Could it be … Satan?!

Allergic reaction to a food you ate? Must be Satan. Storm? Shipwreck? Must be Satan. Indian uprising? Again, Satan. Opossum sighting? Don’t be fooled–clearly, it’s only Satan in disguise. As I read Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s book, Puritan Conquistadors, I kept hearing Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” from Saturday Night Live in the nineties, in my head, giggling, “Must be Satan!”

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I’m sorry; I just couldn’t help myself. But now that that’s out of my system, let’s get serious.

Cañizares-Esguerra writes, “British Protestants and Spanish Catholics deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest and colonization: a Biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies” (p. 9). The Spanish and the British, it seems, were not so different as much of colonial American historiography would have us believe. Both groups understood colonization as an epic struggle against the power of Satan, who, they believed, had enjoyed millennia of unchallenged tyrannical dominion over the weak, effeminate Indians of the Americas. A demonological discourse structured the way both Iberian Catholics and English Puritans thought about colonization and the New World. In fact, they saw colonization itself as a kind of exorcism. Even nature, in this worldview, was manipulated by devils. Storms, poisonous plants, even the poor opossum—all were indications of the evil one’s work in the New World.

Conveniently, “The devil operated in the New World by eroding the racial and social hierarchies of the well-ordered polity” (26-7), so satanic agency could be transferred to anyone’s enemy. Satan could work through the Spanish, the Indians, and even storms.

What is so stunning about Cañizares-Esguerra’s accomplishment is the way he seamlessly weaves together the mental worlds of Iberian Catholics and Protestant Puritans. The author drives a big nail into the coffin of American exceptionalism, and his point is well taken, if, perhaps, a wee bit over-the-top at times.

Chapters 1-5 are lucidly organized, cleverly analyzed, and convincingly argued. But as to the historiographically-oriented Chapter 6, which asks why historians have missed the similarity between Iberian and Puritan discourses of demonology, I offer another explanation: It must be Satan.