After an aborted colonizing effort in Savannah, Georgia, in 1735, the Moravians came to British North America in 1741 to stay. In that year, this Saxony-based pietistic sect founded Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, a communal town that became the center of an ambitious missionary effort in America.
This effort had two components. One was to introduce the gospel of Jesus Christ to Indians and slaves. The second was to reenergize Christianity by bringing the "new birth" to both the churched and unchurched.
Followers of the reformer Jan Hus founded the Moravian movement in Lititz, Moravia, in 1457. Disillusioned with a Catholic Church they saw as corrupt, they sought to emulate the early Christians by living a life of simple piety. Membership totaled more than 200,000 on the eve of the Counter-Reformation. The Moravian Church, also known as the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren), grew so large in Moravia and Bohemia that it became a threat to the Roman Catholic Church and was driven underground. In 1722, refugees from Moravia arrived at the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Berthelsdorf, Germany; under the guidance of Zinzendorf, the Moravian movement revived and prospered, becoming the largest pietistic sect in the Western Hemisphere and leaving its mark in architecture, in music, in education, and on Wesleyan Methodism.
In 1727, the Moravians began sending missionaries to Europe, Greenland, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas for work among blacks, Indians, and whites. The "Diaspora," Zinzendorf's term for the effort to win over Christians to "heart" religion, was at the center of the count's ecumenical vision. Fanning out from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Moravian missionaries attracted a following of nearly two thousand people in the northern colonies by 1760, and Moravians there established congregations as far south as Carrollton Manor, Maryland, and as far north as Broadbay, Maine. In 1753, the Moravians established a southern colony as well: a 98,895-acre community in backcountry North Carolina called Wachovia.
The Moravian movement consisted of two settlement types. The first was known as Ortsgemeinen, or congregation towns, where church leaders restricted residency to full-time church members and expected inhabitants completely to devote their lives to Jesus and the church. The church owned the land and tightly controlled the economy and the residents' social lives. The second settlement type was the Landgemeinen, or farm congregations. In the Landgemeinen, diverse groups of German- and English-speaking settlers from a variety of religious backgrounds lived on dispersed family farms with less oversight from church authorities. By 1800, Wachovia's population totaled twelve hundred pilgrims, 88 percent of whom were German speakers from Lutheran, Reformed, and Moravian traditions. The remaining 12 percent were Anglo-Americans, Scots-Irish, Irish, and others.
The ecumenicalism of the Moravian movement produced complex cultural change in the early Republic. The conversion experience enabled "reborn" brethren to forge close friendships with members of different ethnicities that led to intermarriage and the lessening of ethnic and social differences. Religiously inspired intermixing, in turn, set off a wave of cultural change among German and English speakers that resulted ultimately in the Americanizing of German-speaking members.
See also Communitarian Movements and Utopian Communities; Immigration and Immigrants: Germans; Methodists; Pietists.
Rohrer, S. Scott. Hope's Promise: Religion and Acculturation in the Southern Backcountry. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Smaby, Beverly Prior. The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
S. Scott Rohrer