Frontier Faith

On a cold January day in 1751, Jonathan Edwards—powdered wig, black robe, Geneva bands—stepped into the pulpit of a wooden mission church on the Massachusetts frontier. Before him sat several dozen Indians in breechcloths, leggings, and moccasins. He began to preach.

For generations, history has treated this moment as an exile: Edwards, dismissed from the most prominent pulpit in New England, retreating to the wilderness to write philosophical treatises while largely ignoring the people he was sent to serve. The typical portrait of the Stockbridge Indians is hardly better: silent extras in Edwards's drama, spiritually cowed by their colonial neighbors.

Both accounts are wrong.

Drawing on long-neglected sources, Brandon Crawford tells a richer story. Far from a disengaged exile, Edwards poured himself into the spiritual lives of a people navigating rivalries between English Puritans, Dutch merchants, French Jesuits, Mohicans, Mohawks, and others on the volatile colonial frontier. And the Indians were no silent extras. They embraced, adapted, and shaped the Christian faith in ways that were at once evangelical and distinctly their own. What emerges is a portrait of a pastor and a people who, against all odds, were earnest in their commitments to the gospel, the mission, and each other.