The most popular churches in Robeson County today are Baptist and Methodist, with Pentecostal Holiness gaining in popularity. What may have accounted for the influence of these denominations? Direct missionary activity is a strong possibility, but probably not the only one. Historian Hugo Prosper Leaming has done an extensive study of maroon communities in Roanoke, North Carolina and in the Great Dismal Swamp of southern Virginia. He provides an interesting framework (much of it speculation, due to the scarcity of primary sources regarding these areas) with which to examine cross-cultural communication between Indians, Europeans, and Africans, and how a multicultural society such as the Lumbee might have approached the questions and practices of religion.
The descendants of the so-called "Lost" colony of 1587 probably moved inland with their Native neighbors to what was known to the British as Albemarle, and to the settlers as Roanoke (Weeks 1891:25-26). Unlike its neighboring colonies, much of North Carolina was unchartered until the 18th century, and the community of Roanoke passed for North Carolina's colonial government from 1650 to 1715. Roanoke society was comprised of "unofficial" settlers, mostly debtors from Virginia, recently released or runaway indentured servants, escaped slaves, pirates from the West Indies, and probably descendants of the earliest European and African settlers in North Carolina, from the Spaniards' 1525 settlement along the South Carolina border, Joao Pardo's failed military installation in 1566, and the members of John White's colony in 1587. On the geographic and social outskirts of this settlement were the Tuscarora and numerous smaller tribes. Evidence indicates that this group of refugees, explorers, dissenters, outsiders, and insiders comprised a fairly established community by the time England's first "successful" colony was founded at Jamestown in 1607 (Leaming 1995: 8-10).
Leaming describes in detail the efforts that both the Roanoke settlers and their Native American neighbors made to accommodate one another as independent and sovereign states. Leaming speculates:
True, the Tuscaroras and their client nations were the ultimate sovereigns at that time. But this did not forbid the immigrant community from organizing its own government subject to the suzerainty of the hosts. Native Americans welcomed settlers when their good will was established but did not consider them members of the tribal organization unless they learned and adopted Native American culture as a whole and sealed the process with the ceremony of adoption. ...[Roanoke's] autonomous self-government, without need for foreign or military departments, constituted no threat to the Native Americans so long as it was totally independent of European powers (Leaming 1995: 32).
Contrary to the oft-told tales of blatant English theft of Native American land, several members of the Roanoke settlement, including the Governor, signed deeds with ruling members of the surrounding tribes, implying mutual understanding of legal ownership and an acute sense of the threat which Virginia's expansion efforts presented in the 1660's (Leaming 1995: 42-43).
Leaming describes Roanoke as a kind of enduring frontier, rather than a frontier of creation and desecration, as conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and others. Leaming's frontier concept, similar to that of Jack Forbes (Forbes 1968), may also have applied to Robeson County, considering its similar topography, settlement patterns, and ethnic make-up. Leaming writes:
Not under attack by European power, Native Americans could calmly examine the offerings of European culture without rejecting almost all in patriotic reaction, and without accepting undesired elements as a conquered and degraded people. In similar spirit the Roanoke settler community could continue its exploration of new ways without pressure, inward or outward, to eschew 'savagery' and stand up for Anglo-Saxon ways... Some Native Americans, including entire communities, became Europeanized in major respects, without the domination which that usually implies. (Leaming 1995: 48-49).
Such was the context of Robeson County in the 17th and 18th centuries, down to contemporary times. Native peoples were (and are) able to choose the cultural paths we follow, apart from the "degradation" which many observers would later impose upon us.
This frontier thesis particularly pertains to religion in the settlement. In 1701, the Church of England formed the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. A total of three hundred and nine Anglican missionaries were sent to minister to the native and colonial populations of the east coast (Smith 1993: 11). While Britain's Lord Proprietors sought to establish the Anglican Church as the official state church in North Carolina, the governing settlement at Roanoke would not agree and were more welcoming to a group of Quaker missionaries that arrived in the 1680s. In addition to bringing in members of the Roanoke community, Governor Batts of Roanoke worked with Quaker missionary George Fox to convert the nearby Tuscaroras. Fox was rumored to have the gift of healing, an attribute which may have attracted both Natives and non-Natives to the Quaker practice (Leaming 1995: 67). In spite of the strong Quaker presence, however, most Roanoke settlers refrained from joining any official church, and as one frustrated Anglican missionary described them, they "have no religion, but would be Quakers, if by that they were not obliged to lead a more moral life that they are willing to comply to" (Leaming 1995: 66). Both Quaker doctrine and its history as a dissentist, persecuted religion may have made it at least informally attractive to this motley crew at Roanoke; both settlers and Native Americans perhaps saw this religion as one they could incorporate into their established rituals, spiritual and otherwise.
Quaker doctrine dictates "silent" meetings, unstructured worship where congregants only speak when moved to do so by the "Inner Light," the Holy Spirit. Unlike Calvinist or Catholic beliefs, Quakerism dictates that the presence of God is in all persons and that all can speak directly with Him; its emphasis is experiential and mystical, "always in response to the Divine Light within." The institution of the church has little authority over the individual, and particularly not over the individual's experience of the Divine (Hill, ed. 1984: 628-629). Such a belief system would have been very attractive to those suspicious of authority and determined to sort out their own relationship with God.
While there is no concrete evidence for Quaker activity along the Lumbee river until the 1960s, it is this kind of dissentist inclination and spiritual preference which came to characterize the residents of that area. Ultimately, dissentist groups of Baptists and Methodists, and later Pentecostal Holiness, would take up the firmest residence among Indians in Robeson County. The model provided by the Roanoke settlement was developed in many frontier communities all over the South, and is especially applicable to Lumbees because of its close proximity, similar circumstances, and the similarity of established customs which the ancestors of the Lumbee had developed.