Moravians on the Medomak

A lecture by Michael Amico, given on the evening before an outdoor site-specific musical and dramatic performance on the shores of the Medomak exploring religion in early Waldoboro, July 17, 2026

With Graham Platner's resignation from Maine's U.S. Senate race, public discourse has quickly returned to familiar patterns of "good guy" versus "bad guy." We sort people into moral camps and then rationalize our judgments. Even critiques of the language of weak and strong, disloyal and patriotic can be stuck in the same logic. What we miss or don’t think about at all is that across political allegiance, across centuries, we are all wrestling with the same foundational questions of love, dismissal, authority, dignity, belonging, and your ‘opponent’ might have a point to make about that.

It is how exactly people answer these foundational questions that create and gets swept into the emotional currents that move across time. As many of you know, my method has been to trace the deeper emotional currents of this town and region—to ask about the emotions that have shaped relationships and structured community life over time, in order to feel more clearly what path I’m on, we’re on together or can be, and what direction to move in relation to it all. Through the history of emotions, and history as feeling, I’ve been interweaving voices across time in the hope that, by listening emotionally, we begin to recognize the currents of feeling that shape how we relate and judge, act and withdraw in the world, so that we can find guidance, warning, nourishment, and inspiration.

Whether someone acted “badly” at a particular moment is less important than how they struggled emotionally with the circumstances that led to their actions. Before judging, we should begin to listen emotionally and ask: How do we understand where authority lies and why? What did they fear losing? How about ourselves? These sorts of questions help explain not only others’ actions but also why we ourselves decide certain behaviors are good or bad, and when those judgments become especially urgent, when we want the world to be sifted into good and bad, when we need order and meaning. Without wrestling with the underlying emotional dynamics, we will remain trapped in patterns of blame and retrenchment, dismissal and cancellation, the language of oppressor and victim, us-versus-them.

Tonight I want to explore these questions more specifically through religion. Religion occupied a central place in the lives of early Waldoboro residents as it does for some today. It offers a particularly revealing way of thinking about leadership, masculinity, authority, and the emotional dynamics that shape our personal judgements and our institutional lives. While Graham Platner was not running with an explicitly religious identity, he presented himself as embodying a different style of masculinity—more supportive than superior, say, when compared to someone like Pete Hegseth (although we can see they are also very similar as well.) Certainly politicians such as James Talarico in Texas have articulated forms of Christianity that distinguish themselves from more theocratic and combative visions of public life. Whether or not we agree with their beliefs or even their policies, what interests me is how competing visions of authority and, so, morality are founded on different emotional relationships to other people and the world around us.

So rather than slotting people into identity categories or reducing them to abstract social types—or, in effect, taking sides—I want us to focus on how our lives our grounded in the emotional dynamics of local conditions and circumstances, not even to turn them into compelling narrative or story, too much of a buzz word nowadays. Instead, let me set the spatial and emotional landscape—the stage are actors will share, and we as well.

The German settlers arrived in this area in the mid eighteenth century with a strong sense of purpose and self-respect, hoping to establish productive lives. Colonial authorities repeatedly treated them as expendable buffers against native resistance during wartime. By the early 1760s, following the French and Indian War, Broad Bay, which was the name for Waldoboro then, occupied an uncertain, liminal space. The fighting had ended. People desperately wanted stability and predictability. But order had not yet returned. Authority was unstable, too. The settlers’ principal patron, Samuel Waldo, had died in 1759 on an excursion to survey more land.

At the same time, many settlers faced massive land dispossession. Those living on the west side of the river discovered that their farms lay outside the original Waldo Patent. Some were forced to abandon their land and relocate to the east side of the river; others had to re-purchase property they believed they already owned.

Local historian Jasper Stahl describes the consequences in emotional terms such as bewilderment, rage, helplessness, and injustice. Imagine the frustration of believing you had finally secured a home, only to be told that your claim meant nothing. Imagine being asked to pay again for land you had already spent years clearing and cultivating. These were not merely legal disputes. They shaped how people experienced and felt about their daily work and their future. Now imagine all this happening after war and death, and after being forced to live in close quarters with your neighbors in a communal garrison for a number of years. People felt angry and hopeless. So much remained beyond anyone's control. Anxiety spread.

