On November 20, 1812, Adam Elrod died at age sixty-eight after a long illness. He was buried in the God's Acre at the Moravian settlement of Hope, North Carolina. In the context of the southern backcountry, his life was thoroughly unremarkable in many ways. He was a small planter, onetime tavern keeper, the father of twelve children, and grandfather of sixty. But for historians of the evangelical experience in early America, Adam's life was significant for at least one reason. That this German-speaking Lutheran came to rest in the graveyard of an Anglo settlement in a predominately German Moravian enclave known as Wachovia hints at the complexity of what was happening along the southern frontier in early America. His journey to North Carolina was a long one geographically and psychologically. Adam was born in Pennsylvania to German immigrants, lived for a time in Frederick County, Maryland, and was raised Lutheran. At the tender age of seven, he first heard the Pietist preachings of the Moravians, a defining moment for him that began a nearly lifelong affiliation with that German-based church. On September 19, 1765, he married Rachel Wainscott, an Anglo woman who was born in Shenandoah County, Virginia, and raised Anglican.' They were an unlikely pair, this German-speaking Lutheran and English-speaking Anglican. It is unclear what brought them together. Whatever their initial attraction to each other was, it is obvious that their union was a long one, apparently a happy one, and that Rachel enthusiastically embraced the Pietist faith of her husband. For the rest of their lives, this union of English and German creole found spiritual sustenance in the Moravian church. The role that evangelical religion played in acculturation was both complex and fascinating. Fervently reformist, bent on energizing Christian life, evangelism became a rumbling force on the South's social landscape, especially in the fluid and inchoate communities of the backcountry. In many places, evangelism helped overcome ethnic barriers and reduced the psychological distances between diverse and scattered settlements. The doctrine of that transforming moment known as the birth created a community of believers and helped change how people looked at each other. The results were far reaching, fostering the assimilation of ethnic groups and influencing the interactions of diverse groups in multiple ways.2 Virtually no studies, however, have explored how evangelism worked on the community level to foster cultural adaptation. Instead, a majority of historians have interpreted this religious movement as an assault on the values of the gentry and mainstream churches. For historian Rhys Isaac, the radicalism of evangelicals produced a cultural clash in Virginia as the Baptists confronted the gentry with a spirited challenge to their worldly lifestyle centered on tobacco, horse racing, gambling, and drinking. For Nathan 0. Hatch, evangelism helped democratize American society by giving power to ordinary people. Countless other historians have likened the explosive growth of the Baptists and Methodists in the early nineteenth century to an invasion, with circuit-riding evangelicals putting older, supposedly more mainstream churches on the defensive in a cultural war.3 Certainly, such scholarship has proved fruitful, illuminating the tensions in southern society and the radicalism of religion. But this paradigm of cultural conflict continues to dominate historians' understanding of evangelism, with new works merely refining the standard interpretation of upstart revivalists mounting assaults on the aristocratic elite. Few, as a result, have explored the evangelicals' influence on acculturation in early America. By turning to the community and away from the elite, a whole new set of questions emerges. How did evangelism influence settlers' community life? In what ways did people change as a result of these countless encounters between the saved and the unsaved? …