Between 1730 and 1750 about 80,000 Lutheran and Reformed Germans arrived in North America. Many settled in and around Pennsylvania, where in 1742 there were only nine German Lutheran and thirteen German Reformed preachers. The Moravians filled the vacuum: forty-six out of sixty-eight pastors in around sixty German Lutheran and Reformed congregations were (undercover) Moravians. Among Swedish Lutherans the position was similar. In response Halle, Amsterdam and Uppsala sent pastors who won these congregations over from Moravian control, not without some violent incidents. Aaron Fogleman's important account of this conflict helpfully emphasises its transatlantic nature. It concerned ‘confessional order’, involving resistance to Count Zinzendorf's ecumenical claim that pastors could be confessionally Lutheran and Reformed yet belong to his Moravian community, working under its oversight. Unfortunately, Fogleman seeks to present the conflict as also – indeed primarily – about ‘gender order’. To do this, he has to portray the Moravians as breaching ‘gender order’ doctrinally, in worship and church governance, and pastorally. A highly misleading picture of Moravian theology and practice results. Moravian devotion to Christ's side wound (from which blood and water flowed) as the Church's birthplace did extend to portraying it as like a disembodied vagina. But for Moravians Christ himself was the eternal husband not only of the Church but of individual Christians. They were thus ultimately female, and Jesus was therefore not ‘female’ but, in Zinzendorf's words, ‘the only man’. For Moravians the Spirit was ‘the Mother’, but (contrary to Fogleman's repeated assertions) they worshipped not ‘a female Trinity’ but one consisting of ‘Father, Mother and dear Husband’. Fogleman mistranslates that German phrase and suggests that it could refer ‘to all aspects of Christ's function and being’ rather than the Trinity (p. 213). In Bethlehem married men and women lived apart, in communal single-sex accommodation, but Zinzendorf believed in women's temporal subordination to men and taught that in marriage husbands represent Christ. Moravian ‘labouresses’ sometimes gave pastoral and devotional addresses to women, and testimony on extra-liturgical occasions, but they did not preach to (mixed) congregations. Yet Fogleman repeatedly speaks of ‘women preaching’. Zinzendorf did eventually ordain female presbyters, but only fourteen, on two occasions, in 1750s Europe not 1740s America. Fogleman frequently asserts that the (mainly European) anti-Moravian tracts alleged breaches of ‘gender order’ but rarely quotes them directly. Nor does he prove that opponents were motivated by such concerns, rather than simply including them as stock elements of anti-radical polemic. He admits that ‘there is no evidence that the Moravian itinerants openly promoted the controversial aspects of their beliefs’ and no direct evidence that anti-Moravian violence was provoked by their alleged breaches of ‘gender order’. Occasional qualifications to the argument, mentioned in passing or buried in the endnotes, testify to the quality of Fogleman's scholarship. This makes it all the more regrettable that he has produced a book the argument of which owes more to currently fashionable concerns than to the evidence he has studied so copiously. The Moravians did give greater emphasis to the feminine in God and in the Church, and did offer greater scope for women to work, speak and lead than their mainstream contemporaries. Their real achievement was to do so overwhelmingly within the tradition and its patriarchal ‘gender order’ – albeit pushing at its limits – rather than overturning it as this book wrongly suggests.