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  • Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America
  • Mark A. Noll
Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. By Katherine Carté Engel. [Early American Studies.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. x, 313. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24123-5.)

This well-researched and carefully organized study traces the history of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from its founding in 1741 as an outpost of the international Moravian movement through the tumultuous events of the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars into the much altered circumstances of the early-nineteenth century. Its focus is the interconnection of religious and economic spheres that made the Moravians’ New-World experience so unusual in its own time and so intriguing for later historians. At its founding, Bethlehem was the far-western outpost of the renewed Unity of the Brethren, whose headquarters was the landed estate in Saxony of Count Zinzendorf, the motivating force of the movement. The particular distinction of the Moravians was their all-out dedication to missionary service that, unlike other Protestant efforts of the era, subordinated national and ethnic considerations to religious goals. Central to this enterprise was the Moravians’ creativity in financing their missionary ventures. The particular success of Engel’s book is to explain the contingent relationship between the Moravians’ religious motives and the economic strategies they devised to support these purposes.

At its origin, Bethlehem was a “pilgrim community” organized for mission. Its founders created a corporate entity known as the Oeconomy that acquired property, founded businesses, assigned workers, and negotiated with outside interests. In the process the Pennsylvania Moravians engaged in many of the [End Page 613] same economic activities as their colonial peers, but with a significant difference. The difference was that their business dealings were devoted to supporting missionary outreach to other European settlers, native Americans, and the enslaved populations of the West Indies. In its first decades, great fluidity attended these activities, with a large percentage of Bethlehem’s millers, storekeepers, tanners, and weavers going off for short- or long-term stints as missionaries themselves and with economic decisions regularly oriented to promoting the missionary cause. One of Engel’s most important conclusions is that the Moravians did not promote distinct economic practices; rather, they modified the era’s usual economic activities and organizations only to the extent required by the careful moral standards of their evangelical community and for the purpose of supporting missionaries. Into the 1760s the synergy between the Moravians’ functioning as missionary pilgrims and Bethlehem’s organization as a community economic enterprise achieved remarkable results. Even with their strong ties to Germany, the colonial Moravians were among the colonies’ most attractive evangelical movements, and their missionary work among the Indians was far more successful than any comparable attempts by other Protestants.

After 1760, however, changes multiplied. The death of Zinzendorf in 1760 left the whole Moravian movement beset by a huge debt that this far-sighted but detail-challenged visionary left behind. The end of the Oeconomy under the Moravians’ new leadership in 1762 began a clear separation between religious and economic purposes. The Seven Years’ War, followed by the depredations against Natives by marauding Pennsylvanians (the Paxton Boys), removed Moravian Indians from the precincts of Bethlehem. Shortly thereafter the War for Independence created tensions for a movement that included many pacifists and also remained grateful to the British Parliament for earlier legal recognition. The result by 1800 was a Moravian Bethlehem that remained prosperous and intensely religious, but that no longer sustained close contacts with missionary efforts, that had individualized economic and moral relationships, and that had evolved into a much more typical denomination. Engel’s account of change over the last part of the century features careful attention to the interplay of local and world events, the continuing integrity of Moravian religious motives, but also the compelling force of circumstances that ended the earlier dynamism of this pilgrim community. With her extensive use of German as well as English sources, her close attention to local events and world developments, the book is a noteworthy example of Atlantic history at its best.

Mark A. Noll
University of Notre Dame
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