Christian Munsee

The Christian Munsee are a group of Lenape (also known as Delaware), an Indigenous people in the United States, that primarily speak Munsee and have converted to Christianity, following the teachings of Moravian missionaries. The Christian Munsee are also known as the Moravian Munsee or the Moravian Indians, the Moravian Christian Indians or, in context, simply the Christian Indians. As the Moravian Church transferred some of their missions to other Christian denominations, such as the Methodists, Christian Munsee today belong to the Moravian Church, Methodist Church, United Church of Canada, among other Christian denominations.

The Christian Munsee tribe has produced several people who have become notable figures in Christianity and the Delaware Nation as a whole, such as Gelelemend (a Lenape chief), John Henry Kilbuck (a Moravian Christian missionary to the Native peoples in Alaska), Papunhank (a Moravian Lenape diplomat and preacher), Glikhikan (Munsee chief, Moravian elder, and Christian martyr), and Washington Jacobs (a chief of the Moravian of the Thames reservation).

Present-day Christian Munsee communities include Moravian of the Thames, the Christian Munsee tribe in Kansas, and the Stockbridge–Munsee Community.

Starting in the 1740s, the Moravian Church sent Christian missionaries to North American Indian tribes and started settlements, with full tribal support. The ranks of the Christian Munsee included influential Lenape chiefs from the start. The Moravian Christian approach was to preserve Lenape cultural practices while introducing Lenape to the Gospel message with the entirety of the Christian faith. As such, Moravian Christian missionaries developed the orthography for Lenape dialects and David Zeisberger "compiled dictionaries of various Native tongues, translating them into English and German".

The Munsee were the Wolf Clan of the Lenape, occupying the area where present-day New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey meet. The first recorded European contact occurred in 1524, when Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed into what is now New York Harbor. Like most native peoples of the Atlantic coast, the Munsee suffered from the introduction of European diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, that were endemic among the newcomers, but to which they had no acquired immunity. Those who survived were forced inland by encroaching European settlements.

By the mid-18th century, one group of Lenape people began to follow the teachings of Moravian missionaries. The Moravians were descended from exiled Protestants from Morava, now Czech Republic, who founded a Protestant denomination from Herrnhut in the German state of Saxony. They sought to protect their converts by creating separate mission villages in the frontier, apart from both European settlers and from other native people.

The most prominent missionary among the Munsee was David Zeisberger. In 1772, he led his group of Christian Munsee to the Ohio Country, which he hoped would isolate them from the hostilities of the approaching American Revolution. However, in 1782, a force of Pennsylvania militiamen, in search of Indians who had been raiding settlements in western Pennsylvania, happened upon a group of ninety-six of Zeisberger's Christian Munsee harvesting corn, and rounded them up in the eastern Ohio village of Gnadenhütten. The Munsee protested their innocence of the incidents and explained their Christian convictions and practice of non-combatant and nonresistance. But the militia took a vote and decided to kill all of these "Indians", including the women and children. Those killed are known as the Moravian Christian Indian Martyrs.

While the American militiamen murdered the Moravian Christian Indians in Gnadenhutten, a messenger sent by the Moravian missionaries in Sandusky on March 3 reached Schoenbrunn on March 6 in order to deliver the news that all of them would be moving to Detroit. Two of the Moravian Indians from Schoenbrunn went to tell their brethren in Gnadenhutten but on their journey there, they saw that American soldiers had mangled body of Joseph Schebosh Jr, a Moravian with an Indian mother and European father. They buried his body and quickly returned to warn their brethren in Schoenbrunn as they thought that the others at Gnadenhutten met the same fate. The Moravian Christian Indians at Schoenbrunn fled to Sandusky before the American militiamen could reach Schoenbrunn, where they planned to commit another massacre.