On the evening of September 29, 1751, one of the Moravian missionaries stationed among the Delaware and Mahican Indians in the Lehigh Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania jotted down the events of the day. He wrote in German, the language of the international Moravian community, and he knew his diary would be circulated to members of the church throughout the world. The Moravians, a Protestant sect founded in 1727 by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and based in Germany, were key players in the rise of international evangelicalism. They established missions throughout the Atlantic world, and were especially attracted to Pennsylvania...

In the present day, a large electric star sits on the hillside over the hulking, rusting mass of steel mills and railroad tracks that for a century dominated the life, economy, and even air of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a symbol of the town’s desire to be known as the “Christmas City.” To justify this claim, residents call on their colonial heritage as a communitarian religious enclave of the Moravian Church. Bethlehem’s name is part pun—the Lehigh River that runs through town was also called the Lecha, and thus the Hebrew for “House on the Lehigh” became Beth-Lecha, or Bethlehem—but...

Life in Bethlehem’s Oeconomy was distinctive, regimented, and deeply pious. Residents dedicated their lives to supporting missionary work and to the Savior. They also built one of early America’s largest and most durable communal projects. The Oeconomy’s success came from many quarters. Its hierarchical and authoritative government permitted an otherwise cumbersome system to function, but leaders’ efforts had to be, and were, supported by the obedient acquiescence of the town’s rank and file. Perhaps even more important to the Oeconomy’s functioning was its pragmatism, however. Because Moravians were more interested in supporting missionary work than they were in challenging the...

Bethlehem stood at the center of Moravian work in North America, but Moravian missionaries and itinerants were known more for their activities on the road than for their sturdy stone buildings and productive workshops. The 1740s, the high-water mark of the evangelical Great Awakening in America, saw a remarkable expansion and evolution of the Moravian presence on the continent. Yet that process was not smooth. The Brüdergemeine met substantial opposition to its efforts among European-American colonists, particularly from representatives of the European state churches, who saw the ecumenical Moravians as invading their territory and their congregations. Bethlehem’s Moravians responded to...

The desire to spread the Gospel animated everything the Brüdergemeine did, from traveling to the Caribbean, to enduring controversy, to planting Bethlehem. The elaborate community they built could not be maintained, however, without a steady flow of cash. Missionary work was, at its very heart, expensive, and this imperative thrust the Moravians into the Atlantic economy just as surely as it sent them in search of new souls to awaken. At the same moment that Count Zinzendorf was attempting to bring Pennsylvania’s Christians together in ecumenical fellowship, and even as the many members of the Bethlehem pilgrim congregation traveled out...

The members of the Moravian community at Bethlehem pursued ordered lives centered on devotion to Christ and mission work. Internal dissent was rare; leaders exercised their prodigious authority over individuals’ lives without much interference. Evangelists traveled in and out of town and to and from the West Indies. They married, had children, and brought those children to Bethlehem to be raised. New workers arrived from Herrnhut, and others returned to Europe for new assignments. The course of Moravian life that emerges from most of Bethlehem’s records recounts daily matters marred only by minor inconveniences. This picture accurately describes Bethlehem during...

Zinzendorf’s death in 1760 was a watershed event for the Unity. It opened the way for a serious evaluation of the Brüdergemeine from top to bottom, and those who took up the helm in Herrnhut seized the opportunity. Over the next four years, through and after the time of the General Synod held in 1764, every aspect of Moravian life came under the keen scrutiny of men focused on restoring financial stability and ensuring denominational security. They systematized and regularized, and along the way they significantly increased Herrnhut’s power in the international Unity. For Bethlehem, the changes resulted in two...

In January 1777, Revolutionary leader John Adams traveled through Bethlehem on his way to Baltimore, where Congress had convened after fleeing from British troops in Philadelphia. In his account of what he termed “that curious and remarkable Town,” he described (as many visitors did) the high quality of the accommodations at the Sun Inn and remarked that “it belongs it seems to the Society, is furnished, at their Expence, and is kept for their Profit, or at their Loss.” He noted the impressive mechanical water works that delivered fresh water throughout the town, and remarked that “they have a fine...

The 1780s saw the beginning of a new era for Bethlehem, for the Moravians, for citizens of the new United States, and for the Atlantic world. The American Revolution transformed thirteen of Britain’s mainland colonies into a new nation. The war brought economic challenges in its wake, and the struggling country, cut out of the protective fold of the British Empire, had to reestablish trading networks and rebuild its damaged infrastructure. The churches of the colonial period faced a changed environment as well. The departure was most marked in the South, where the established Anglican Church yielded to a rising...

Bethlehem’s eighteenth-century history started on a high note, but did not sustain the tune. The Moravians founded the town in a burst of evangelical energy felt from Suriname to St. Petersburg, and only a decade later Bethlehem’s massive stone buildings and armies of pilgrims had made it a permanent part of the North American landscape. During the warfare of the 1750s, it was the most solid place on the northeastern Pennsylvania frontier, and the town’s leaders were likely people from whom the provincial government could ask for regional information. But its population peaked in the 1750s and stagnated after the...