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History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Virginia Conference

by A. P. Funkhouser

CHAPTER XI

THE TRANSITION FROM GERMAN TO ENGLISH

In 1725, probably nineteen-twentieths of the half million inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies were using the English language exclusively. The Hollanders of New York and the Swedes of Pennsylvania and Delaware were fast breaking away from a dependence on the mother tongue. The Germans in America were as yet few.

After the date just mentioned, the German immigration became heavy and it almost occupied whole counties between the Hudson and the James. These foreigners were industrious and thrifty and showed a capacity for substantial citizenship. Rut to a great extent they resisted Americanization, and to a still greater extent they resisted the adoption of the English language. They exhibited an extreme tenacity in clinging to the German idiom, especially in the talk of the home circle. Where Germans lived in close contact with English-speaking people, and where, as a consequence, intermarriages were frequent, the foreign speech slowly yielded. Rut when a Scotch-Irishman, for instance, took a German wife, the children were likely to become German-speaking and thus new territory would be conquered for the use of an un-American medium of thought. Too few of the newcomers were so broad-minded as pastor Pretorius. He wrote his sons that although they were of a German father, they were nevertheless born in America, and he pointed out to them that it would be a shame if they did not use the language of the country.

Over a considerable part of Pennsylvania the degenerate form of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch is still in daily use. It has no educational value, neither has it any literary development worthy of mention. Rut in the Valley of Virginia, those who spoke German and those who spoke English lived as neighbors, and there was much intercourse between them. Before the present century

began, the use of German had been almost absolutely abandoned in this region. There is, however, an area in the southeast of Pendleton that was settled almost exclusively by Germans. Here are more than a thousand people, who, in conversing among themselves, seldom use anything else than a corrupt jargon now reduced to a very few hundred foreign words. Not only have these words lost their grammatical terminations, but the commonest idea can hardly be expressed without some help from English words. As in the case of the Pennsylvania Dutch, this crumbling patois serves no necessary or useful purpose whatever. The people who use it as home talk can neither understand standard German nor read the huge German Bibles purchased by their great grandparents. Because of this devotion to a useless form of speech, the dwellers in these valleys are superstitious as well as unprogressive. It holds them back from entering into the full spirit of American life and American institutions. This group of people does not include any United Brethren congregations. As a medium of preaching, the German tongue has been extinct within the limits of the Virginia Conference for at least eighty years.

Where the German speech has thoroughly and for some time been discarded, the descendants of the German immigrants of the eighteenth century are almost indistinguishable from the mass of the American population. Where this has not been the case, the descendants still exhibit foreign peculiarities, are reactionary in spirit, and as Americans are even yet incompletely assimilated.

An efficient system of popular education, put into force at least a century ago, would long since have extinguished this unfortunate display of obstinate conservatism. Not until 1870 did Virginia take any effectual step in this direction. Pennsylvania has been almost as great a laggard. For many decades both these states were much remiss in the civic as well as educational duties toward their citizens of non-British origin. In the colonial era the German immigrant was tolerated rather than made at home. Too

often he was looked upon as a subject for extortion. Instead of seeing that his children, if not himself, developed into genuine Americans, the propensity of the immigrant to be clannish was fostered and little Germanys on American soil were unwittingly encouraged.

Otterbein was twenty-seven when he arrived in America, and he continued to preach wholly in German to people who knew little English. To the last his conversational English easily betrayed his foreign birth, although he finally mastered the art of writing English with force and clearness. Boehm was born in Pennsylvania, but like Otterbein he preached only in German. To the end of his long life he could not express himself in English with much ease. Geeting, the third of the founders of the United Brethren Church, also confined himself to the German in his preaching. But Newcomer soon found it necessary to preach in English as well as in German. As early as 1800 he found that little German was understood at one of his Virginia appointments. He remarks that though his English was broken it seemed to make some impression. His audiences in the Valley of Virginia seem often to have been mixed, and had he not been able to preach or exhort in the official language of the United States, his efficiency as a bishop would have been much impaired.

So it is not correct to say that until 1820 the preaching of the United Brethren in Virginia was almost exclusively in German. But until that date the use of German was in the lead. Only one decade later, English was fast taking the place of the foreign tongue. There were several reasons for this growing demand for English preaching. For forty years after the close of the Revolution the renewed immigration from Germany was very small, and little of this small amount settled in the region now covered by the Virginia Conference. The children of the United Brethren families were often educated in English and not in German. Such persons would prefer to hear preaching in the adopted tongue. And by reason of intermarriage, or the settling in of new comers, in nearly every locality

where the United Brethren fathers planted societies, there would be people who understood little German or none at all.

Nevertheless, the church was slow to give up the use of the foreign speech. Until 1833 German dominated in the General Conferences. In 1819 a few copies of the Discipline were printed in English, but it was not until 1837 that this book appeared in English, with the accompanying German version looking as though it were a translation from English to German and not as though the entire book had been translated from German to English.

This tenacity in holding to a language that has no official recognition in this country worked against the numerical growth of the United Brethren Church. By 1820 it counted only 20,000 members. During one decade there was an actual loss. The children of United Brethren parents who clung to the German noticed that the unprogressiveness of the latter operated as a handicap in the matter of civic and social opportunities. There was hence an extensive drift of the younger generation into other churches, especially the Methodist.

But when once the speech of America had obtained the mastery in the United Brethren pulpits, the decline of the church was arrested. The falling away in membership gave place to an increase, this increase coming largely from the non-German elements of the American people. By 1880 only one-twenty-fifth of the total membership of the United Brethren were adhering to the German.

The United Brethren Church is now a German denomination only in the sense that a very large majority of its communicants are of the posterity of the German settlers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. But this posterity is now almost entirely American in speech and still more so in thought. That many people of English, Scotch, and Welch descent have joined the United Brethren is not because of what may still be termed a German complexion, but because of their approval of what the church distinctively stands for. This non-German element has made

a very noticeable impression on the life of the organization. The non-British beginnings of the United Brethren are no longer felt. In brief, the United Brethren Church of 1920 is as truly an American church, and in as full harmony with American thought, as are the branches of American Protestantism that are purely of British origin.

But the deluge of foreigners that has been inundating America since 1840 has called the attention of this church to new duties. It is in response to this call that the United Brethren have entered the field of foreign missions. One of these fields,—very appropriately the German,—was opened in 1869.

The United States has no official tongue but the English, and if the foreigner does not know it on his arrival here, it is his business to learn it. And yet there is a sense in which preaching in a foreign tongue to an American congregation is quite proper and even necessary.

The thoughts of the newcomer are cast only in the mould that is peculiar to his mother tongue. His comprehension of thought uttered in English is as limping as the broken English in which he tries to converse with the natives of his adopted country. If he is denied the privilege of hearing Scriptural truths expounded in the only idiom with which he is truly familiar, a positive wrong will be done him. It is better for the interests of Christianity, and even for Americanism in general, that he should retain the option of listening to a preacher who is at home in the language in which he was himself reared. But unless there has been positive neglect, on the part of the newcomer or the community, or both, the need that applies to the foreign-born citizen does not apply to his American-reared children. In them the bridge has been crossed and should no longer be necessary.

It is greatly to the credit of the United Brethren that as a church they have moved along these very lines; slowly, it is true, yet so surely and effectively that theirs is almost the only considerable American sect that does not continue to reveal unmistakably the original foreign impress.



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