Religion on the Margins

A reexamination of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church and its role in the European imperial project.

In the eighteenth century, missionaries of the radical, Pietist Moravian Church wandered from Germanic Europe to the edges of the known world in search of tolerance and a closer relationship to God. This open-minded, cosmopolitan undertaking led to unintended consequences, however, both for the Moravians and for the other persecuted peoples—European, African, and Indigenous—they sought to convert.

Religion on the Margins examines the complexities of early modern Moravians as a cosmopolitan community focused on an eschatological global vision while having to negotiate diverse cultures and, most importantly, the institution of slavery. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of letters, diaries, teachings, and mission histories, Benjamin M. Pietrenka sheds light on how a professedly anti-colonial cast of characters became entangled in the complex realities of European colonialism in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, Pietrenka shows how the Moravians, operating from within the constraints of mission work, became complicit in the European imperial project in spite of their stated values and their own experience of marginalization.

For scholars of early modern religion, empire, and politics, Pietrenka’s book challenges tendencies in the field to equate modernity with secularization and invites us to consider how nonelite actors understood religion and ethnicity through each other, in ways that contributed to the emergence of modern scientific racism and white supremacy.

This is an ambitious book that poses a challenge to narratives of Moravian exceptionalism and critically examines how race and gender factor into Moravian histories and historiography.

Supports recent research that challenges the construction of modernity as a process of secularization by reorienting the field toward non-elite actors.

Will appeal to historians of early America and the Atlantic World, critical race studies scholars, missiologists, and Moravian studies scholars.

Benjamin M. Pietrenka is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Church History at Ruprecht Karls Universität Heidelberg and a Lecturer at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. His work has appeared in Religion and American Culture and Journal of Early Modern History as well as in the edited volumes Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent and The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism.

Benjamin M. Pietrenka is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Church History at Ruprecht Karls Universität Heidelberg and a Lecturer at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. His work has appeared in Religion and American Culture and Journal of Early Modern History as well as in the edited volumes Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent and The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism.