Lutheran and Reformed Groups
Lutheran and Reformed Protestants constituted most of British North America’s white non-British population and considerably enriched its ethnic and Protestant pluralism. Both groups trace their origins to the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, both are biblically grounded faiths emphasizing salvation by the grace of a sovereign God, and both spread through northern and western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Rejecting the icons, crosses, and—except for baptism and communion—the sacraments of Roman Catholicism, they insisted that devotion focus on Jesus and the text of the Bible.alt=Image>
America’s first Lutherans were Swedish settlers who founded New Sweden in the Delaware River Valley during the 1630s and their first congregation at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1638. The Dutch annexed this colony in 1655, and its 400 inhabitants came under the control of the Dutch Reformed, who had established New Netherland in the nearby lower Hudson River Valley and the city of New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan Island in 1626. The Dutch Reformed became a strong regional presence, establishing eleven churches in New Netherland before the British seized it in 1664 and more than 70 in English-ruled New York and New Jersey by 1750, as well as Queen’s College (later Rutgers University) and a theological seminary in New Brunswick, New Jersey. New Netherland’s Lutherans, Swedish and Dutch, were coerced into Reformed worship and adopted elements of that tradition, but under English rule established their own congregations—the first at New York and Albany—and a council joining Lutherans throughout the Hudson and Delaware valleys. Another and much smaller Reformed group, the French Reformed (called Huguenots), remained inchoate and formed only a handful of congregations around Boston, New York, and Charleston that were eventually absorbed by other ethnic Reformed groups.
Germans were by far the most substantial ethnic element of the Lutheran and Reformed presence. Attracted by Penn’s policies, they migrated largely from the Palatinate (a Rhine River Valley area in southern Germany) to Pennsylvania in 1683 and founded Germantown near Philadelphia. During the mid-18th century, German Lutherans and Reformed engaged in a large transatlantic migration of about 65,000—which with natural increase elevated their American numbers to more than 225,000 by 1776 and contributed to a diverse back-country religious culture as they joined the Scotch-Irish westward and southward migration into western Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. Despite their spread along the frontier, a substantial German Reformed migration to the Hudson River Valley from 1708 to 1710, a sizable German Lutheran presence in New York and New Jersey, and the erection of several churches by both groups in the Southern seaports, the region north and west of Philadelphia remained for Germans the major focal point of settlement.
Physical and cultural geography—including shared ethnicity and language, Anglophone dominance, isolation from their European church organizations, a shortage of clergy and other resources, competition from various German sects, and the challenges of institution-building on the frontier—moved German Lutherans and Reformed to such cooperative measures as shared buildings and hymnals and to increased reliance on lay pastors. Yet they maintained separate communions and clergy, and eventually formed separate organizations. German Reformed congregations formed a Coetus in 1747 and the German Reformed Church in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1793, while German Lutherans formed a governing Ministerium of Pennsylvania in 1748.
Their continuing use of the German language operated to keep both groups ethnically exclusive, their growth fueled largely by continuing immigration and natural increase.
Yet they also contended with an emergent American culture. They were often sympathetic to the new revivalism of the 18th and early 19th centuries—which had some German roots—and German Reformed in particular were readily moved by the patriotism of the American Revolution to jettison their European language and theology. Lutherans were more conflicted, with those in urban and backcountry areas, where they were often in the minority, defending ethnic tradition less tenaciously than their counterparts in all-German rural areas. Amid the pluralism of the cities and the revivals of the trans-Appalachian frontier, they embraced the English services, ecumenical cooperation, and evangelicalism of their Anglo-Protestant neighbors.
Old Lutheran Church in Philadelphia, 1800. Lutherans and other German religious groups were particularly prominent in Southeastern Pennsylvania.