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• 1 media/SM_ph16_IncreaseoftheKingdomTitle.jpg 2022-12-02T14:55:46-08:00 William Apess and “The Canaan of Gospel Liberty” 10 image_header 2022-12-07T06:50:29-08:00

  If Occom’s somewhat syncretic blend of Old Testament and New Testament narratives are but shadowy images and implications, Pequot writer William Apess directly brings such syncretism to the fore with force in both his theological and political writings. Apess was a Methodist minister who became politically activated — and injured — during the Mashpee Revolt in Massachusetts. A few years before the revolt, Apess published a sermon titled “The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ” alongside an accompanying essay titled “The Indians: The Ten Lost Tribes.” Apess was explicit in his belief that Indigenous people in North America were descendants of the Israelites. He often leveraged this belief in order to argue, within a Judeo-Christian framework, for the historical and religious significance of Indigenous people according to the religious tenets that Christian settlers themselves instituted.

  Part of the eschatological Biblical narrative, of course, is that Christ's consummation of his kingdom on earth is accompanied by the nation of Israel's acknowledgement of God and repentance for unbelief (Apess 106). From his lookout standing “on some of the great landmarks of time,” Apess notes in “The Increase” that he “look[s] back on a long line of prophecy fulfilled” (102). Barry O’Connell, in his introduction of the sermon and its companion essay, argues that Apess’ rhetoric in this sermon is “arguably regressive” because in “making the Indians objects and signs of the conversion of the world, his evangelical discourse controls and subjugates ‘the Indian’” (O'Connell 99). But Apess is doing something less didactic or easily apprehensible: in his movement between the primacy of the new covenant (Jesus the Son of Man) and a preoccupation with the “ancient chosen people,” the “jewels of Israel” (Apess 106), he synthesizes belief in both the new covenant, which through Christ has supplanted all of the old, with an insistence on an ancient claim to a previous one.

  That is, Apess views Indigenous people not as tired symbols of a reductive Christian narrative, but as agents of a justice and righteousness that they seek to bring about. Apess makes a move similar to that of Occom’s 1785 petition in that he seeks to build a firmly New Testament vision by way of the Old: the subject of Apess’ sermon is an increase in the kingdom of Christ, “on earth and in heaven.” This kingdom Apess defines as “righteousness” (104). The valence of this definitional word, righteousness, carries connotations of justice, a theme that figures prominently in Apess’ later political writings on behalf of the Mashpee. But in the confines of this sermon, Apess clearly sees a link between the coming of Christ, wrapped up in the fulfillment of the millennialist prophecy, and a type of divine justice where “the axe is laid at the root of the tree of human corruption” (102).
  
  

  The kingdom of Christ and its enlargement, for Apess, is dependent on his belief that “the ancient people of God, long despised as outcasts and wanderers among the nations, have not yet been gathered into the fullness of the Gentiles” (106). (Emphasis mine). This, in Apess’ logic, is not so much an impetus for conversion but instead for something like justice — for if “the Indians of the American continent are a part of the long lost ten tribes of Israel, have not the great American nation reason to fear the swift judgments of heaven on them for nameless cruelties, extortions, and exterminations inflicted upon the poor natives of the forest” (106)?

  For this future, Apess revives Ezekiel’s prophecy, transposing image of the revived Israelites onto his Indigenous audience: “Young men … rise up by thousands and enroll themselves in the army of immortality. The tribes of the wilderness are in motion … the deep brown wilderness is vocal with the shouting and songs of the delivered tribes, long slaves to error but now emancipated and brought out of the wilderness of sin into the Canaan of Gospel liberty” (111). The Canaan of Gospel Liberty: the “promised land” of Judeo-Christian lore is inverted, no longer solely symbol of a material place from which the indigenous Canaanites were displaced. It merges new covenants (“gospel”) and old (“Canaan”) to suggest a physical landmark that is defined by righteousness, where “exterminations” cease.