Why did Natives convert to Christianity

Because of the close relationship between federal Indian policy and American churches during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christianity has a long and important history in Oklahoma's Indian Country. Driven by a belief in the necessity of converting Indians, and openly supported by federal policymakers, missionaries arrived as early as the 1820s, convinced, as Henry Warner Bowden has written, "that one set of cultural standards–the one shared by churchmen and politicians–promoted both spiritual progress and national stability." As a result, church leaders and politicians alike believed that conversion to Christianity would quickly, humanely, and permanently solve the Indian question. Indeed, in 1869 the Board of Indian Commissioners noted in its annual report that where assimilating Indians was concerned, "the religion of our blessed Savior is . . . the most effective agent for the civilization of any people."

By the 1850s missions flourished in the eastern half of Indian Territory especially among the Five Tribes, among whom the history of mission work reached back to the preremoval era. Following removal, missionaries reestablished churches and mission stations in the Indian Territory. These institutions often worked in tandem with schools and academies such as the Presbyterians' Dwight Mission (Cherokee, 1820, 1828), Chuala Female Academy (Choctaw, 1842), and Tullahassee Manual Labor Boarding School (Creek, 1850), the Congregational/American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions's Wheelock Academy (Choctaw, 1832), the Methodist Episcopal Church's Quapaw Mission (1843), and Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females (1852).

Between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s federal policymakers and mission groups intensified their efforts in the western half of Indian Territory. In 1869 federal officials inaugurated the Peace Policy, a church-led, reservation-based assimilation program rooted in the belief that missionaries were the most effective agents of the government's civilizing agenda. Although the Peace Policy lasted less than a decade, its support for church-sponsored work was such that by the late nineteenth century every mainstream denomination, including the Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Mennonites, Quakers, and Catholics, had mission stations on Oklahoma's reservations. (The Mormons were absent, excluded by official policy and public prejudice.) The Baptists and Methodists claimed the lion's share of the missions, but the Catholics ran noteworthy missions and schools in the Potawatomi Nation at Sacred Heart Abbey, at Anadarko on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, and in north central Oklahoma among the Ponca, Otoe, and Osage. The Mennonites established an especially strong mission station among the Comanches at Post Oak Mission and at Colony.

By the twentieth century Christianity was a major faith in the Oklahoma Indian community. The Methodist Oklahoma Indian Mission Conference, for example, reported in the year 2000 that it had seventy-two hundred members worshiping in eighty-nine churches in Oklahoma, Kansas, and north Texas. Baptist and Methodist congregations outnumbered the rest of the field, but there were sizeable numbers of Catholics and a growing number of Pentecostals as well.

Regardless of the denomination or tribal affiliation, American Indian Christians do not always reflect the assimilated image that policymakers had once anticipated. From the beginning, Christian and tribally specific beliefs and practices often combined to produce syncretic expressions that were and are simultaneously Christian and Indian. As James Treat writes, American Indian Christians "have constructed and maintained their . . . religious identities with a variety of considerations in mind. . . . Many native Christians accomplish this identification without abandoning or rejecting native religious traditions." Thus, the appearance of native hymn traditions, for example, has helped many tribes to maintain the cultural and spiritual power of language and belief according to traditional ways. In the late nineteenth century, moreover, mission stations often became associated with kin-based bands, thus serving as a focal point for new communities in which Native people who became deacons or lay leaders continued to maintain and express traditional ideals of generosity and kinship. In these and other ways Christianity gave many of Oklahoma's Indian people a way to accommodate the changing social and cultural contours of their world, and in doing so to maintain an important sense of ethnic identity and pride.

Clyde Ellis

Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Louis Coleman, "Cyrus Byington: Missionary to the Choctaws," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 62 (Winter 1984–85).

Hugh D. Corwin, "Protestant Missionary Work Among the Comanches and Kiowas," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 46 (Spring 1968).

Isabel Crawford, Kiowa: A Woman Missionary in Indian Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1915] 1998).

John Preston Dane, "A History of Baptist Missions Among the Plains Indians of Oklahoma" (Ph.D. diss., Central Baptist Theological Seminary, 1955).

