About The Moravian

The Moravian

The Moravian was the weekly journal of the Moravian Church in America, founded in 1856 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, by Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz, who edited it for ten years before resigning the editorship in 1867 to lead the church's theological seminary and becoming a Moravian bishop in 1870. The paper first appeared on 1 January 1856 and served the American province of the Unitas Fratrum, the Unity of the Brethren, at the moment that province was gaining greater self-government from the church's General Synod at Herrnhut in Saxony. Surviving issues from the 1890s, including volume 40 in 1895, show it still publishing from Bethlehem, carrying synod reports, mission diaries from Labrador and congregational news for the Moravian settlements centred on Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz.

Few American church papers were founded by a figure of de Schweinitz's scholarly stature. Bethlehem-born, educated at Moravian College and in Berlin, he wrote the Moravian Manual, the standard Life and Times of David Zeisberger and the great History of the Unitas Fratrum while also building the institutions of the American church. The Moravian was his journalistic instrument in that project: a weekly means of informing, uniting and educating a small, historically rich denomination spread across Pennsylvania congregations and worldwide missions.

Founded 1 January 1856

Biographical accounts agree on the essentials: de Schweinitz founded The Moravian, the weekly journal of his church, in 1856 and edited it for ten years. A fuller biographical narrative dates the paper's first appearance precisely, to 1 January 1856, and places its founding alongside his growing responsibilities: he had added a professorship of theology in the seminary to his duties in 1855, teaching students who resided in his Philadelphia parsonage, before the seminary's permanent establishment at Bethlehem. The paper and the seminary were twin projects of American Moravian institution-building.

The date matters in church history. De Schweinitz had been a delegate from the United States to the General Synod of 1851 and had worked successfully for fundamental changes in church government, after which the Synod granted local autonomy to the American province. A province becoming self-governing needed its own press. The Moravian, founded five years later, gave the American Moravians the weekly journal that autonomy required.

Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz

Edmund Alexander de Schweinitz was born on 20 March 1825 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the heart of American Moravian life, and died on 18 December 1887. He studied theology at Moravian College in Bethlehem and at Berlin, entered the ministry in 1850, taught at Nazareth Hall and in the theological seminary, and held pastorates including Dover, Ohio, Lebanon and the First Moravian Church in Philadelphia. During the Civil War he was in charge of the Lititz congregation, and in 1864 he transferred to Bethlehem, where he remained for sixteen years.

In 1867 he resigned the editorship of The Moravian to accept the presidency of the theological seminary, newly and permanently established at Bethlehem, and he succeeded in enlisting the financial support of the local churches for it. In 1870 he became a bishop of the Moravian Church. The newspaper's founding editor was therefore not a hired journalist but one of the province's chief architects, which explains the paper's authority in its first decade.

The Editor as Historian

De Schweinitz's books frame the paper's intellectual character. He authored The Moravian Manual in 1859, The Moravian Episcopate in 1865, The Life and Times of David Zeisberger in 1870, Some of the Fathers of the Moravian Church in 1881 and The History of the Church Known as the Unitas Fratrum in 1885, the last a major scholarly history reviewed at length in the English Historical Review. A posthumous memoir appeared at Bethlehem in 1888.

A weekly edited by a historian of that calibre carried more than announcements. Zeisberger, the subject of his best-known biography, was the Moravians' great missionary to Native Americans, and the church's mission heritage permeated both the scholarship and the newspaper. Readers of The Moravian encountered a denomination interpreting its own past while reporting its present, a combination that gave the journal unusual depth for a small church's weekly.

A Journal for the American Province

The Moravian served the American province of a worldwide church whose centre lay at Herrnhut, Saxony. Its constituency was concentrated in the historic Pennsylvania settlements, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz among them, but its horizon was the whole Unity: synods, provincial administration, congregations and missions. The paper documented in the 1890s, held by the Moravian Historical Society, shows volume 40, number 26, dated 26 June 1895, still published from Bethlehem nearly four decades after founding and three decades after its founder laid down the editorship.

