In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God. Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.

In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God. Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.

Were indigenous Americans descendants of the lost tribes of Israel? From the moment Europeans realized Columbus had landed in a place unknown to them in 1492, they began speculating about how the Americas and their inhabitants fit into the Bible. For many, the most compelling explanation was the Hebraic Indian theory, which proposed that indigenous Americans were the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. For its proponents, the theory neatly explained why this giant land and its inhabitants were not mentioned in the Biblical record. In Old Canaan in a New World, Elizabeth Fenton shows that though the Hebraic Indian theory may seem far-fetched today, it had a great deal of currency and significant influence over a very long period of American history. Indeed, at different times the idea that indigenous Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel was taken up to support political and religious positions on diverse issues including Christian millennialism, national expansion, trade policies, Jewish rights, sovereignty in the Americas, and scientific exploration. Through analysis of a wide collection of writings—from religious texts to novels—Fenton sheds light on a rarely explored but important part of religious discourse in early America. As the Hebraic Indian theory evolved over the course of two centuries, it revealed how religious belief and national interest intersected in early American history.

In Conquest of Canaan: Warfare and Victory in the Christian Life, the prolific author Jessie Penn-Lewis examines the story of Israel’s war with Canaan in the Old Testament as an eye opening new look not only at the war itself, but also at the spiritual warfare of the modern Christian.