Bruce David Forbes, "John Jasper Methvin: Methodist 'Missionary to the Western Tribes' (Oklahoma)," in Churchmen and the Western Indians, 1820–1920, ed. Clyde Milner and Floyd A. O'Neil (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).

Arlene Hirschfelder and Paulette Molin, eds., Encyclopedia of Native American Religions (New York: Facts on File, 1992).

Marvin Kroeker, Comanches and Mennonites on the Southern Plains: A. J. and Magdalena Becker and the Post Oak Mission (Hillsboro, Kans.: Kindred Productions, 1997).

Luke E. Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Jack Schultz, The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma: Maintaining a Traditional Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999).

James Treat, ed., Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996).

Walter Vernon, "Methodist Beginnings Among Southwest Oklahoma Indians," The Chronicles of Oklahoma 58 (Winter 1980–81).

The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Clyde Ellis, “American Indians and Christianity,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AM011.

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• Native Americans on the Path to the Catholic Church: Cultural Crisis and Missionary Adaptation

To help understand the conversion of Native Americans to Catholicism, historians need to take into account the historical and social context of the American Indian community at the time when many Indians were leaving their ancient Stone Age religion and adopting Christianity. Indian religions all were closely linked to their hunting, farming or raiding economies, and by the 1890’s their ancient lifestyle would end. The United States government placed most of the Western Indians on reservations from 1850 to 1890, and it was during this turbulent period that missionaries established permanent missions among them. In addition to their task of converting the Indians, Catholic missionaries had to help them adapt to a new economy, land boundaries, diet, social rules, marital rules, morals, and political system. In contrast, when Jesuit missionaries went to China in the seventeenth century, they did not attempt to make radical changes to Chinese culture, but rather focused on spreading the Catholic faith. In the Native American missions, religion and culture had to change together. Catholic missionaries, however, were not agents of the American government; they were representatives of a modern American Catholic culture that often tried to distinguish itself from many American social trends. With the movement of white population into the American West, Indians faced some of the most rapid and dramatic cultural changes in history. These profound economic and social changes were the primary forces that brought an end to traditional Native American religions. [End Page 71]

One of the central aspects of Indian religion that could not survive the encounter with modern culture was the institution of shamanism. Most Indian tribes had shamans who were the healers of the community. Shamans operated under the theory that breaking religious rules would bring sickness to the individual or would have adverse affects on hunting or farming. Diagnosis and treatment of illness and poor hunting were the shamans’ responsibility. Indians believed that shamans were capable of sending their souls out of their bodies, traveling to the land of the gods, and fixing the problems. The tragic outbreak of smallpox and other diseases among Native Americans had the effect of discrediting the shamans who were powerless to hinder the devastation of the diseases. At the beginning of the missions, shamans were the rivals of Catholic missionaries, and the missionaries certainly did try to discredit them. At times, Catholic missionaries themselves administered medicines to Indians and vaccinated them against disease.1 When priests, nuns or white doctors provided medicines, Western medicine began to replace the shamans’ remedies and through this process a central part of Native American religion began to erode.

Changes in trade and the introduction of Western goods also degraded Native American culture, and the fur trade was a profound example of this. One of the hallmarks of Indian religion was the interdependent relationship between the animals and the people. Native peoples saw the animals as spirits or gods. To ensure a good hunt, the Indians would invoke and propitiate the animal spirits. In turn the animals would allow themselves to be killed by the people. In Native American religion, the idea that the animals sacrificed themselves for the good of the people was a common theme.2 The fur trade, however, brought an end to this benevolent relationship between the hunters and the hunted. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian overhunting decimated beaver populations in the Great Lakes area.3 Native Americans’ desire for copper pots, steel knives, silver, wool blankets, cotton cloth and alcohol changed their relationship with the animals. No longer were the fur-bearing animals hunted for food with accompanying rituals that honored their sacrifice. The fur trade changed the animals from self-sacrificing spirits into commodities. Although rum traders deserve blame for this tragedy that caused the devastation of the beaver population around the Great Lakes and the degradation of Indian communities, it seems fair to ask why Indians abandoned the animal spirits for copper, iron, rum and other Western goods. If they were really attached to their conception of the balance of nature, the avoidance of overhunting and their worship of...