The boundaries of land were uncertain, legal claims were contested, authority was unstable, the possibility of maintaining order began to collapse. Some settlers considered abandoning Broad Bay altogether. Others lashed out, destroying property or dragging stones back onto cleared fields simply to diminish the value of another person's land. Feeling powerless, people grew spiteful.

Religion offered a framework of order in a world where little else felt secure. Religion held tight the emotional crossroads between home and the unknown. Families and communities organized themselves through religious structures of authority and meaning. Religion answered practical questions: Who has the right to tell whom what to do? Any why? Why should anyone obey? It reassured people that the world still possessed meaning and direction. Without such a framework, many experienced profound existential uncertainty, which was nothing but, and all the more real for being, a very strong feeling of the unknown.

These same questions had shaped religious belief in Europe for centuries. One of Broad Bay's earliest German settlers, George Hahn, had spent time in Moravian communities in Europe, which gave him spiritual inspiration and where he also met his wife. Together they emigrated to America intending to join the Moravian settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

In some ways, Moravian beliefs predated the Protestant Reformation, though their history is complex. Compared with other Protestant traditions, the Moravians cultivated a more egalitarian, intimate, and mystical religious life. They were known for refusing military service and for approaching indigenous people not primarily through conquest but by living among them and treating them as equals, while many of their settler neighbors were engaged in ongoing frontier wars with native people.

One of the more surprising books I came across in a used bookstore once is called Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America. It explores aspects of Moravian spirituality that challenged conventional understandings of gender and authority. During what became known as the "Sifting Time" in the 1740s, Moravians experimented with unusually expansive expressions of gender and homosexuality and how it intersected with devotional life. They believed, and were accused of believing, that men possessed feminine souls and should cultivate tenderness, humility, sensitivity, affection. They were mockingly portrayed as overly sweet and affectionate—given to laughing and crying, and to using words like “hearty,” “cordial,” “lovely,” and “sweet” with too much frequency.

Now instead of Pennyslvania, where the Moravians had their own developed community, George Hahn eventually arrived in Broad Bay, where there were other Germans, and encountered a settlement in disarray. This was 1752, in between wars, and before the settlers could really establish themselves in a still unforgiving world and land. Hahn found people were acting reckless. Some were searching for religious guidance. He gathered those who desired spiritual community to read scripture together and discuss printed sermons, trying to apply what he learned from the Moravians in Europe. For several years, this small fellowship continued. Yet everyone recognized that they lacked the theological training and pastoral experience to provide what people were seeking and what they needed emotionally. They did not have access to the spiritual foundations of the Moravian tradition. It was a mystery to them. Their tears and anguish took over and their spiritual structure crumbled. They needed a minister.

And their desire for one was intense. A minster would bring authority, legitimacy, education, and hope. His presence could persuade and reassure. Others might give their respect, too.

So Hahn’s group wrote to the Moravians in Boston requesting help. By chance, a Danish-born Moravian minister named George Soelle happened to be there when the letter arrived.

He visits Broad Bay, and when it is arranged that he can remain through the winter, the Moravian community builds a church and meetinghouse for him on land owned by a Moravian believer on the east side of the river. Soelle will write an account of his time that has been newly translated into English and published as a pamphlet and available at the Historical Society here in town. He recalls: "I preached to them and to all the people of the village every Sunday. I also began to preach in English, and I visited our dear people diligently. Gradually, the hearts of the people opened up.”

Everything remained “calm and peaceful," he writes, "until November, when the hired pastor arrived.” That pastor was John Schaeffer, hired in 1762 to serve the new church at Meetinghouse Cove on the west side of the river—the first church outside the communal garrisons.

Immediately Schaeffer felt that this place was not big enough for two preachers. For whoever gathered and held a congregation also exercised broader authority within the settlement, securing the status, resources, and influence that came with it. Religion was a battleground for power and authority. Soelle, the Moravian, described Schaeffer, the hired pastor, in strikingly direct terms: "He cannot really be called a wolf, but rather a wild boar in the vineyards."

Rumors and accusations quickly followed from Schaeffer’s prompting; “blasphemies,” Soelle called them. Schaeffer claimed that he was actually first a Moravian, a close associate of Spangenberg, an important Moravian in America, but then had left the church; then he claimed that Soelle had been stoned by a group of boys in Philadelphia, that police had driven him from Newport, "and a thousand other lies and blasphemies,” Soelle says.

