Lepore on colonists' misunderstanding

While I am in general very pleased with the synthetic character of The Name of War, it seems to me that Lepore over-determines moral evaluations when presenting the religious considerations at play in King Philip's War. I am struck by such instances as when Lepore remarks, "If the English had examined Algonquian actions not as signs from God but as signs from Indians, they might have seen a great deal about Algonquian motives" (118), or as when, on the following page, she writes, "Ultimately, of course, all Indian explanations for or interpretations of the war were dismissed [...] because they compromised the justness of the colonists' own cause." (119) Lepore oscillates, in these and similar depictions of the English colonists, between portraying the English colonists as bunglers and devious propagandists. If the colonists appealed to God or God's justice as an explanation, it was either because they were too dense to discern that God wasn't really at work or because they were clever enough to see that appealing to God might be rhetorically expedient. It cannot be that they were a people preoccupied with God, for better or worse, in a way that 20th and 21st century Americans tend not to be. I am not interested in defending the actions and motives of the English colonists any more than is Lepore. Neither do I think that Lepore's occasional moments of pronounced bias affect the quality of The Name of War as a whole. But I do think Lepore would better serve her account if she took the colonists' interpretations and accounts of their own motivations more seriously. I do not say that Lepore ought to take them at face value or as they come, of course; but Lepore makes the colonists' behavior far more mystifying than it might be by adopting a piecemeal skepticism vis-a-vis the adequacy of colonial religious self-understanding.