation colonies, whether southern mainland or Caribbean, as well as the mid-Atlantic colonies. These (loosely defined) puritans influenced social structures and cultural order in all three colonies, but did not control social institutions in all three places in equal measure.14 While these separate colonies shared a dissenting ethos, each location had a particular trajectory. For instance, puritans and Baptists visited and even preached to each other’s congregations in London during the seventeenth century, including John Bunyan, author of the allegory for Christian conversion The Pilgrim’s Progress. At the same time in Massachusetts Bay, ruling puritans persecuted Baptists as religious outlaws for their insistence on adult baptism.15 Without an established church in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Baptists there did not face the same persecution and exclusion from town government. But they did have to contend with internal schisms.16 Conflicts over the appropriate life stage for baptism do not appear in Bermuda’s records. The public conversion narrative required in most of New England’s puritan churches relating an individual’s spiritual and physical struggles to discern the working of God’s grace upon and in them was not a common practice in English congregations, although those who