Yet Soelle and his followers quietly continued their work. German and English settlers alike increasingly attended his sermons.He became especially respected as a schoolteacher, even teaching the children of families who opposed him.

The conflict intensified. The Moravians were told to follow Schaeffer and help pay his salary. Plans were made to expel Soelle and George Hahn once the ice melted and ships could sail out. Then came open confrontation. Soelle writes, "On the 10th of May the fire broke out and Hahn and I were actually led away under the escort of thirty to forty armed people as prisoners. But they became divided and let us go.” In June, their opponents confiscated the Moravians' forest meadows.

Yet Schaeffer, Soelle says, “cannot prevent it that sometimes this one or the other comes to hear [me] and not without a blessing.” More people were continuing to attend Soelle's meetings.

Reading Soelle’s account, it becomes clear that the conflict is not primarily theological. Again and again, Schaeffer appears to inflame the situation while Soelle presents himself as patient and composed. At one point a German newspaper arrive containing a report from Schaeffer's estranged wife describing his treatment of her. In response, ten families who had remained with Schaefer withdrew their support from him (sound familiar?), standing with the Reform-leaning schoolmaster instead. These included the people that, Soelle says, Schaeffer most relied on and trusted to carry out his design.

The question was and is not, What do you believe? but Whom do you trust to help you? Which kind of person—whose presence and emotional sensibility and bearing—could hold together an anxious, angry, frightened community? And how? When it does feel ‘together,’ how actually is it being held together: through force, through acceptance? These are the questions we need to be asking today as well. If we approach doctrines, ideas, judgments through the relationships and conditions that existed when they took shape, we hear that disagreements over them are really an expression of the struggle over who is speaking and how. From what authority and presumption? Is theirs an expression of force or resistance to force? How did they understand what mattered and why? Theological differences, like moral, political, or intellectual ones, are merely the language through which people negotiate deeper social and emotional conditions.

If you look at religious traditions across time, we can see how religion grows out of suffering and, in the face of the unknown, the effort to make sense of things and imagine a better life. Shared belief certainly brings a sense of cohesion, but beneath it lay more immediate and driving desires, such as to live among others stably and without constant threat. Debates over the nature of Christ's body and blood and what form they take in communion, are what, on paper, distinguish Christian sects, but they come to hold weight and meaning as the answer to underlying emotionally-charged questions acquiring ever-renewed force through on-the-ground realities, re-felt in early Broad Bay, where wartime trauma, garrison life, forced intimacy, fear, and material insecurity created an extraordinarily pressurized emotional environment. Similar pressures had shaped European social and religious life before many settlers arrived here. In the face of that, the resulting doctrines distinguishing religious traditions are primarily expressions of competing visions of what the world is and how the world ought to be ordered, whom to trust, and where authority should reside.

So the conflict is not between Lutheran, Reform, and Moravian beliefs exactly, but between Schaeffer, the other Reform-minded school-teacher, and Soelle, and how exactly they brought reassurance and what demands came with the conditions to belong. Sometimes these differences even split families.

Now one way to create peace and security is through force, and statistically, it is much more men primarily drawn, sexually, to women, who, in the face of a sense of not having or knowing, of uncertainty, assert their lack of mastery of the world through assertions of power and violence over women and men, that they’re in competition with.

The same emotional dynamics echo through Soelle's account. He writes simply: "This winter our sermons were sometimes well attended, but the pastor has not stopped barking,” which is how he terms his preaching.While Schaeffer appears combative and coercive, Soelle consistently portrays himself as calm and patient. Whether or not that his how he was perceived by others, certainly people felt a major difference. Parents increasingly entrusted him with what mattered most: their children. "To many parents now the greater welfare of their children is more in their hearts than ever,” Soelle writes.

One man, seeking a baptism for is child asks for it from Soelle, who feels he cannot say no. As a consequence, during his Easter service, Schaeffer orders a group of men to disrupt it, pull him out of the building, and throw him in the water. Soelle tells his people to be quiet. “I was unperturbed,” Soelle recalls. “I looked at [the men] kindly, and they left without saying much."

Eventually civil authorities intervened and permission for the other schoolmaster to baptize was given, at least to keep the peace.

But Soelle’s method was different. It was not loud or violent and he did not turn to the law. He says, “I looked at them kindly, and they left without saying much.” His peace was disarming. It triggered some question deep within his accusers. Something similar had emerged when the group of men tried to remove him last, when they became divided and let him go.

