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Abstract
The diabolic portrayal of resident native populations featured prominently in the seventeenth-century colonial Separatist and Puritan worldview, with the Algonquian peoples cast as a corrupted race in the service of the Devil; a means by which God challenged religious complacency or chastised collective sin; and, in times of spiritual crisis and despair, a mortal threat to the "rule of saints" in the region. This study focuses on the real-world impact of the nonconforming Reformed Anglo-Protestant belief system and the resulting cultural-religious clashes that shaped New England's early colonial period.