The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America's First People, Tuininga, Matthew J, New York, Oxford University Press, 2024 (ISBN 9780197671764), 464 pp., HB $33.85

In The Wars of the Lord, Matthew J. Tuininga offers a historical narrative that avoids the platitudes that too often haunt this kind of research. Spanning the years between the Mayflower's arrival in 1620 and the devastating King Philip's War (1675–1676), Tuininga illuminates the messy intersection of faith, ideology, and violence in early New England, compelling readers to wrestle with complexity rather than comfort. We live in an era of ‘decolonizing’, where scholarship often suffers under the impulse to assign guilt based solely on geography. This tendency is, ironically, the inverse of an earlier academic habit of uncritically giving the benefit of the doubt based on geography. Tuininga achieves his goal with clarity and empathy. The book reads like a drama and engages its audience with cinematic force. He demonstrates his skill as both a writer and a historian. Rather than providing a clear-cut villain or hero, Tuininga paints a nuanced portrait: the Puritans saw themselves as a covenant community—‘Israel’ to the Native ‘Canaanites’—consumed by genuine spiritual zeal yet tragically blind to the moral consequences of conquest. Native peoples, in turn, understood themselves as continuing a tradition rooted in the land and in their ancestors given to them by spirits. His storytelling is vivid and immersive. Scenes of miscommunication, broken promises and escalating brutality feel cinematic in their intensity. Tuininga is careful to honour Native American agency by developing a more textured view of how they perceived the English and how those perceptions shaped their responses. Previous and contemporary analyses that render both sides as one-dimensional can only be corrected through this kind of careful scholarship. Importantly, Tuininga resists moralizing. He notes that earlier generations of historians tended to idealize the colonists, while later narratives vilified them. In contrast, the reality is more complicated and unsettling. He emphasizes understanding motivations over simplistic judgement, quoting poignantly: ‘Ultimately … it is less important to judge the dead than to discern why they did what they did.’ This posture models humility toward history and its actors—Christians and colonists alike. Religious ideas, Tuininga shows, drove much of the violence. The logic of religious and civic zeal merged: missionary outreach and military conquest were perceived as two sides of the same spiritual war, a ‘War of the Lord’ meant to uproot Satan's power and bring salvation from the kingdom of darkness. Massacres, which included women and children on both sides, reveal the grim irony of warfare throughout human history. Tuininga is careful not to judge pre-Geneva Convention warfare by contemporary standards, yet he does not shy away from the reality that war is gruesome and raises moral questions for later generations about how it was conducted. As a professor of religious studies who teaches about religion in America, including Native American religion, I find one weakness in the book here. While Puritan theology receives careful attention, the religious worldview of Native Americans receives less. In particular, the resistance of the sachem as both civil and religious leaders to Christian teaching could have been explored in more detail. They viewed Native American converts to Christianity as a threat to their own power. Tuininga acknowledges the existence of this power conflict but does not flesh out the substance of Native American belief. John Eliot receives some extended treatment as an example of a Puritan who took time to understand the belief systems of Native communities. But overall, readers are left with little sense of the extent to which Puritans understood Native American religion and why they rejected it. We know they dismissed it as unbiblical, but that begs the question: what, precisely, did they encounter and teach against? The absence of written records means we rely on early explorers and traders for information about Native American religious practice. Later, after more sustained contact with Christianity, Indigenous traditions began to take on monotheistic tones (e.g., the ‘Great Spirit’) alongside animistic elements of nature-veneration. If we had a clearer sense of their ancestral religion, we would better understand their stance in conflicts over land and culture. Indigenous peoples themselves recognized geographic boundaries—both within linguistic groups and between them—in contrast to the popular stereotype that they had no concept of land ownership. On what basis did they claim land? The answer seems to be that they believed they had been created upon that land, and therefore it was theirs. This amounts to a kind of ‘blood and soil’ argument. We later see this theme in the teachings of the prophet Neolin a century afterward, leading into Pontiac's War. As sachem resisted Christian missions, their resistance was not merely about economics. It was about preserving a way of life and deeply held beliefs about spirits, nature and origins. Helping modern readers to understand those beliefs—and moving beyond the lazy portrayals often recycled in popular culture—would strengthen the book's goal of nuance. That would then also open the door to philosophical analysis of such beliefs on both sides. In the end, the story is one of populations on the move, both increasing and decreasing, of a desire to change land use and expand markets. Yet beneath these material conflicts lie the beliefs that supported them in each culture. The struggles Tuininga narrates are ultimately conflicts between two different ways of understanding reality. Both may have been mistaken, but both could not have been correct. This early clash in English colonial history set the stage for centuries to come. Even today, we still wrestle with the unresolved question of how a pluralistic society can sustain both difference and unity.