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Religious movements that actually had begun decades earlier found new encouragement during the Enlightenment. The Pietists, who since the late 17th century had been repelled by unfeeling expressions of faith, especially were unmoved by the coldly intellectual emphasis brought on by the new philosophy. They continued to meet in small groups apart from the church. Also, they sponsored mission work from Europe throughout the world. Particularly during the 19th century they opened missions in:
The official churches, supported by the state, often returned the favor by shaping dogma to accommodate the state’s political agenda. The Pietists, as well as orthodox Christians, viewed the close links between church and state with increasing suspicion. Orthodox Protestant Christians, though few in number at first, grew in significance.
This practice was not limited to Lutherans. Other orthodox Protestant Christians, especially in Germany, Italy, and England, supported the Romantic historians as they rediscovered liturgical materials, music and texts and benefited from the recovery. In England the Oxford Movement emphasized the Church’s ancient catholic (universal) roots. This was reflected in a revival of historic and contemporary church music of high quality, medieval hymnody, and a revival of chant. Faced with political, social, and economic unrest among their subjects, government authorities used the church as a means to resolve conflicts that rose occasionally to the level of open rebellion and riot. Usually, this had everything to do with government and very little to do with faith. It meant that people of faith were placed in a difficult position. In Saxony, Germany, for example, the government sought to combine Lutheran and Reformed churches. This required a revision of the "Augsburg Confession," which orthodox Lutherans were unprepared to accept. In the face of such a compromise, many of these Lutherans left home and emigrated to the United States, where the cornerstones of their churches proudly proclaimed that they were a church of "The Unaltered Augsburg Confession." Concerned with orthodox teaching and Reformation heritage, these Lutherans were among the first American Lutherans to benefit from research into classical hymnody and worship practice that was being conducted during the 19th century. Swedish and Norwegian Pietists, who occasionally experienced persecution for their resistance to state church regulations, also found it desirable to escape to the New World. They settled largely in the upper midwestern United States and had very different perspectives from the Germans who settled just to their south and east. The Pietists and orthodox Lutherans continued to view each other with suspicion for generations. In many places, the Lutherans who had settled the eastern United States a century before had learned to make peace with the Enlightenment in ways that neither of the midwestern groups tolerated. In reality, these apparently different groups were more alike than they admitted. Orthodoxy, Pietism, and Rationalism existed in each of the groups. In the final analysis, the groups varied most in the languages they spoke and the cultural and church traditions they observed.
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Orthodox
Lutherans called for reformation and return to the historic doctrinal
statements of their respective church bodies. They found an unwitting
ally in Romanticism. Differing factions of Romantic scholars also sought
the recovery of historical, ethnic, and cultural materials. One group
wanted to maintain cultural identity while the other sought its theological
roots. 