Lying on a blanket in the pasture and listening to my older sister read is one of my favorite memories. Until she didn’t finish the story and I had to read the rest of the Zane Grey western myself. I was either in the third or fourth grade but I loved the story. And because my mom and dad were often reading westerns including their favorites, the Zane Grey ones, I also read them. Grey began his writing career by writing about his ancestors. They were fictionalized but still there was historical truth in them. And so, I wondered about the Native Americans who became Christians and died for their faith in a burning church. Was it true?
I couldn’t remember which book it was in but when I went searching, I found that in the book The Spirit of the Border Grey had written about the death of some native Americans who died for their faith. With further research I found that Grey had seemingly melded two historical events together. In his story the Moravian community was attacked by both unfriendly natives and decadent mountain men. Each time a Moravian missionary got up to speak in their church, he was shot. And then the Christian natives were burned alive—at least that is my memory.
But the truth is there were two incidents, one during the French and Indian wars and the other during the Revolutionary War. In an article on Wikipedia, the first event is explained:
“The Gnadenhütten massacre was an attack during the French and Indian war in which Native allies of the French killed 11 Moravian missionaries at Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania (modern day Lehighton, Pennsylvania) on 24 November 1755. They destroyed the mission village and took one woman prisoner, and only four of the sixteen residents escaped. Following the attack, Benjaman Franklin was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Provincial Counsil to construct forts in the area, and in other parts of the Province of Pennsylvania, to defend against Native American attacks, which were becoming increasingly frequent due to the French and Indian War."
Clearly this was an attack on missionaries, any native Americans there escaped. But Grey seems to have centered his story on the second incident, the one that occurred during the Revolutionary war, 1782. The natives had been converted by the ministry of Moravian missionaries. The Moravians were pacifist and so the Christian natives were also. They lived in community but owned property. The missionaries’ history went back to Bohemia and John Hus in the 14 century. Hus was a reformer much like Martin Luther, but about 80 years earlier. And unlike Luther Hus was burned at the stake. The first followers of Hus were willing to take up arms and fought in the thirty years war. However eventually they were overcome, persecuted and exiled.
Some of Hus’ followers took shelter at the estate of Count Zinzendorf, a Pietistic Christian, coming under his protection in the 1700's. There they became a community concerned with missionary ministry which included their calling to the native tribes in America, first the Mohawks and later to the Lenape. In their ministry they were pacifists.
Because they were pacifists they were suspected of treason and arrested by a Pennsylvania militia. Wikipedia states this:
“The Moravians asked their captors to be allowed to pray and worship on the night before their execution; they spent the night before their deaths praying as well as singing Christian hymns and Psalms. Eighteen of the U.S. militiamen were opposed to the killing of the pacifist Moravians, although they were outvoted by those who wanted to murder them; those who opposed the murder did not participate in the massacre and separated themselves from the killers. Before murdering them, the American soldiers "dragged the women and girls out into the snow and systematically raped them." As they were being killed, the Moravians sang "hymns and spoke words of encouragement and consolation one to another until they were all slain". Believing in nonresistance, they pleaded for their lives to be spared but did not fight back against their persecutors."
Those who committed the crime were never charged but later history memorialized the martyrs and according to the Wikipedia article Theodore Roosevelt called the massacre "a stain on frontier character that the lapse of time cannot wash away." There is much more to this account at Wikipedia.
As I have searched out the stories of faithful Christians, I am amazed at how these differing groups turned to non-violence in their faithful suffering. The Huguenots I wrote about earlier were not pacifist but in their deepest troubles found that carrying swords to worship was untenable and rather, instead carried only their Bibles. For the Christian natives the acts of hymn singing, prayer, and words of encouragement to brothers and sisters, was their defense, their only defense, against such evil. Their resistance to tyrants was truth—because the Lord of life is truth—it is our real means of resistance. Speaking truth about evil is resistance.
I am trying to capture the meaning and fortitude for Christians despised in the midst of tyranny. It's not happening here you say. In the Hispanic churches, both Catholic and Protestant, it is. Among Iranians and Afghan Christian refugees sent back to their countries it is death. And among those who are speaking the truth about what is happening, that is, the loss of freedom for the immigrant and refugee, the brutality given to those arrested, there are already insults, isolation and death threats.
But there is a name above every name:
