Jan Stievermann

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Jan Stievermann | A "plain, rejected little flock": The Politics of Martyrological Self-Fashioning among Pennsylvania's German Peace Churches, 1739–65 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.2 | The History Cooperative

A "plain, rejected little flock": The Politics of Martyrological Self-Fashioning among Pennsylvania's German Peace Churches, 1739–65

IN 1748, the closing year of King George's War, two tracts appealed to Pennsylvania's German-speaking population, addressing in particular those groups known by modern historians as the German Peace Churches. One tract was a translation of Plain Truth, in which Benjamin Franklin sought to advertise the reasonableness of his voluntary Association for Defense. The other tract, a direct rebuttal of Franklin's, was the product of Germantown printer and Radical Pietist Christoph Saur (1693–1758), who admonished his readers to follow Christ in disavowing any use of force, even when the escalating imperial contest between Britain and France would finally bring war to Pennsylvania. Surely much to Franklin's chagrin, Saur's Verschiedene Christliche Wahrheiten (Several Christian Truths) declared it "utterly impossible that any member of the body of Christ will oppose their enemies in the flesh with a murderous gun and use the same," even against an Indian attacker or an invading "French murderer," but asserted that "they can very well die as martyrs by the sword and lose their life for the sake of Christ."¹	1
Here and elsewhere in the tract, Saur drew on the traditional discourse of nonresistant martyrdom, which would have been familiar to virtually all his pacifist readers from their devotional literature. Transferring the examples of ancient Christian martyrs into the context of contemporary Pennsylvania, Saur sought to create a sense of solidarity among Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Moravians, Schwenkfelders, and various smaller pacifist groups, for whom the ideal of meek suffering for Christ was central and deeply rooted in their communal languages and collective memories. For all their doctrinal differences, he encouraged his readers to see themselves as members of the same "body of Christ," or the true invisible church defined by its readiness to bear witness to the truth of the gospel through self-sacrifice. Significantly, Saur's texts did not interpret the peace testimony in purely passive terms but called on the customarily quietistic ideal of the nonresistant martyr with the intention of encouraging his pacifist readers to take an active stance against Pennsylvania's militarization.	2
Far from occurring in isolation, Saur's writings belonged to an extensive discourse of nonresistant martyrdom that proliferated among Pennsylvania's German Peace Churches in the mid-eighteenth century. This discourse was made up of a wealth of smaller printed items—tracts, newspaper articles, and devotional writings such as hymns and occasional poetry—as well as several monumental martyrological works, notably the 1748 High German edition of Thieleman J. van Braght's fifteen-hundred-page Der Blutige Schau-Platz oder Martyrer-Spiegel der Tauffs Gesinnten oder Wehrlosen-Christen (The Martyrs Mirror) and the 1762 Neu-Eingerichtetes Gesang-Buch (Newly Arranged Hymnal) of the Schwenkfelder church. Most of these texts have received little or no attention from historians, and they have never been read together in the sense of belonging to a cross-denominational dialogue. Some studies comment on the appearance of the larger works but merely take them as indications that the different churches that commissioned these texts looked to their historical legacy of persistence under duress to brace themselves for the impending afflictions of war. Though this interpretation is certainly correct, it is far from exhaustive. The shared language of meek suffering had a much more complex significance for the German Peace Churches of prerevolutionary Pennsylvania, which hitherto has been overlooked.² It supplied a framework for the development of an ecumenical group consciousness among them that, as the example of Sauer's Verschiedene Christliche Wahrheiten suggests, also carried significant political implications.	. . .

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