Linford D. Fisher of Religion in American History spoke earlier this week with Rachel Wheeler, author of To Live Upon Hope: Mohican and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-century Northeast:
LF: […] In the broader field of religious history, there is a lot of discomfort with seeing religious decisions as being tied to practical concerns. In your book, you are careful to say that you do not have an instrumentalist approach to religion, and yet so much of what you describe seems to center on Native practicality and their view of efficacy as a test for religious truth. So in terms of a broader approach to this question of functionalism, how might attention to Native American sources wean us from this discomfort?
RW: I think it is a Protestant discomfort; what’s most important in Protestantism is belief. In Protestantism, you don’t pray in order to get something, so I think that carries over into scholarship, that “true” religion or “authentic” religion is about belief no matter what the outcome is. Whereas in Native American religion, traditionally, if it doesn’t function in ways that you need it to, then you question it. But I do think there is a difference between the efficacy that I am talking about and the functionalism of postcolonial discourse concerning Native American conversions. When they use “functional” in that context, they mean that the Natives don’t really believe, that they are just pulling a fast one over the missionaries, which is not the case here. I think a lot of the Lived Religion focus has called attention to the efficacy part of even Protestantism.
Read the entire inteview here.