1 Background
Samson Occom was a Mohegan minister of the eighteenth century. His conversion took place during the Great Awakening, and it’s this conversion he describes in his autobiography.
The Great Awakening was typically American for a few reasons, and in short they are: capitalism, anarchy, and experience. On its surface, the Great Awakening was an explosion in religious activity in the 1730s and 1740s, and, sure, it was that.
But it was also, effectively, a public relations campaign promoted and circulated in newly expansive print networks in the American colonies. The Great Awakening was happening in churches and in tents, but it was also happening in print. You could buy the Great Awakening in a few pamphlets.
The Great Awakening was predicated on a transformation of not only the nature but the geography of religious authority. Christians came to abandon the idea that spirituality was a local social medium. They didn’t just go to the church down the way. They shopped around. The Great Awakening was in part the dawn of the American consumer as the crux of an emerging American anarchism.
And, finally, the Great Awakening prized experience, in the form of conversion, as a sort of authority in a way that earlier religious practice did not. Paradoxically, perhaps, it didn’t authorize experience in general as authoritative; it authorized a certain script, as it were.
The script goes like this: You realize everyday life is vacuous, and you experience the terror and helplessness of that; all of your individual efforts fail and you give up trying to improve your life; then grace arrives, generally metaphorically as light, and you have renewed perception and joy and so on; and you tell others about all this, so they can enjoy it, too.
I will mention also that ‘experience’ in American thought generally has always, in its many uses, sat at an uncomfortable intersection between particular and general. What I mean is that its value is often seen as lying in its particularity: The world is all particulars, and knowledge and understanding are possible only through the knowledge and understanding of particulars, and these come to us through experience, which is true. And we might add to this that experience has a certain moral and even political authority: that your experience is yours, a possession, something not only true but something you are entitled to, something you have a right to.
But, again, policing what counts as experience—in both respects, that is, as true and as valuable—happens just as generally. For example, let’s suppose the Great Awakening elevated experience as a religious phenomenon. Fine. It wasn’t every experience that fit the bill, however. For example, if you had the experience of getting high or drunk and meeting God, I’m guessing that wouldn’t count as meaningful religious experience. Nor if you had the experience of meeting the devil and learning that he’s a cool dude and means well. Hence the unofficial ‘script’: Experience is meaningful, so long as it hews to a recognized and authoritative pattern.
2 Occom
For the conversion, see p. 53, at “When I was 16 years of age,” etc. Notice here the “Trouble of Mind,” followed by putting his trust in Jesus, and then “the Distress and Burden of my mind was removd, and found Serenity and Pleasure of Soul, in Serving god” (pp. 53–54)—in other words, a typical conversion story.
He then studies under Eleazar Wheelock but his eyesight fails him. He opens a school in Montauk and serves as a minister to the local population. All of this, which is charmingly told, gets you to the highlighted passage on p. 57.
He relates that he was destitute and out of money and appealed for help, and in the process discovers that a white man in his position was paid the same for one year that he was paid for twelve years of work. (For a rough estimate: £180 in the eigteenth century might be worth about $50,000 today, which the other minister was receiving annually; Occom would have been receiving the equivalent of $4,200 a year.)
Occom’s question: What’s that all about? And you could take everything to this point as conforming, in a more or less deliberate way, to the ‘script’ of conversion and religious instruction. Everything leading to his destitution and request for assistance is exemplary of the Christian mores of the Great Awakening: He did the conversion bit, he dedicated himself to a devout Christian life, and he ended up broke. And why? Well, it’s got a depressing answer, he thinks; see the green passage on p. 58. It’s because he’s an Indian.
And not just that; it’s because he’s a “poor Indian,” he writes. In other words, the impoverishment he suffers as a minister is maintainenance of his socio-economic status. That’s significant because it exposes the inverse reality of civilizing rhetoric.
Here’s what I mean. Take Apess. Recall his imagined interlocutor who watches Apess’ grandmother beat him and chalks it up to ‘nature’. Recall Apess’ basic line: Impoverishment and its associated moral ills are products of European colonization. The imagined individual might think: Maybe Indians ought to take responsibility for themselves, pick themselves up by the boostraps, and get an education—whatever. Occom is the perfect image of this individual’s fantasy. He is an Indian who converted to Christianity, got an education, and then worked as a teacher and minister for other Indians. And he was impoverished anyway.
If you were skeptical of Apess’ account and had a version of the ‘Why can’t these people just fix themselves?’ thought, take Occom’s account (guy does exactly what he should do; receives same impoverished condition as a result) as your reason to be skeptical about your own skepticism.
Apess and Occom pair nicely to bring out the basic thought that, however it gets sliced and spliced, the moral or political or aesthetic universality of a certain early American vision is seen by many to be a partial one.