Sewall had become convinced that Mexico would be the site of Christ’s Second Coming. He forcefully countered Mede’s opinion that the New World was damned, instead insisting that America would be the scene of Christ’s great victory. In his schema, Indians were the descendants of Jews (because according to one reading of the Song of Solomon, Jews during end-times would be gathered in a garden of nuts, and Mexicans, according to Sewall, ate a lot of nuts). America, he said, still with Mede on his mind, “was not a place of damnation.” Europe’s Jews would migrate to the Americas and join with their lost brethren, and Mexico’s New Jerusalem, he wrote, will “wonderfully dilate, and invigorate Christianity in the several Quarters of the World; in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, and in America.” Like the imprisoned Father de la Cruz in Peru a few decades earlier, Sewall was declaring that America would be the future seat of the returned savior, and in the process he put forth a generous, sweeping vision of the New World as humanity’s redeemer. “Shout, Sing triumphantly,” Sewall ecstatically wrote, “O America! America! America!” “Christ shall come to this Mexican Valley.”

— America, América by Greg Grandin