and dressed in the Indian manner, so that in travelling to and fro they were taken for Indians. But whenever they could not subsist by the work of their own hands, they were provided with the necessaries of life by the Brethren [Moravians] at Bethlehem.”40 When Rauch eventually built a Christian worship space in Shekomeko, it was a bark structure like the other buildings in the village. As Richard Pointer and Rachel Wheeler have both stressed, Rauch was seemingly a willing observer and practitioner of Mohican culture.41 He may originally have been interested in Mohican culture because he wanted to make sense of Native religious customs in order to present his Christian teachings in a more effective way, but by participating in local cultural practices he also participated in Native religious life. Missionaries such as Rauch listened to, recorded, and interpreted dreams, blessed hunters and hunting lodges, dispensed medicines, performed rituals for the dead and dying, and offered personal spiritual power through the blood of Christ.
When Christian hymns were sung, or sermons preached, they were usually done in Native languages. Because song, especially as a means of communicating with the divine, was an important part of religious life in Native and European Moravian communities alike, missionaries stressed this connection. In his foreword to his hymnal in the Delaware language, missionary David Zeisberger stated: “As the singing of psalms and spiritual songs has always formed a principal part of the divine service of our Church, even in congregations gathered from among the heathen . . . all our converts find much pleasure in learning verses with their tunes by heart, and frequently sing and meditate on them at home and abroad.”42 Hymns were a part of daily life for Native Christians, just as songs had always been a part of daily life in Native communities: they were sung to and by the sick and the dying. They were sung at gravesides. They were sung by men while hunting. They were sung by women in the travails of childbirth. They were sung to bring comfort, to call spiritual power, and to create and fortify community. They cemented treaties and sounded bravery in battle. And hymns became gifts that could be received from spirit helpers or manitou, continuing aspects of sacred song practices in Native communities. Hymns fulfilled similar functions in European Moravian communities, too, forging commonalities in the way that both groups understood the social, cultural, and spiritual purposes of song.43
Rauch’s missionizing efforts were based on the Christian customs, theologies, and cultural ways that he had carried with him across the Atlantic. What theologies of song had he shared with residents of Shekomeko, and how had these theologies influenced their responses to Moravian Christianity? Rachel Wheeler has argued that there was a distinct difference between the missionizing efforts of the Moravians and the version of Christianity promulgated by English Congregationalist missionaries at the Christian Indian town in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. While Native Christian practice at Stockbridge was shaped around literacy—learning to read from the Bible and the hymnal and interpret Scripture—Moravians emphasized an embodied sense of theology that was principally conveyed through hymns and worship rituals, connecting with previous uses for sacred songs in Mohican communities. Moravians also emphasized teachings about the divine that connected with already existing spiritual understandings of manitou or spirit beings. Jesus was presented primarily as a God who had become a man, a great warrior who was killed, yet whose wounds and blood held redemptive, life-giving power. Rather than relying on biblical texts and exegesis, Moravian missionaries presented a distinctly embodied version of Christianity that particularly resonated with Mohican communities.44 Moravian rituals and songs formed the core of missionary practices in North American mission contexts.
When Rauch arrived in the New York Colony in 1740, the Brüdergemeine (Brethren’s Community), known in English as the Moravian Church, was a new church body and its religious practices were still very much in development. The first Moravian community of Herrnhut (The Lord’s Watch) had been established in 1722 in southeastern Saxony. In the early 1720s, the young German nobleman Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf had purchased a large acreage along the Zittauer Straße, a road connecting the nearby towns of Löbau and Zittau, following his marriage to fellow noblewoman Erdmuthe Dorothea Reuss. At the time, the young couple could scarcely have foreseen the consequences of that purchase. By 1722, together with religious refugees from Bohemia and Moravia, members of the persecuted Protestant denomination of the Unitas Fratrum, they had established a small Christian town on their lands. Although the immediate aim of the community was to provide a sanctuary for Protestants persecuted by the Hapsburg Empire, in 1727, the community developed an entirely new mission. At a worship service on August 13, 1727, Zinzendorf and his fellow “Herrnhuters” sensed a particularly strong presence of the Holy Spirit in the church building, mirroring the biblical tale of the day of Pentecost. Although the worshippers that day hailed from many different Protestant backgrounds—Lutheran, Pietist, Unitas Fratrum—this experience of religious revival impelled them to come together as an entirely new church: the erneuerte Brüdergemeine (Renewed Brethren’s Community). Their religious fervor also encouraged them to move beyond the boundaries of their small community to spread the Christian message. Within the next twenty years, the people of Herrnhut had founded a transcontinental and transoceanic network of Christian missions stretching from Tibet to Suriname.
According to Zinzendorf, he had foreseen the development of this mission network in a dream in 1723. In this dream, the Holy Spirit had revealed to him a landscape with many Christian towns similar to the community of Herrnhut.45 It was this specific method of planned spiritual landscapes and towns—communities that resembled each other in both worship and spatial construction—that would fuel the development of more than thirty newly constructed international settlements, in addition to numerous outlying missions such as Shekomeko that were established in already extant towns and communities. The planning of each new Moravian community’s physical structure was approved in Europe, and then constructed with natural materials available on site. Most settlements were built around a central town square, and contained communal houses and worship spaces, as well as gardens, trade buildings, and agricultural fields. Lifeways in Moravian communities were also predictably replicated based on a system of communal living called the Oeconomie (Economy), in which community members contributed their earnings directly to the church. Moravians were divided into gendered “choirs” based on age and marital status. The desired goal was to create a shared, spiritual space where each person could live solely for the purpose of serving Christ without fear of monetary poverty. Christ, and not a human church official, was the elder of all Moravian communities. At meetings, his presence was signified by an empty chair and his will was ascertained by casting of lots (das Los).46 Lots were an important arbiter of not just communal decisions but also individual choices. Moravians carried pieces of paper or “lot chips” in their pockets that could be cast to invoke a randomized answer or “Christ’s will.” Lots settled disputes, interpreted Scripture, and sanctioned marriages, missionary activities, and social customs. The entire social organization of Moravian communities depended on the lot as an arbiter of social and spiritual will (fig. I.2a–d).
Lots also governed worship practices, including music. All Moravians learned to publicly demonstrate their improvisational abilities in daily musical worship services, called Singstunden (singing meetings). In a Singstunde, individual hymn-verses and phrases of chorale melodies, from a memorized repertory of several thousand preexisting hymns, were extemporaneously combined by a community member called a Liturg (worship leader, liturgist), and repeated by other participants to create a Liederpredigt (hymn-sermon). The Liederpredigt was itself a sounded explication of a particular scriptural passage called the Losung (watchword) that was chosen from a set of hymn verses and scriptural passages selected by Zinzendorf.47 If no suitable verses could be drawn from the memorized repertory to suit the Losung, then the liturgist would improvise a new hymn. The entire practice was called “singing from the heart” (aus dem Herzen gesungen). The soundways of Moravian communities were therefore as planned as the buildings and communal living practices. The choir system immersed community members in a daily cycle of religious hymns and prayers, directing the entirety of life to spiritual contemplation and a close relationship with God. As these practices were replicated in each community, they constituted a worldwide community based on divinely communicated
