Picture, if you will, the rich landscape of American religious history that has taken shape over the last half century. At least three features of this terrain stand out, the first being a richly-textured panorama before us, a recognizable field of study that has come into existence in a relatively short span of time. This field has been shaped by a varietyof forces, among them the vast expansion of religion departments since 1960, the recovery of the role of religion in the broader disciplines of history, literature, sociology and political science, and the stubborn persistence of religion in modern American life which scholars struggle to explain.

The antitrinitarian Polish Brethren, from the inception of their denomination as a breakaway from the Calvinist Reformed Church in 1565, had earnestly debated the issue of whether a “true Christian” might collaborate in the workof the sword-bearing magistracy, take part in war, or kill a fellow human being in self-defense. Whereas the brotherhood in the militarily exposed Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with a few exceptions, gave a positive answer, the congregational leaders in the more secure kingdom of Poland for the most part said no. To do any of these things, the latterargued, entailed disobedience to Jesus’ commandments as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament. For Christ replaced the laws of the Old Testament, which had allowed the ancient Israelites to wage just wars and wield the sword for good cause, with a gospel of love and defenselessness. This doctrine of nonresistance the pacifist Brethren, of course, had taken over from the Anabaptists of central Europe, whose insistence on adult baptism they also adopted.

The French Revolutionary festivals were planned as ritualized celebrations (speeches, tableaux, parades/processions, and music) of a revolutionary myth (new nation, elect community, pantheon of political heroes) with strong resemblance tothe traditional myth and ritual celebrating creation and redemption. This myth and ritual in the case of theweekly festivalswas then placed on a day set aside in the same fashion as previously Sunday had been set aside, mythologized, and ritualized. Under the Directory government, however, the festival celebrations went into steep decline, and only the Commemorationof 14 July survived the revolutionary decade. Even so, almost twenty years ago, in a brilliant and all-encompassing essay that has become the reigning paradigm, Mona Ozouf argued that the experience of the sacred central to the Old-Regime Catholic feasts was transferred to the revolutionary festivals, and from the revolutionary festivals to the revolutionary (and post-revolutionary) government. In a chapter entitled “Popular Life and the Revolutionary Festival” she presented evidence that popular religious sentiment (love of bells, crucifixes, Maypoles, and so on) remained alive and well; and in a chapter entitled “The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality,” evidence that fundamental humanconcerns (biological, social, and civic) once alive in a religious context lived on in a political context.

On 19 January 1774, Joseph Müller was expelled from the town of Salem, North Carolina for becoming engaged to Sarah Hauser without the permission of the Elders Conference. On 23 August 1775 Mattheus Weiβ was likewise expelled forwriting a “bad letter” to friends in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and on 4 November 1789, Jacob Bonn Jr., who hadbeen struggling with chronic debt, was expelled for refusing to sell his house and accept a steward for his finances. Theexpulsion of inhabitants for such offenses seems odd in a century labelled the “age of enlightenment.” It might well be viewed by good American constitutionalists as an unacceptable intrusion into the private lives of the individuals concerned. For the Moravian Brethren who built Salem on an ideal molded in Germany, the behavior of such offending Brethren represented a conflict between two different concepts of freedom: that of individual freedom, whichcame to be identified by both the European and American leadership of the Brethren as “American,” and that ofa spiritual freedom, which found expression in the submission to the good of the whole and obedience to Christ as literallord of the community. Historian A. G. Roeber has pointed out that many Germans were puzzled by “the American freedom” especially in the post-revolutionary years and did not always even agree among themselves over its precise meaning. Clearly, however, for many of them it represented a sharp departure from the more communal orientation of German society and government. Even the greater spiritual freedom offered by the lack of a state church was often viewed ambiguously. We can gain insight into the particular meaning of the conflict for the Brethren by first looking at the origins of the Moravian behavioral ideal, then at the way in which the dynamics of church/town discipline illustrate the tension between communal ideal and individual freedom, and finally by considering the specific impact of the translation of this ideal to an American setting.

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.