The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1730–1820 (review)

"You can hardly imagine how many denominations you will find here," a German settler in Hereford Township, Berks County, wrote to friends in Europe in 1768, but "we are always at peace with each other." Indeed, anyone who despised another because of his religion would be considered foolish. "Everybody speaks his mind freely. A Mennonite preacher is my next neighbor and I could not wish for a better one. On the other side I have a big Catholic church" and "the present Jesuit Father . . . confides more in me than in those who come to him for confession . . . Next to them the Lutherans and Reformed have their congregations." Pluralism was the rule in the experience of Schwenkfelder elder Christoph Schultz. "We are all going to and fro like fish in water."

Was this the experience of other Pennsylvania communities? Was it confined to rural pockets like Schultz's neighborhood? Mark Haberlein, professor of early modern history at the University of Bamberg in Germany, chose Lancaster to "demonstrate how religious diversity emerged and how adherents of various faiths interacted with one another in a single town." He has succeeded in an admirable study illuminating many aspects of Lancaster's first century. His meticulously-researched local history has broad implications for American religious history, as Haberlein has made a case for seeing the long eighteenth century as more significant than earlier or later periods in building religious institutions and shaping American attitudes.

Lancaster, like many Pennsylvania towns and villages, was essentially a German-speaking community and its churches reflected this. Lutherans comprised forty percent of the taxpayers in the borough in 1773, adherents of the German Reformed Church twenty percent and Moravians ten percent. The small Catholic congregation was also German-speaking. The town also had an Anglican church and a Quaker meeting. Laura Becker found much the same religious mix in early Reading. Mennonites and Presbyterians were rooted in rural Lancaster County. The Presbyterian congregation in Lancaster remained "in a rather forming state" until 1770 when they obtained their first minister. His primary call was to rural Leacock Presbyterian Church, where he resided, and Lancaster had only a third of his time.

Haberlein has broken new ground in demonstrating that their churches were important to most Lancastrians and that an increasing percentage participated in church life as the century wore on. In her study of Germantown, for instance, Stephanie Grauman Wolf concluded that churches had a very small role in the community, reflecting the growing secularization of the community. Haberlein found that 63 percent of borough taxpayers in 1751 and 72.5 percent of those on the 1773 tax assessment repeatedly appear in church records. Since the Catholic and Presbyterian congregations have no surviving records for most of the century and Anglican records are spotty, Haberlein found a high percentage of Germans were communicant members of the Lutheran or Reformed congregation and their number increased steadily between 1749 and 1790.

Lancaster churches experienced a common problem in the early decades of the town's history, a dearth of trained clerical leadership. Each congregation was left in turmoil by a series of incompetent clergy and jackleg preachers. The Catholics, served by Jesuit pastors from German universities, were the exception. Moravian efforts to supply Lutheran and Reformed pulpits with awakened preachers added to the confusion and led some members of the older churches to join the new Lancaster Moravian congregation. A tradition of strong lay leadership emerged in each group. Reflecting the composition of the community, they were mainly artisans before mid-century and thereafter drawn from the merchants, shopkeepers, lawyers and medical doctors of the town. In the second half of the century, all the churches had settled pastors with university or pietist academy training. Lay leaders seem to have been reluctant to go along with the emphasis on church discipline and tighter pastoral control...