In the eighteenth century European immigrants came to North America and found a much different place. Initially what impressed many immigrants were a relatively weak established church, low taxes, ethnic diversity, vast distances, dispersed settlements, and opportunity. This meant that religious toleration and freedom of sorts defined life for them in ways they never could in Europe. Yet in spite of the distances and differences, North America and its new inhabitants remained connected in many ways to Europe. In addition to the migrations themselves, the Atlantic trade and religion kept them connected. Heavy immigration occurred during the era of the...

‘‘Everything is different in America,’’ the immigrants used to say (and still do). Many if not most free immigrants in the eighteenth century migrated with family members or others from their home village, remained in contact with those they left behind, and continued in America to promote important aspects of their old culture like religion and language. Yet the immigrants stressed difference more than similarity when comparing conditions in the colonies with their homelands. In North America there was a lot more land, a relatively weak state (which meant low taxes, greater geographic mobility, and religious tolerance), and in some...

In 1700, a time of apocalyptic significance to many German radical pietist groups on both sides of the Atlantic, a new society formed in Allendorf on the Werra around a noblewoman named Eva Margaretha von Buttlar (1670–1721). The ‘‘Mother Eva Society’’ eventually moved to Wetteravia, one of the well-known refuges for religious radicals (see Map 3), and developed beliefs and practices concerning gender, marriage, sexuality, and the body that shocked the outside world. Their initiation, purification, and rebirth ritual was the most extreme. For women it involved what they called ‘‘circumcision’’ (Beschneidung): an initiate would be led into a...

A few years after the close of the Mother Eva drama, the Moravian movement began to take root on the estates of Count Zinzendorf in Upper Lusatia. In 1722 the first ‘‘Moravian’’ refugees settled there and began building the town of Herrnhut. By 1727 their numbers had grown significantly, the town was complete, and they celebrated the renewal or ‘‘rebirth’’ of the Moravian church. From this point until the count’s death in 1760 the Moravians experienced the most dramatic, innovative, and productive period in the modern history of their church, yet at the same time it was their strangest and...

Moravian ambitions in North America were motivated by a zealous ecumenism that they attempted to extend to other radical groups and churches alike, and it challenged or threatened those groups for a number of reasons. Unlike other radicals who pursued the philadelphian ideal, it was not enough for Moravians to separate themselves from the fallen institutional churches in order to unite with other like-minded Christians. Instead, they embraced both radical separatists and the established churches, hoping to find a way to unite all of them. Unfortunately for the Moravians, few Protestant Christians truly desired this kind of unity at this...

The struggle against the Moravians that began in the 1730s played an important role in the transatlantic Protestant awakening until the 1750s. One of the most important weapons the Lutheran, Calvinist, and other rivals employed in the battle against the Moravians was the printing press. They published and circulated hundreds of polemics in numerous languages on both sides of the Atlantic that warned innocents of the dangerous Moravian threat at hand. For example, in Frankfurt Johann Philip Fresenius published a widely read anti-Moravian polemic in 1746 that included an ‘‘autobiography’’ written by a renegade mystical seeker living in Pennsylvania named...

The struggle against the radicalism of the Moravians that began in Europe in the 1730s spread across the Atlantic to Georgia, Suriname, and the Caribbean and intensified in the mid-Atlantic colonies in the 1740s, where thousands of Lutheran and Reformed immigrants were settling and building new religious communities. All sides used military rhetoric to describe the growing conflict. Count Zinzendorf established a ‘‘corps de reserve’’ in Philadelphia in 1742 to assist any threatened Moravians, and in 1743 the Moravian itinerants held a ‘‘Warriors’ Communion’’ in Bethlehem. Fresenius described people in Philadelphia who had fled the Herrnhuters, yet were still plagued...

In the 1740s the conflict between the Moravians and the Lutheran and Reformed clergy and their supporters raged from Virginia to New York, but it was most intense in the German and Swedish communities of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where widespread religious violence erupted, and a typical pattern of community conflict emerged throughout the region. Moravians sent one or more preachers to a community where there was no other regular Lutheran or Reformed pastor, who gained acceptance by most congregants, as well as the elders and church council members. They often focused on new, unestablished immigrant communities, or old communities...