National Council on Public History

Religion In Moravian Bethlehem

The number of books and articles published about the Moravian Church and their missionary endeavors has grown significantly in recent years. Many of these works have focused on the town of Bethlehem, located in eastern Pennsylvania, which was established in 1740 as the center of Moravian mission work in North America. This scholarship reveals that during the mid-eighteenth century, the Moravians faced open animosity from their neighbors and endured attacks from religious authorities because of their unorthodox beliefs about the Christian trinity, their willingness to grant women leadership positions in the church, and their close interactions with Native peoples. I am interested in how Moravian historic sites have integrated scholarly critiques of the early Moravian church into their site interpretation, how they discuss issues of faith and spirituality with general audiences, and how “historic Bethlehem” and other Moravian sites have shaped perceptions of the Moravian church and missions in public memory.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Bethlehem complex included dormitories, an apothecary, a schoolhouse, and a number of thriving industries that catered to the surrounding countryside. The imposing structures that comprised the settlement included some of the largest buildings in the colony. By the late 1740s, the population in Bethlehem approached nine hundred. Rather than residing in traditional familial households, the Moravians pioneered a “choir system” that established households based on age, gender, and marital status and dictated where a member of the congregation lived, worked, and worshiped. Married couples lived separately, meeting occasionally in “special sleeping quarters,” and sent their children to reside in the Children’s Choir as soon as the infants were weaned. Every choir had its own liturgy, hymn book, and held separate choir services in addition to the community worship services. A communal “General Economy” provided for the financial needs of the community and funded missionaries in the field.

Both the General Economy and the choir system developed as a means to meet the practical day to day requirements of the community while allowing men and women the flexibility necessary to engage in missionary work. Women were routinely appointed to church governing boards and ordained as Acolytes, Eldresses, Deaconesses, and Pristerinnen (female ministers), positions that allowed them to minister to the community and lead absolution and footwashing ceremonies. Beyond the visible role that women played in the day-to-day activities of the Moravian church, Moravian theology relied heavily on female imagery and reconceptualized the traditional view of the Holy Trinity to emphasize what they considered its maternal nature.

Scattered protests against the Moravians, at times leading to physical altercations, occurred periodically throughout the 1740s. Historian Aaron Fogelman has suggested that the level of violence against Moravians throughout the Middle Colonies during this decade was significantly higher than most historians have recognized and led the Moravians to avoid holding revivals aimed at white colonists in favor of expanding Indian missions in the early 1750s.In the face of violent opposition, the Moravians slowly backed away from their controversial practices. By 1758, the leadership of the Moravian church had decided to end the choir system and establish single-family dwellings. Three years later, the General Economy system ended. After 1762, the ordination of women as Priesterinnen ceased. Women continued to serve as Deaconesses and Acolytes, but Eldresses were no longer allowed to ordain other women into these positions independently. As a result, the number of Deaconesses and Acolytes dwindled; the last Deaconess was ordained in 1786 and the final Acolyte four years later. In the decades following these substantial changes, the Bethlehem mission slipped slowly toward dissolution. Between 1761 and 1766 alone, Bethlehem lost nearly one hundred members.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, a number of historic sites and museums dedicated to telling the story of the Moravian Church in early America have gained popularity. In 1937, the Chamber of Commerce in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, launched a campaign to transform the city into “Christmas City, USA.” The city lauded Bethlehem’s Moravian founders and used the religious sect to shape the image of “historic Bethlehem.” Historic Moravian Bethlehem is now a National Historic Landmark District. The 1741 Gemeinhaus – originally one of the largest choir houses, now thehome of the Moravian Museum of Bethlehem – is a National Historic Landmark. Today, visitors can explore a number of restored Moravian buildings, take an audio tour along the Bethlehem Heritage Trail, and shop at the annual Christkindlemarkt. The Historic Bethlehem website assures tourists that “a Moravian from the mid-1700s would recognize his or her community and feel at home walking the streets of Bethlehem.”

In December 2014, I spent the day exploring Moravian Bethlehem with my brother and sister-in-law. We began at the Historic Bethlehem Visitor Center, then visited the Moravian Museum of Bethlehem and toured the 1741 Gemeinhaus, the 1744 Single Sisters’ House, and the 1758 Nain-Schober House. Due to time constraints, we were not able visit all of sites in the Bethlehem complex. I found that although the museum complex highlights the progressive aspects of the early mission community – particularly the opportunities that women enjoyed – it does not engage with the more complicated aspects of the Moravian community. The narrative is a celebratory one, and violence and controversy are largely absent. We don’t hear of women’s steady demotion in the latter half of the eighteenth century. There is little mention of how the end of the General Economy fractured the community, or how the Moravians retreated from pacifist teachings during and after the American Revolution. My brother and sister-in-law were surprised when after the tour I informed them that the choir system separated married couples as well as single men and women and children were raised communally as parents left for months or years at a time to engage in missionary work.

At a time when our newsfeeds are filled with stories of religious violence taking place around the world, how should we as historians address issues of religious violence in the past? We are familiar with the history of Pennsylvania as a colony founded on the principle of religious tolerance. How do we fit the attacks against the Moravians because of their radical religious beliefs and practices into this narrative? And, perhaps more problematically, how do we explain to public audiences that the Moravian church responded to such attacks by increasingly conforming to the social and cultural expectations of their neighbors?

For more information about colonial Bethlehem, see the following:

Craig D. Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

Katherine Carte Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

Aaron Spencer Fogelman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700-1763. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

Discussion