Puritans, Quakers & Moravians

Three traditions this lesson covers have each left marks on modern Protestantism that far exceed their own membership:

These three movements are, each in their different ways, the streams through which free-church Protestantism arrived in America and the evangelical pattern of cross-cultural missions arrived in the world.

The Puritans were not a denomination but a movement within — and eventually, against — the Church of England. The word “Puritan,” originally an insult, described the wing of English Protestants who believed Elizabeth’s Settlement of 1559 (see Lesson 18 Part 8) had stopped short. They wanted to purify the church of remaining Catholic practices and structures.

Core Puritan concerns:

The Westminster Assembly (1643–1649). During the English Civil War, Parliament’s Long Parliament summoned 121 English divines, 30 laymen, and 8 Scottish commissioners to an Assembly at Westminster to reform the Church of England. Meeting for six years in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, the Assembly produced the foundational documents of English-speaking Reformed Christianity:

Key Puritan writers and their books still read today:

The Act of Uniformity and Great Ejection (1662). When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Act of Uniformity (1662) required all ministers to swear allegiance to the restored Anglican Prayer Book. About 2,000 Puritan ministers refused and were ejected from their parishes on 24 August 1662 (the Great Ejection, also known as Black Bartholomew’s Day in memory of the 1572 French Huguenot massacre). They founded what became English Nonconformity — the Presbyterians, Congregationalists (Independents), and Baptists who remained outside the established church through the 18th and 19th centuries. Susanna Wesley’s father Samuel Annesley was one of the 2,000 ejected (see Lesson 21 Part 2).

New England Puritans. The Great Migration of 1629–1640 brought roughly 21,000 English Puritans to Massachusetts Bay. These became the Congregational churches of New England and the cultural DNA of much of American Protestantism — the Sabbath tradition, the town-meeting polity, the suspicion of establishment religion, the education-mindedness (Harvard founded 1636, Yale 1701), and the preaching tradition that produced Edwards. Their intellectual heritage still shapes how American Christians, even non-Reformed ones, tend to think about theology, education, public life, and conversion.

Persecution and growth. Quakers were persecuted severely in England and the American colonies. Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Robinson were hanged on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661 for returning to Massachusetts after being banished as Quakers. George Fox himself spent a total of about six years in prison. Margaret Fell (1614–1702), the widow of Judge Thomas Fell who became Fox’s wife in 1669, was a brilliant organizer, advocate, and theologian (Women’s Speaking Justified, 1666, is a Quaker classic on women in ministry). By 1700, there were perhaps 50,000 Quakers in England and another 25,000 in the American colonies.

William Penn and Pennsylvania (1681). The aristocrat and Quaker convert William Penn (1644–1718) was granted a vast American colony in 1681 in payment of a royal debt owed his father. Penn’s “Holy Experiment” in Pennsylvania guaranteed religious liberty to all who acknowledged one God, established good relations with the Lenape Indians (the famous 1682 treaty under the elm tree at Shackamaxon), and drew German Mennonites, Amish, Lutheran Pietists, French Huguenots, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, and Welsh Baptists along with Quakers from across Europe. Pennsylvania became the single most religiously pluralistic English colony in North America, prefiguring the American religious liberty that the Founders would later write into the Constitution.

The Germantown Protest (1688). On 18 February 1688, four Quaker and Mennonite immigrants in Germantown, Pennsylvania (Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op de Graeff, and Abraham op de Graeff) signed and sent to their Quaker monthly meeting the first known formal protest against slavery in the American colonies. Their petition argued simply that Quakers who had themselves fled persecution could not hold slaves without contradicting the gospel. The document was filed away; it was rediscovered in the 19th century and is now considered one of the foundational texts of the American abolition movement.

Later Quaker contributions. John Woolman (1720–1772, Journal), Anthony Benezet, Elizabeth Fry (prison reform in England), Lucretia Mott (abolition and women’s rights, Seneca Falls 1848), the Grimké sisters, American Friends Service Committee (1917, Nobel Peace Prize 1947). The Quaker tradition has a far larger moral footprint than its numbers (~400,000 worldwide today) would suggest.

The Moravian missionary revolution. In August 1732, Zinzendorf encountered a Caribbean Black man named Anthony Ulrich in Copenhagen who described the desperate condition of the enslaved Africans on the Danish sugar island of St. Thomas. On 21 August 1732, two young Moravian craftsmen — Leonard Dober (potter) and David Nitschmann (carpenter) — sailed from Copenhagen for St. Thomas. Their plan, if the Danish planters would not allow them to preach to the slaves, was to sell themselves into slavery to do so. They were the first Protestant missionaries of what would become a global movement.

Within the next eight years Moravians went to St. Croix, St. John, Suriname, Greenland (Hans Egede’s station joined by Moravians 1733), Georgia (the Wesleys met them here), South Africa (Georg Schmidt 1737), Ceylon, Labrador, and Cape Coast on the African Gold Coast. By 1760, when Zinzendorf died, the community of about 600 Moravians at Herrnhut had sent out over 225 missionaries — more in 30 years than all of Protestantism had sent out in the 200 years between the Reformation and the Moravian movement.

Moravian theology and worship:

Influence on the Wesleys. John Wesley’s 1735–1738 encounter with Moravians on the Simmonds and later Peter Böhler’s London discipleship were decisive for his Aldersgate conversion (see Lesson 21 Parts 4–5). Wesley’s three-month visit to Herrnhut in the summer of 1738 shaped his Methodist structural instincts. It is no exaggeration to say that without the Moravians there is no Methodism — and without Methodism much of modern Anglo-American evangelicalism is unthinkable.

Zinzendorf’s legacy. Zinzendorf died at Herrnhut on 9 May 1760 at age 59. His last recorded words: “I am going to my Saviour. I am ready… I did but ask for first fruits among the heathen, and thousands have been given me… Now I am ready to go to him.” The Moravian Church today numbers about 1.1 million members in 30 countries, with its strongest presence in Tanzania, the United States, Jamaica, and Suriname.