German Sectarians in British America
A significant minority of German migration to colonial America consisted of Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, and Dunkers who accepted William Penn’s 1677 invitation to Pennsylvania.
Called Anabaptist (meaning “rebaptism”), these radical Protestant sects emerged in 16th-century central Europe, believing the New Testament to require adult baptism, foot washing, pacifism, and withdrawal from the corrupt governments and churches of the “world” into exclusive communities based on simple living and plain dress. These groups were persecuted, but spread through Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany’s Rhine Valley.Mennonites, the main early Anabaptist body—and now America’s largest such group—originated with the congregations established by Menno Simons (1496–1561) in Germany and the Netherlands. Groups from the Lower Rhine Valley first migrated to Pennsylvania in 1683, settling at Germantown and founding a church there in 1708. Philadelphia’s commercial growth drove them westward to the rural isolation of Lancaster County, and from there they spread with other German groups southward into Virginia and the Carolinas. By the early 19th century, they had moved into Ohio and Indiana. Avoiding proselytizing, they sustained their numbers primarily through continuing immigration and high birthrates.
The Amish originated with Swiss Mennonite Jakob Ammann (1644?–1730), who left the perceived laxity of the Mennonites in the 1690s and gathered followers in southern Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Russia. Persecuted like the Mennonites, they sought refuge through migration to Pennsylvania, settling in present-day Berks County in the 1720s. Only about 500 arrived in the 18th century, but thousands more followed in the 19th, settling beside Mennonites in Ohio and Indiana.
The Mennonites proved more inclined to modernization and Americanization. The Mennonite Church, the nation’s largest Mennonite body, retained pacifism but gradually adopted the church structures, English liturgy, and denominational institutions characteristic of American evangelicalism, spawning several smaller and more conservative schismatic offshoots along the way. The Amish, meanwhile, retained German liturgy, continued to worship in houses or barns rather than erecting churches, and resisted denominational structure. In the 20th century, some moderate Amish began to build meetinghouses and use electricity.
Dunkers (or Brethren), who practiced baptism by triple immersion, originated in the Palatinate when German Reformed began leaving the church to embrace celibacy, Christian communism, and various Anabaptist practices. Their American experience paralleled those of other German sectarians: they were driven by persecution and lured by Pennsylvania, settling in Germantown in 1719 and 1729; they founded their first American congregation in Germantown in 1723; they migrated westward and southward to rural areas; they were rent by progressive-orthodox schisms as they responded in contrasting ways to their new environment; and they eventually formed a single large denomination (the Church of the Brethren) and several smaller, more traditional groups. One important schismatic movement was the Ephrata community, formed in 1732 near what is now Reading, Pennsylvania, and dedicated to celibacy, poverty, and a Saturday Sabbath. It flourished for a time and sent out missionaries to make converts, but internal dissension and tensions with other German sectarians contributed to its 1796 demise. The Brethren more generally evangelistically inclined, grew more rapidly than Mennonites and Amish—and partly at their expense—and formed an Annual Conference in 1742.
Moravians are a missionary and ecumenically inclined group focused in their devotion on the body of Jesus.
Their leader, former Lutheran Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60), established a communal village called Hernnhut on his estate in Moravia in 1722 and identified colonial America—especially its German and Indian populations—as a missionary target. Zinzendorf dispatched a group to Georgia in 1735 to establish communal farms and convert the Creeks and Cherokees, but the group relocated to Philadelphia. From that base, they established several Indian missions, founded the First Moravian Church in Philadelphia, and formed several communal settlements, including Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (1741), and Salem (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina (1753). The American settlements maintained ties with Hernnhut and, while adopting some surrounding cultural and social patterns—embracing revivalism and private property, for instance—remained ethnically distinct. Descent rather than conversion became, and remains, the major mechanism by which Moravianism endures.Maintaining tradition and ethnic identity continues to be both a strength and a problem for these groups, which remain numerically small but fascinating to American outsiders spiritually troubled by modern society.