Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith by Philip Jenkins

Author:Philip Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

German America

The German-speaking lands likewise had their Protestant sects, which faced intolerable pressure in the persecutions of the post-1675 decade. William Penn lived in Germany in the mid-1670s, where he encountered the Pietists as well as other devout Protestants. When his new colony of Pennsylvania was established, its authorities avidly tried to recruit German believers, who were drawn both from mainstream churches, the Lutheran and the Reformed, and also from the sects, such as the Mennonites and Anabaptists. The key settlement of Germantown (north of Philadelphia) was founded in 1683 as a magnet for German believers of all shades and denominations. The region’s various German churches became seedbeds for national denominations that in later years would claim many millions of members. These early migrants included strong representation from the recently emerged Pietist movement, and that element grew enormously with later Lutheran immigration. The venerated founder of Germantown, Francis David Pastorius, was a close friend of Spener: he joined the Pietist movement in 1679 after fleeing a revolutionary upsurge in his home city, and then moved to America. Born-again Christian faith flourished in the new province.55

The emerging German world became a haven for beliefs that simply could not survive in Europe’s repressive atmosphere. We have already encountered the apocalyptic mystic Johannes Kelpius, who in 1694 led the sect’s emigration to the Philadelphia area. Following a cryptic passage in Revelation, they founded what they called the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness. Those “mystics of the Wissahickon” made southeastern Pennsylvania a center for religious experimentation through the following century.56

One famous surviving sect from this era must be understood in the context of the persecutions of the crisis years. Through the seventeenth century, Mennonites had often been harshly persecuted, but matters now became much more acute. Some resisted government pressure to the point of martyrdom. Others, meanwhile, sympathized with the sect and offered material assistance but would not take the final step of a public declaration of faith, with the lethal consequences that entailed. Churches disagreed on the proper response to these “good-hearted” believers and on how strictly to discipline weaker members and fellow travelers. The most intransigent demanded they be shunned and avoided. In 1693, this issue caused outright schism, as the hard-liners followed Jakob Ammann; from his name, they became known as the Amish. The Amish still flourish across North America, although they are extinct in their European homeland.57

The United States is legendary for its seemingly limitless religious diversity, for all its faiths, sects and churches. Within the Christian traditions that still remain numerically dominant, that religious story cannot be told except in the context of those late seventeenth-century crises and conflicts, which drove exiles beyond the seas.

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