Soelle ended up staying in Broad Bay for another six years, when his followers began to leave for North Carolina to be among people who lived more like them.

English settlers began arriving almost immediately. German leaders soon aligned themselves with the incoming English elite, who brought the money and connections. German children increasingly spoke English. Until they had their own church, the English attended the Reformed services. (Schaeffer himself left the ministry and was eventually excommunicated, settling in Warren.) Those who had first separated from Schaeffer as a group, when they heard about his treatment of his ex-wife, built their church next to the former Moravian lot. This was the church building that survived to the present as the Old German Church. What we can now begin to sense and feel is how it emerged from this period of questions, how it was a kind of interventional space, a remedial space, a transitional space, that, never fully finished on the east side, so only warm weather services could be held there, became the stand in for the early community as a whole. These are qualities we could explore together in the Old German Church itself.

Historian Jasper Stahl separates the Moravians into their own chapter in his book. It grants them a certain distinctiveness, yet it also treats them as a temporary episode whose significance lies chiefly in their departure. In reality, the Moravians stood at the very center of Waldoboro's formation. While the Old German Church was built after they left, the spirit they nurtured before even Schaefer or Soelle arrived led to its construction and its use even by multiple sects and ethnicities as a kind of interfaith space. The Moravians remind us that Waldoboro, like any town or person, have pass through them currents of emotional resistance to dominant narratives. It’s the feeling of: Don’t tell me what to do or believe or feel. Sometimes those currents are quiet, even suppressed. Sometimes they can be harnessed to violent ends. Either way their influence continues to shape us. The subtler, more powerfully centered ones we’ve been exploring tonight deserve free passage through time, which is one of the things we hope to continue in tomorrow’s performance, as we are this evening.

This brings me to the writing of history itself—not least the work of Soelle’s own account. How we record the past is part of how we act in the present. Moravian ministers wrote short histories of their missions as acts of testimony and survival. These were not simply institutional records. They were ways of creating order or making sense not in terms of institutional hierarchy or reigning power structures, but in their own terms, refusing to let oppression define their remembrance as simply an oppressed, victimized people and instead, in their reading and in the behavior they recorded, eliciting new feelings without telling people how they should feel. These historical accounts also demonstrated and preserved faith through presence rather than doctrine. Some of the most central things in our lives can only be saved and nurtured in that way.

We like to summon our ancestors with coins, plaques, and statues, with names preserved in church books, military records, and family genealogies. Consider one of Waldoboro's most famous figures, Conrad Heyer. There is in his well-worn character something of a vulnerable interior within a hardened shell, just like the Old German Church he has stood for. It wasn’t simply that he wasn’t actually the first child born in the settlement, but that he was born to a single mother who joined the Moravians and left before Broad Bay became Waldoboro. In effect, he was orphaned, and it was the town’s mythology that adopted him as its native son, one with a tender core that lends him both mystique and symbolic importance, that gave him weight and presence and inspired his singing. The Moravians were the tender core of Waldoboro at its beginnings.

The feeling around that tender core is the longing for home—not merely a physical place but an open, welcoming, and enduring space people associate with a life after death. Many religious traditions, such as the Moravians, hoped to create it on earth. I think we all do. The feeling of it comes down to how people open and close up around each other. Not just in your little world of the present tense, but across time. Have you ever sensed or had a question about the people who used to live where you live? Family members, neighbors past, unknown farmers and laborers, Indigenous inhabitants? Before knowing their name, dates, and occupations, if even that, can you feel the effects of their actions? Can you hear their cries, sense their gestures, an extended hand reaching across time? What in their words, actions, and unfinished lives demand response from us, keeping history going? Soelle writes about Jesus in this way—as someone who continually reopens the boundaries of belonging, encourages questions and inquiry, interrupts any final claims to power. For us today, Soelle is that figure. These people are at the center of community across time.

To feel them, or the part in us all that can identify with them, and continue their work, to continue history, is to speak about unseen realities, to sense the ‘from away’ deep inside each of us, brought out, in a vocational mindset, by ministers, teachers, artists, and sometimes absolute strangers. The interpretation of mystery can generate wisdom as well as chicanery and grandstanding. It’s all in how the interruption of the unknown is felt as something other than a threat to harden around but, as in the best performances, an acknowledgement of what feels neglected, unseen, or lost between us.