Both the Moravian missionaries and the Indigenous prophets of the Ohio Valley promised salvation, not just spiritual but practical, presenting the Lenape with an essential question: Which religious framework was most likely to see them through war? That some of the Moravian Indians moved fluidly from one framework to the other suggests spiritual ambivalence was the most reasonable response to their perilous situation.
In the end, there was likely no religious framework that could have saved them. Seven months before the massacre, the leader of a neighboring Wyandot tribe visited Gnadenhutten and delivered a prophecy of his own.
“You live in a dangerous place,” he said. “Two powerful and mighty spirits or gods are standing and opening wide their jaws toward each other to swallow, and between the two angry spirits, who thus open their jaws, are you placed. You are in danger, from one or from the other, or even from both, of being bruised and mangled by their teeth; therefore it is not advisable for you to remain here longer, but bethink ye to keep alive your wives, and children and young people, for here must you all die.”
Of all the prophecies directed at the Moravian Indians, only this one proved tragically true.
Heckewelder had devoted his life to steering the Lenape away from the influence of their prophets, but he was aware that it was ultimately not the teachings of Indigenous religious leaders that had doomed them. As he wrote of an a Moravian convert who had been away from the community at the time of the massacre but who lost two daughters and countless friends, “Though he was never heard to utter a revengeful sentiment against the murderers, he however could not conceal his astonishment that a people who called themselves Christians and read the scriptures, which he supposed all white people did, could commit such acts of barbarity.”