In his fascinating and provocative study of the way in which Moravian theology was inflected, interpreted, and implemented in the “margins” of the Atlantic World in the 18th century, Pietrenka opens up a wide field of inquiry into the reception of this Protestant group’s concepts of the gendered and “raced” body, humanity, God, and spirituality with the indigenous peoples it proselytized to in geographies as far flung as the Caribbean, North America and Greenland. Using the methodologies of body history (Körpergeschichte) and critical Church history, Pietrenka makes plentiful and original use of a wide range of archival sources to examine not only the missiological theories of the leaders of the Moravians (Zinzendorf, Spangenberg et al.), but more importantly how these concepts were received and implemented by the mission workers in the field, and where possible by non-Christians, whether Inuit, Mahican, or enslaved Africans. How did the particularly Moravian images of a bleeding and wounded Savior resound with those whose own belief systems held parallel concepts of suffering and pain?

To undertake this original approach, Pietrenka’s book is divided into chapters that focus on the different communication media employed by the Moravians in their worldwide mission movement in the period of 1727–1765. These include the Periodical Accounts (Gemeinnachrichten), travel diaries, mission pedagogies, personal memoirs, letters and mission diaries held in the Unity Archives, Herrnhut, the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, and Church House, London that make up the bountiful sources available to readers of German script, the archaic handwriting in which they were written. Pietrenka asks the question of all these sources, how did the “message of Christ’s saving grace” (1) navigate these colonized spaces and how did the language included in these communications reflect the parameters of cross-cultural discourse that were necessary in these spaces, thus preserving the agency of the peoples who were to be converted.

First introducing the Moravian mission practices that shape this study, he moves to discuss the communication media employed to keep this wide reaching mission movement networked, Drawing on the groundbreaking study by Gisela Mettele, Weltbürgertum oder Gottesreich (Göttingen, 2009), Pietrenka cites reports of the various Congregations Days (Gemeintage) at which all Moravian communities heard mission reports from around the Moravian world, which brought together in a common discourse Mahicans and Lenape listening to reports about the Inuit in Greenland or enslaved Africans in the Caribbean hearing about Inuit in Greenland. The central chapters of the book examine the intersections in belief systems between the missionaries and the indigenous and enslaved peoples, and he concludes with how the philosophies of race that were dominant and circulating within the wider European and North American contexts intersected with and undercut the benevolent paternalism of Moravian missiology, conflicts that were especially prevalent in interactions with colonial authorities in these mission fields.

This is a truly complex task. To first find the sources that allow a researcher to even begin to answer these questions and then interpret them, reading against the dominant narrative of paternalistic mission theology is deeply challenging; however, Pietrenka meets this challenge. Using his deep understanding of Moravian theology as an embodied faith that positively valorizes the corporeality of the human experience, he argues for both the importance of empirical observation and also the subsequent transformation of the magic or supernatural world (as he terms it) within the indigenous imagination. Furthermore, to undertake such a sophisticated reading in a comparative context is also a courageous interpretive move, one that Pietrenka does well to attempt. While the methodology he employs is not always clearly articulated, this study is an important first step in the rereading of Moravian work in the mission field.

This book is of importance to researchers working in the areas of Protestant missions and extends the work begun by Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2005) and more recently Katharine Gerbner, in Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). These works share Pietrenka’s critical perspective, examining how ostensibly progressive or anti-colonial religious movements became entangled with slavery and empire in the Atlantic world. Pietrenka’s original contribution is the deeper dive into how those on the ground and in the field implemented these policies and transformed the interior worlds of those to be converted.