One of the first places we visited was the Salem Tavern. The tour guide there gave us some interesting lessons about the Moravian community in the late 18th Century. Apparently, this tavern was a vital part of the Moravian community's economy, and the main reason for this was because the Moravians were religious purists. Like the Amish up north, these Protestants wanted to keep "outsiders" from having any influence on the ways that the community had brought over with them from "the Old Country." So the tavern was set up to be the only place in the entire town where outsiders could stay and do business with the town's trades people. The idea was that the people of Salem could ply their trades, sell their wares to folks in the surrounding areas, and still for the most part never encounter personally any "strangers." The desire here was to make sure no outside ideas would enter to contaminate the community.
I, of course, recognized the error in such thinking, but considering there was a gulf of 2-3 centuries, I couldn't point that error out to the folks involved. It's a curious historical oddity.
Later in the day, I learned some other rather interesting facts. For instance, Salem had been home to several hundred African slaves. The odd thing about these slaves was that no one owned them: the Moravian church did. In addition, the church insisted that all slaves be Moravians as well as the rest of the community... and in fact for many decades, the Moravian slaves lived as slaves on every day except for Sundays, when they would go to church and worship right along with the rest of the community, integrated into the peculiar Moravian "choir" system.
The story became far MORE interesting when it turned out that the people of Salem decided in 1820 that it was no longer appropriate for the slaves to worship among the white community members. The decision was made to create a "separate but equal" church at the far end of the town from the suddenly all-white church. Slaves would no longer be buried in "God's Acre." They would have to set up a "Black God's Acre" at the end of town where the "Strangers' Cemetery" had been set up decades earlier.
Now the question becomes: why did the people of Salem decide they needed to change their religious life so radically, when they were doing so much to avoid making changes to the faith of their fathers? The answer, naturally, was that segregation was an idea that came to them from the surrounding communities. And that's the vital lesson that people need to understand about all religions, past present and future.
If you read the Old Testament, you'll see a lot of energy dedicated to keeping the "Holy Hebrew Faith" pure and insulated from outside influences. The books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy (in particular) and filled with laws and stories illustrating the need to keep outsiders from "contaminating" the people with other religions. Death was prescribed over and over again for the "unorthodox."
In the New Testament, every book holds some reference to the evils of "false teachers" and corrupt religious leaders, and the need to keep one's beliefs unchanged from the "true" Christian faith. Anyone who strays into the dreaded "unorthodox" is to be cast out, hated even if they are family, for the good of the church.
And even today, there are many churches out there that do their best to guard the "true religion" as jealously as if they had a padlock on the mind of every church member that warms their pews. There are literally in Greensboro alone DOZENS of churches that test their members to make sure they believe what they say God needs them to believe. The sad thing (from their point of view) is that no matter how they work at it, no matter how strict they are in guarding the minds of their followers... change happens. The outside world creeps in regardless of what is done to retain the "purity" of members' thoughts.
It is a constant that no puritan in any age could ever face without fear. Change happens.
