Misperceptions and Identities Mis-taken: Interpreting Various Hostilities Encountered by Moravians in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania

Abstract

This essay integrates Moravian studies, missiology and historical theology. It begins with a brief survey of the historiography of Moravian missions in colonial North America. It then surveys various reasons for periodic hostility against Moravians in New York and Pennsylvania between roughly 1740 and 1790. It recovers the ethnic and cultural diversity, prejudices and defensive actions of colonists that were a significant component of life in these contested spaces and turbulent times, thus demonstrating that so-called ‘religious’ persecution remains a complicated phenomenon. It suggests Moravians might have avoided certain instances of misperception and consequent ‘persecution’ had they adapted themselves culturally in ways they did not. Moravians were often perceived by other colonial Europeans as a threat to the security and stability of developing locales, and remained largely on the social periphery in colonial North America as a consequence of being both wrongly and rightly understood. As an international and transnational religious community pursuing its own global dispersal for the sake of mission, Moravian political neutrality and perceived ‘foreignness’ was misunderstood in times of war by English and Dutch colonists, especially, as sympathy for the enemy or even evidence of espionage, though the religious and secular fear of their being Catholic seems to have been eventually resolved. Because Moravians in the British colonies fraternised with Native Americans for the sake of mission and were part of an international fellowship also befriending Caribbean slaves, they were sometimes slandered by colonists who feared them as instigators of rebellion by these marginalised populations. Finally, the Moravian sense of being set apart by God from the broader society and called to suffer for the sake of their righteous difference and gospel influence, when acted upon, provoked hostility from colonists who perceived them as a threat to local balances of power, denominational order or family cohesion.