Certainly there was some repairing of muskets going on at Christian's Spring, as Bob Lienemann's introduction to the Moravian Gunmaking book makes clear, and work done explicitly for neighboring County Committees (which had to be preparing/repairing guns for troops going to war). And, in Lancaster, some Moravian gunsmiths agreed to make muskets instead of rifles.
But it is important to keep the circumstances as complicated as they actually were: the Moravian church in Bethlehem, which closely governed Nazareth and Christian's Spring, insisted on a position of non-involvement, forbade church members from serving in militias or taking Pennsylvania's Test Act or serving in public office, and (at times) said that even paying for substitutes for militia service was inappropriate. The church rebuked individuals like William Henry for his public service (at the same time that the church benefited from his lack of obedience when, in public office, Henry used his influence to protect the church). The church's position--refusing to entangle itself in the dispute between Britain and America--nearly led to the loss of all its property in Pennsylvania. The church's petitions to the PA legislature, begging for help, never mentioned gunsmithing services on behalf of the Revolutionary cause.
All of this is to say that, while to us it must seem like their gunsmith work involved them in the Revolutionary cause, to them it must have looked differently. It is one thing for individual gunsmiths in Lancaster to make muskets: the Lancaster congregation had many "disobedient" Moravians such as Henry. But Christian's Spring, a gunshop "run" by the church, is another matter. Perhaps they rationalized that "fixing" muskets ("parts / accessories for 57 muskets" listed in the May 1777 inventory) differed from undertaking a military contract (or making rifles with bayonets)? Or else how would they have explained to themselves what to us looks like "involvement" or "entanglement," like the "taking of sides," which in all other public and private utterances they strictly avoided?
Scott
