Reviews of Books

The movement of religious migrants from Europe to America and the transformations wrought by the American setting on the ideals of believers have long fascinated historians. Ever since Perry Miller, the Puritans have supplied the signal case for the "Americanization" of Old World faiths in the New. More recently, other religious folk in transit have come to the fore, such as the Quakers (Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 [New York, 1999]) and German faithful of various stripes (A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America [Baltimore, 1993], and Aaron Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 [Philadelphia, 1996]). Typically, many such studies establish the reasons for their subjects' migration to America, chart their subsequent spiritual and social change in the New World, and then, like the newcomers themselves, leave Europe behind. Elisabeth Sommer's Serving Two Masters, a study of eighteenth-century Moravians, takes a different approach. Though it revisits familiar themes of declension, loss, and spiritual re-invention, it treats them in a new way. It traces the parallel evolution of the Moravian community in eastern Saxony and its offshoot settlement in colonial North Carolina and compares their different responses to pressures on religious idealism in the eighteenth-century age of revolution. The result is a sensitively drawn portrait of religious acculturation in Europe and America that retains a transatlantic outlook throughout.	1
The Moravian Church, more formally known as the Renewed Unity of the Brethren, was among the most distinctive representatives of the Continental Pietist and Anabaptist movements to find a home in early America. Descended from a pre-Lutheran reformist sect in late medieval Moravia, the church survived persecution to secure a refuge and a new identity in the early eighteenth century on the estate of a Saxon nobleman, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. In keeping with his early training in Lutheran Pietism, the count settled the Brethren in the new town of Herrnhut and organized them into a tightly knit biblical community dedicated to an emotional spiritual life. Distinctive features of the church included worship groups called "choirs," divided by age, gender, and marital status; the casting of lots by the church hierarchy to determine God's will on important decisions, including marriage by the faithful; and an elaborate inventory of rules for personal behavior and economic activity designed to enforce obedience and piety. Partly to evade persecution for enthusiasm, the church sent thousands of migrants to Pennsylvania and North Carolina during the eighteenth century. There, identifying themselves as God's chosen people, the newcomers meant to abide by the same spiritual codes they had followed in the German lands.	2
Basing her study on thousands of pages of church diaries, minutes, reports, and personal conversion narratives from archives in Germany and the United States, Sommer moves deftly back and forth across the Atlantic to examine changes in church polity and practice over the eighteenth century. A central theme of the book is the impact of the Enlightenment on a fellowship intent on insulating itself from worldliness, rationalism, and politics. A chapter entitled "Gambling with God" provides a case study of that effort. It traces permutations in Moravian use of the lot, which was regarded as the expression of Christ's will. By this mode of decision making, the sect claimed to ground itself on divine revelation and to establish Christ as its Chief Elder. Successive generations in both Europe and America—particularly in the latter—gradually grew restless with this complete submission to Christ. Increasingly, they put emphasis on individual agency and human reason and claimed authority to make decisions. By the early nineteenth century, in a major concession to individual will, church authorities weakened the rule of the lot and permitted Brethren to choose their own marriage partners.	. . .