That persistence through editorial succession is the mark of an institution rather than a personal venture. De Schweinitz edited for ten years; the paper continued for decades beyond him, because the province needed it. Weekly journals of this type trained a denomination to think of itself as one body, reading the same reports in the same week from Pennsylvania to the mission fields.

Mission Diaries and Synod Reports

The documented contents of the 1890s paper include church synod reports, mission diaries from Labrador, including Hebron, and congregational news for the American province. Mission diaries were a distinctive Moravian genre: station reports written for the supporting church, describing weather, hunting, illness, worship and the daily life of Inuit congregations served by Moravian missionaries on the Labrador coast. Printing them in the weekly journal turned distant mission stations into familiar places for Pennsylvania readers and sustained the giving on which the missions depended.

Synod reports performed the opposite movement, bringing the province's governance into every congregation. Decisions about ministry, education and church order, debated by delegates, reached ordinary members through The Moravian's columns. Between the Labrador diary and the synod report, the paper mapped the full extent of Moravian life, from its most remote mission to its central assemblies.

Bethlehem: A Moravian Publishing Centre

Bethlehem was a natural home for the paper. Founded by Moravians in 1741, the town held the church's American archives, its college and, after the seminary's wanderings between Bethlehem, Nazareth and Philadelphia, its permanently established theological seminary under de Schweinitz's presidency. A modern collaborative project between Lehigh University and the Moravian Archives, documenting the community's first hundred years, processed some two thousand volumes of congregational library material and the papers of missionaries, artists and tradesmen from the same Bethlehem world that produced The Moravian.

Publishing in Bethlehem placed the journal beside the province's memory institutions. The Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth preserves the paper's issues today, including the 1895 volume cited in this profile, and the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem remain the church's research centre. The Moravian thus survives not only as text but within the archival system its own community built.

The Founder's Family and Legacy

De Schweinitz belonged to a family deeply woven into Moravian science and ministry; his relative Lewis David de Schweinitz, raised in the same Bethlehem world, became the nation's leading mycologist of his generation. The editor's own son, George Edmund de Schweinitz, became a leading eye specialist and ophthalmologist to President Woodrow Wilson. The family's trajectory, from Bethlehem church scholarship to national professional distinction, parallels the American province's own maturation that The Moravian was founded to serve.

Within the church, de Schweinitz's legacy is institutional: seminary president, bishop, historian and founding editor. The Moravian is the most public-facing part of that legacy, the one that reached ordinary members weekly rather than scholars occasionally.

What the Surviving Record Shows

The honest limits of the record should be stated. The Moravian is documented in biographies of its founder and in archival holdings of its later issues, rather than in a modern institutional history of the paper itself. Its founding date, first appearance, founding editor, ten-year editorship, Bethlehem base, weekly frequency and 1890s contents are firmly attested. Details such as a complete list of successor editors and a precise closing date are not established by the sources assembled for this profile, and are therefore not asserted here.

Even within those limits, the paper's importance is clear. It gave a newly autonomous American province its own voice at the height of the denominational press era, under an editor whose historical scholarship still anchors Moravian studies. Any account of how small American denominations held themselves together in the nineteenth century, across oceans of governance and mission geography, must reckon with weeklies like The Moravian.

Significance

The Moravian stands at the intersection of journalism and church-building. Founded on New Year's Day 1856 by the man who had won the American province its autonomy and would soon lead its seminary and join its episcopate, it embodied the province's coming of age. Its columns joined Bethlehem to Labrador, synod chamber to farmhouse congregation, and past to present through the historical consciousness its editor brought to weekly work.

For researchers today, the surviving issues in Moravian collections offer synod proceedings, mission reporting and congregational intelligence unavailable in such connected form anywhere else. For the church, The Moravian remains a founding artefact of American Moravian identity, proof that by 1856 the Unity of the Brethren in America could speak to itself, weekly, in its own journal.