Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America

Jesus Is Female By Erik Machorro

What comes to mind when you think of the “new world?” You think of discovery, but mostly you think of freedom. What come to mind when you think of the Great Awakening? You think of it as a time of Religious growth, of peace and prosperity. What most people don't know is that the Great Awakening was a time of huge turmoil and religious violence in colonial America. A group of religious radicals from Germany, the Moravians, came to America in search of religious freedom and to fulfill their vast missionary goals. They had one distinct feature, they allowed women to preach, and practiced alternative forms of sex, marriage, and family life. They also questioned gender structure and believed Christ could be female. These beliefs and practices created a vigorous response from protestants in the new world, and in Europe.

Aaron Spencer Fogleman, history professor at Northern Illinois University
took German, Dutch, and English documents on both sides of the Atlantic to create and chronically detail the events of that took place during this time. The Moravians spread and preached in many German and Swedish communities and grew quite a following. The question for the various Lutherans and Calvinists was, do they accept the Moravians into their communities or should they drive them out? The Moravian “problem” became a major issue across the colonies.

Prior to the moravians, another radical group had already been driven out,
the Mother Eva Society. Founded by Eva Margeritha Von Buttlar, this group practiced various “extreme” methods of sex. The men were forced to participate in “ceremonial intercourse” with Mother Eva while her husband, Justus Gottfried Winter, watched in the sideline. Their most extreme practice was their female initiation process. During this procedure, Justus and his associate, Sebastian Ichtershausen would lay down women on a bed, he then would insert his hand, one finger at a time, into the women’s uterus in an attempt to crush their ovaries. This process, Justus assured the women, would “purify them” of the “old Adam” living inside their womb. the procedure did not always work, however, and would have to be repeated. One women noted that she “would rather undergo 10 more pregnancies” than to go through that again. According to the Moravians, this was important because only then was the women pure. The believed the women who underwent this procedure would be able to “transfer her purity” to a man by means of sexual intercourse.

The Moravians, founded by Count Zinzendorf, was not nearly as extreme in their initiation procedures, but that did not stop the protestant world from despising their very existence. Various writers and publishers began to write Polemics, papers that were a sort of propaganda, and would get circulated amongst the different parishes in an attempt to create a disloyalty amongst the colonists to the Moravians. To them, this group was a dangerous threat to social and gender order as they understood it.

Amongst these Polemicists was Jean Francis Reynier, who wrote about his
experience living as a part of a Moravian society, and even attacked Count Zinzendorf himself. He wrote of a twisted marriage practice that appeared to be a mere spectacle, but was entitled as a “Blessing.” He wrote about the “blue chamber” that new couples were given for a brief 15 minutes to perform sexual intercourse, while others viewed and observed from a window. The couples were also set up for marriage, and usually did not know each other prior to their experience in the blue chamber. Reynier attempted to get to know his bride, only to be interrupted and rushed into having sexual intercourse by an official. The women also accounted that on their wedding days, while getting dressed, Count Zinendorf would observe as they got dressed and would “fondle their breasts” prior to the marriage ceremony.

At first, the protestants relied on evangelical, non-violent means of
the Moravians from spreading their ideas. It was a battle of who can preach to the most places the gain the most followers the quickest. The protestants were at a disatvantage, since they relied heavily on finances given to them from both officials back in their home countries, and of donations given to them by their parishioners. The “Zinzendorfers”, as they were sometimes called, relied on no finances. They worked for free, and preached without a need for tithes or offerings. The people really appealed to their methods of preaching and of life, and so, followed them. The protestant reaction to this was to figure out a more productive form of purging, or to watch their communities fall away from them. It was not very long before some began to resort to violence.

One such event took place in the parish of a small Pennsylvanian town.
One Moravian preacher was locked out of the church and told to never return. He and his followers “broke in” to the church and he began a sermon. An angry mob quickly formed outside and 4 men entered the church and told the man to stop preaching. When he refused, the mob broke in, fought through the crowd, and grabbed the man and dragged him outside where the crowd beat him in the street. The Moravians were successfully driven out of the parish and never returned.

The Moravians are not a very well known group, but their place in American history is as important as any others we may have read about. We, as a country, were, and in many ways still remain, to be a country that proclaims religious freedom, but denies it to groups that we find threatening. To anyone interested in the secret history of America, or interested in how a culture could shape religion and vice-versa, this is the book for you. This book is not only a source of how radical religion shaped early America, but how it is still shaping us today. A violent response was brought up through religion, or through simple sexism. We can still see today how religion, or ANY belief, is still used as grounds for violence and retortion.