Dilemma

In her book The Name of  War: King Philip's War and the Origens of American Identity, J. Lepore remarked that war needs to be justified and explained with words. She presented the war and its moral/religious implications between the English men looking for religious freedom and the Indians whom were seeing as sinful and degenerated by the wilderness. Because the English were the ones able to record the events, Lepore makes the assertion that the English described and interpreted the war. According to Lepore, The English sought to Christianize the Indians without the cruelties of the Spanish who were the measure for murder and depravity, but at the same time they had to fulfill the will of God upon the Indians who were not yet considered totally humans.
As Lepore remarked, I also think some theological arguments were used by the English to justify the war, but their good Christian intentions were not enough to prevent cruelties and savagery from any side. In my opinion, once engaged in the conflict, neither side could avoid committing atrocities which were executed to either reach the Puritan ideals or to defend the land the Indians consider their home. But I can see that, from their knowledge of Bartolome de Las Casas' account Tears of The Indians, the English had a model of brutality they wanted to avoid.