Moravian Church

Moravian Church, or the Church of the United Brethren, a German pietist sect that originated in Saxony and spread to the Americas during the mid-nineteenth century. In Central America, the Moravians are found almost exclusively along Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, where they work with people of Zambo heritage (collectively known as the Miskito Indians). Although based in Bluefields, Nicaragua, the Moravian Church maintains missions as far north as southern Honduras.

The Moravians first came to Nicaragua in 1849, when they established missions and schools for the Miskitos, Afro-Caribbeans, (Costeños) and British Protestants who lived along the coast when the country was a British protectorate. After Britain abandoned its claim to the coast in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, the Moravians confined their work to the Miskitos. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Moravians, who advocate "separation from the world" for religious reasons, encouraged the Miskitos to maintain their identity separate from that of the Catholic, Hispanic society of western Nicaragua. This practice has periodically caused friction between the Nicaraguan government and the Moravian Church, as evidenced in 1900, when Nicaragua's president, José Santos Zelaya, temporarily closed Moravian schools for failing to teach the Miskito to be "faithful subjects of the government."

Although the Moravian Church advocates pacifism, Nicaraguan Moravians from the Atlantic coast were instrumental in forming the first popular resistance to the Sandinista government in 1981. This ethnically based movement for Miskito autonomy was known as Misurasata, an acronym for Miskito, Sumo, Rama, and Sandinista. Since 1985, Nicaragua's north and south Atlantic coasts function as self-governing, autonomous regions.

See alsoNicaragua .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Humberto Belli, Nicaragua: Christians Under Fire (1984).

John Booth, The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution, 2d ed. (1985).

George Irwin Ferris, Jr., "Protestantism in Nicaragua: Its Historical Roots and Influences Affecting Its Growth" (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1981).

Additional Bibliography

Gordon, Edmund T. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community. Austin: University of Texas Press, Austin, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1998.

Hale, Charles. R. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Robertson, C. Alton. The Moravians, the Miskitu, and the Sandinistas on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast: 1979–1990. Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Church in America, 1998.

Smith, Calvin L. Revolution, Revival, and Religious Conflict in Sandinista Nicaragua. Boston: Brill, 2007.

                                  Virginia Garrard-Burnett