Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (review)

Radical pietism is rapidly becoming a fertile field of inquiry in the area of church history. With the appearance of W. R. Ward's Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789 (Cambridge, 2006) and Thomas Kidd's The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, 2007), Aaron Fogleman's foray into radical religion in early America is in good critical company. However, whereas Ward invites the reader to consider the significant role of Kabbalah, alchemy, and mysticism in the development of an alternative expression of faith in the long eighteenth century, and Kidd examines the broader historical and social context of evangelical Christianity in the North American colonies, Fogleman chooses instead to focus narrowly on the eighteenth-century polemic against the Protestant sect of the Moravians.

Fogleman organizes his work into three parts: "Religion and Gender," "The Moravian Challenge," and "Religious Violence and the Defense of Order." While the first two sections focus quite narrowly on an interpretation of Moravian theology, drawing on printed and manuscript sources, the final part attempts to provide an explanation for isolated incidents of orthodox Lutheran violence and judicial censure that Fogleman argues constitute a response to the theory and practice of Moravian theology in the American colonies. Given that this tripartite structure relies heavily on the accurate interpretation and presentation of Moravian thought and practice, it is unfortunate that the author falls short on the former, thus compromising the latter. For example, Fogleman makes the startling claim that for the Moravians of the first half of the eighteenth century, "[Jesus] became female by giving birth through the sidewound, which in portraiture, speech and hymnology became a womb" (p. 80).This is a quite erroneous reading of Moravian theology and iconography, which rests on the author's insistence on a rigid isomorphism between cultural artifacts and lived practice of the eighteenth-century Moravian church. In so doing, Fogelman claims that depictions in private devotionals of domestic scenes framed within the red margins of a vulna/vulva must represent a lived reality of a female Christ, thereby excluding any notion of Christ's maleness.

Fogleman cites as an example of the radical isomorphism of the early eighteenth century Moravian church the practices of the Single Brothers Choir, where in Herrnhaag in 1748, the brothers were all "accepted and declared as single sisters" (p. 89). However, whereas Fogleman reads this declaration as a "gender transformation" (p. 89), it is far more in keeping with the mysticism that Ward points to that such practices and liturgies allowed men within the Moravian communities of the early-eighteenth century to continue in a tradition of "vulnerable masculinity" that had long been available as a gender role within spiritual communities, in which a model of vulnerable masculinity could be found in the image of the wounded Christ. For eighteenth-century Moravians, this was a Christ who retained a dominant appearance of masculinity, but with what one could call feminine marks. And this gender confusion is central to an understanding of the eighteenth-century Moravian Christ, just as it is for the medieval mystics.

In this work, Fogleman is correct in identifying the mode of representing Jesus with female characteristics as a sign of a site of cultural struggle, but the crucial fact remains that this Moravian Jesus was not female but eternally male, eternally vulnerable and male, and signifying a cultural struggle not only between "radical pietism" and orthodox Lutheranism but also encompassing an important moment of crisis and transition in the history of masculinity.