- Although we start with a Spanish-Pueblo encounter, Native Americans promptly disappear from the narrative. Visually, the film reinforces the myth of America as an empty wilderness: we get repeated shots of individuals walking alone through unpopulated landscapes. I understand that such shots are an exigency in a historical film when you don’t want to hire and costume lots of extras or recreate colonial towns; but they have an unfortunate ideological effect that I would want to call students’ attention to.
The party line adopted in the film is that Pueblos never really converted to Christianity: the friars simply misunderstood the Pueblos’ pluralistic religious attitude, their willingness to add Christian elements to their religion without repudiating their native traditions. I smell oversimplification. I know for a fact that 17th-century Hopi communities were divided between Christian and traditionalist factions, with the Christians trying (at least according to traditionalist accounts) to help the friars stamp out native religious practices.
The film’s claim that the First Great Awakening helped pave the way for the Revolution is an oft-made claim. I think this claim tends to be overstated by American religious historians; I have yet to see strong textual evidence for it. In fact, as we were watching the film, my husband remarked about precisely this claim, which he had not heard before: “Eh, that connection’s kind of vague.” Agreed. This is a point I would want to nuance with my class. After all, establishment Congregationalists and even many Anglicans–people who opposed revivalism, as this film drives home–nevertheless felt amply justified in joining the Revolution. It may be true, as the film puts it, that revivalism gave the Revolution a new moral force; but the Revolution had other moral foundations, and at least in the primary texts I use when I teach religion and the Revolution, revivalism does not loom large.