Pietism in Germany and North America 1680-1820
Edited by Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton
by James Melton
My co-editorship of this volume grew out of my current project on colonial Ebenezer, the small community founded on the Savannah River in 1734 by Protestant exiles from alpine Salzburg. Along with English Puritanism, German Pietism was one of the most important traditions shaping American Protestantism. Emerging in the seventeenth century as a reaction against a rigidified Protestant orthodoxy, Pietists called for a more inward, less dogmatic faith rooted in experience, Bible-centered devotion, and new forms of lay religious association. The Pietists were a diverse group. They included mainstream Lutherans and Calvinists eager to revive their churches from within, but also radical sects like the Moravians who split from the established Protestant churches to form their own communities.
By the early eighteenth-century, the movement had become a transatlantic phenomenon. Cotton Mather corresponded regularly with Pietist leaders and acquired Pietist devotional tracts for the Harvard College library. John Wesley’s conversion experience occurred at a Moravian prayer meeting, the evangelist George Whitefield enjoyed close ties with Pietist leaders, and the movement was an important inspiration behind the Great Awakening. Pietist communities of various stripes were founded throughout British America, from Pennsylvania to the southern frontier. Yet historians have yet to explore fully the Atlantic dimensions of the movement. Scholars in Germany have largely been preoccupied with Pietism’s influence in Europe, while the Anglocentric legacy of American colonial history has tended to obscure the movement’s importance in North America. Colonial scholarship, with its traditional focus on New England has encouraged a neglect of Germans in general. Some 85,000 of them immigrated to the thirteen colonies between 1700 and 1775, around 10,000 more than their English counterparts. But because most Germans settled not in New England but in the middle and southern colonies, they – and by extension, the religious ideas and practices they brought with them – have not received the attention they deserve. The eighteen essays in this volume, roughly half of them by German-speaking scholars, seek to bridge this historiographical and geographical divide. Topics include the Pietist roots of American slave religion, transatlantic religious networks, print culture, and the migration of radical sects from Europe to the New World. Since scholars in the field have only recently begun to explore the central role of women, several essays also focus on the ways Pietism served to expand female religious participation and agency.
Most of the essays were originally presented as papers at a 2004 Emory conference funded by the German Historical Institute in D.C. and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Hartmut Lehmann (then director of the Göttingenn’s Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte) and I were involved in planning the conference, and each of us contributed essays. My colleague Jonathan Strom at Candler, however, deserves most of the credit for steering the volume toward final publication.