The Church

The Church begins as the community through which settlers came to New World in hopes of leaving behind the corruption and sin of Old World and founding a pure, fraternal society. In Prentisstown, however, its recurring sermons about unity coexist with the town’s coercive rule and a history of violence: religious language about sacrifice and what is hidden helps turn social fear into persecution and collective complicity.

Founding and Ideals

The Church is described as the reason the settlers came to New World. Its members were part of the group offered the chance to leave Old World and establish a new settlement; among them were Todd Hewitt’s mother and Ben, who persuaded Cillian to join. The settlers’ stated hope was to begin again in a new Eden, with purity and brotherhood. That founding ideal is recalled retrospectively against the hardships and violence that followed, making the promised Eden a measure of how far the community fell short.

The Church’s language of shared dependence persists in Prentisstown. Aaron regularly preaches that the men are all one another have, and that they must bind themselves into a single community. The teaching that if one person falls, all fall is repeated so often that it becomes a familiar communal refrain. Yet the language of mutual care sits uneasily beside a town in which Mayor Prentiss rarely attends church and exercises power over the congregation from outside its regular worship.

Worship and Preaching in Prentisstown

People continue to attend church mainly because they are expected to. During one Sunday service, Todd and Manchee pass the entrance as the congregation prays; the scene presents worship as a collective sound of petition for help, forgiveness, and deliverance. Aaron preaches over those prayers, speaking about sacrifice, scripture, blessings, and sainthood. His sermon is forceful enough to obscure what may be happening beyond its stated religious themes, and Todd suspects that the preaching could be covering something up.

The Church’s public teaching therefore has a double edge. Its call to brotherhood offers a language of solidarity in an isolated settlement, but the same demand for unity can make dissent difficult to distinguish from betrayal. The account does not establish that every churchgoer supports the violence carried out in Prentisstown; it does show that the town’s religious rhetoric and its coercive political order operate alongside one another.

From Blame to Collective Violence

Ben later explains how hardship across New World—crop failures, sickness, and the absence of the promised prosperity—was followed by preaching that assigned blame. The Spackle were made the target of that blame; what began as preaching became a movement and then a war. Ben describes the conflict as radically unequal: humans had guns and the Spackle did not. Although not all the Spackle were killed, the survivors learned to keep away from humans.

The account then connects the violence against the Spackle with the later killings in Prentisstown. Todd states that after the Spackle were killed, the men of Prentisstown killed the town’s women. Ben clarifies that not every man took part, but says many were swayed by Mayor Prentiss and Aaron’s preaching, including the doctrine that what was hidden must be evil. Women and men who tried to protect them were killed. Todd’s mother was among the victims, a personal loss that makes the history of religiously framed blame inseparable from his own past.

Prentisstown’s violence also reaches boys and men marked as offenders or escapees. Mr Royal, Todd’s former schoolteacher, was not a suicide as the town’s story had suggested: he was killed by Seb Mundy on the boy’s thirteenth birthday as part of the coming-of-age rite. Mr Gault, who had tried to flee through the swamp, was captured and killed on Mr Prentiss Jr’s thirteenth birthday. The town could substitute a disliked resident for an escapee when it lacked a captive. Todd recognizes the structure as a communal transaction in which one man’s life is given to a boy to end; the narration names the result as shared guilt, with Todd identifying himself as the exception. In this history, the Church’s language of communal unity stands in sharp contrast to a community whose cohesion is maintained through scapegoating, killing, and participation in the town’s rites.