Sex and violence are not usually associated with colonial American Moravians, the radical German Pietist sect that established successful communal settlements in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and dozens of mission congregations from New York to Virginia, in the mid-eighteenth century. The Moravians' construction of gender and the public violence they experienced in the Delaware Valley during the 1740s stand causally linked, however, at the center of Aaron Fogleman's Jesus Is Female. Fogleman argues that Moravians experienced unprecedented violence because their gendered Trinitarian theology and controversial sexual practices crossed intellectual and cultural boundaries fiercely defended by Lutheran and Reformed guardians of traditional order in German Pennsylvania. For Fogleman, this encounter delivered a blow from which the promising Moravian mission never recovered and also provides historians today with an important new example of the potent interaction of religion, gender, and violence in colonial society.

Recently the Moravians, with their communal “choirs” of celibate and married members, have emerged as a prime religious subject for historians informed by gender theory. Fogleman's new study is the most ambitious statement of this approach to date. The book begins with a fine historical overview of Continental religious radicalism in early America, detailing its strong presence in the Delaware Valley long before the Lutheran and Reformed communions organized effectively. Fogleman reminds us that most of Pennsylvania's German Protestants were Pietists of some kind, and he helpfully presents their colonial religious world as one shaped by the rivalry of powerful Pietist centers in Holland, the Palatinate, Halle, Uppsala, Wetteravia, and Saxony. In a companion chapter, he locates colonial Moravianism in the context of “gender and confessional order in the Protestant World” (34–72), arguing along with other feminist theorists and sectarian historians that early modern Atlantic society experienced a crisis of gender roles fostered in significant part by the emotive expressionism of Pietism and Evangelicalism.

Turning specifically to the Moravian “challenge to gender order,” Fogleman interprets the sect's chief heterodoxy as its embrace of “a female Trinity” (74–86). Here some significant problems begin. The figures of Christ as Bridegroom and bloody agent of the soul's regeneration that Fogleman uses repeatedly to justify this interpretation were Christological, not Trinitarian, in doctrinal reference and they played a prominent role in all Pietist discourse. The Moravians' imagery of a female Holy Spirit, moreover, followed a long doctrinal tradition dating from the Early Church through medieval mysticism to the Radical Reformation, and there is little evidence that they confused spiritual rebirth through Christ's atonement with a gendered confessional claim that “Jesus is female,” something no Moravian writer ever said.

The heart of Fogleman's gender argument, though, is that “many of [the Moravians'] protocols, poems, and hymns, and much of their iconography, suggested female qualities of Christ, including sensuous descriptions of a nurturing, motherly Savior, and even graphic portrayals of the side wound, apparently in the form of female genitalia.” This orientation, he continues, “influenced the lives and piety of many Moravians in the closed communities and provided their enemies with material for polemics” (77). Fogleman mines an impressive variety of neglected symbological genres to support this interpretation, but his readings are forced and inaccurate in a number of cases.

Stanzas from Eucharistic and atonement hymns, for example, are cited without literary or liturgical context and translated in ways that seem deliberately designed to highlight graphic sexual suggestion at the expense of more likely theological resonances. Similar difficulties attend Fogleman's use of visual imagery. Here the gender challenge is literally in the eye of the beholder of the many Moravian drawings of Christ's side-wound reproduced in the book. Fogleman says that these wound drawings look like vaginas and therefore expressed Moravian gender radicalism. One can agree, or one can say they look like mouths, or indeed like side-wounds, especially since many of them come with inscriptions, like the example on the book's dust jacket that depicts a couple in their cozy bedroom drawn inside a stylized wound with a written motto identifying it as such.

The point here is not that Moravian lyrics and images were tame when it came to sex. The sect's sensual symbology did shock Lutheran and Reformed colonists, expressing as it did not only intimacy with the Savior but also an even more persistent obsession with his blood and wounds. The issue is why such symbolically complex source material from a sectarian culture should be presented in a way that discounts its explicit religious meaning in order to advance its putative sexual reference. By doing so, Fogleman's argument reads more like a gender-theory hypothesis in search of sectarian evidence than the historical exploration of “the limits of radical religion in early America” that he proposes (217–236).

The book moves to more solid factual ground in its treatment of anti-Moravian violence during the 1740s. Fogleman has found fifteen “court cases, arrests, imprisonments, and pursuits of Moravian preachers” between 1742 and 1747 alone and woven them into a compelling story of religious conflict that properly challenges the stereotype of the Delaware Valley as a peaceable kingdom of religious diversity. He argues that such violence was unique in the region, but religious conflict there was hardly limited to anti-Moravian arrests and mobbings. Local factions in Lutheran, German Reformed, and Presbyterian congregations frequently sued one another for legal title to meetinghouses and schools, locked each other's ministers out, and provoked riotous disorder.

Fogleman's argument for the uniqueness of anti-Moravian violence ultimately turns not on its frequency or intensity but on his claim that challenges to confessional and gender order triggered these violent cultural reactions. He casts Lutheran and Reformed leaders as defenders of traditional order, which they doubtless were, then argues that they and their lay followers visited violence on the Moravians because they were antagonized by the hapless sectarians' gender radicalism. In the broadest sense, Fogleman understands these attacks as a decisive patriarchal pushback that not only defeated the Moravians but also permanently arrested the potential of the American colonial experiment to foster religious and gender radicalism.

Other more parsimonious interpretive options are available. The most obvious one is that Lutheran and Reformed leaders organized to reclaim their congregations from widespread infiltration by Moravian missionaries whom they regarded as irregular, unqualified, and deceptive, if not heterodox. Not surprisingly, clerical leaders on both sides of the Atlantic used every available means to combat the Moravian threat including legal action, physical threat, and polemic filled with a heresiography of sexual impropriety first assigned to the Münsterite Radicals in the 1520s. Fogleman acknowledges such interpretive alternatives but dismisses them without critique, opting instead simply to insist, apparently ex hypothesi, that the Moravians' gender challenge was the root cause of the violence.

Jesus Is Female is the latest and most ambitious application of gender theory to Moravian history. It offers provocative interpretations that readers inclined to this interpretive approach will find convincing and innovative, along with many important new sources warranting further scholarly examination. Others will take it as a book arguing an extreme interpretive position that is theoretically reductive and, at a number of crucial points, frankly conjectural.