ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth-century American south, the Pietist vision of reforming the world appeared to be within reach. A group of religious exiles from the area around Salzburg with pastors from Halle was invited to settle in the newly established colony of Georgia. Their diasporic community was to serve as a Protestant Christian stronghold against the Catholic Spanish, a missionary island for Native Americans, and a pious place of order and industriousness. To maintain confessional identification and the support of benefactors, reports consisting mainly of the pastors’ diaries were published and transatlantic correspondence was frequent. The discursive construction of a group we can call the “Georgia Salzburgers” reveals processes of community formation through inner-communal unity and conversion, interfaith contacts, and the invention of tradition. This essay examines how these sources depict the Salzburgers as a model congregation of German Pietists that was self-consciously continuing the religious traditions of the Reformation.
