In 2015, Christiansfeld, an eighteenth century town in Southern Denmark, was enlisted as UNESCO World Heritage. This thesis examines how the Moravian Brethren, a small Protestant community in Christiansfeld, negotiate and interpret their historic site, practices and objects in the midst of heritage-making processes in Christiansfeld.

The thesis further draws on contemporary perspectives from the Moravian Brethren congregations in Herrnhut, Saxony, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which similarly to Christiansfeld are Protestant colonies built by and for Moravian Brethren in the eighteenth century. Sites and congregations that wanted to join Christiansfeld on the World Heritage List.

Based on analytical concepts and theories from Critical Heritage Studies, especially studies of religious cultural heritage, I examine ethnographic findings from long-term fieldwork in Christians-feld and shorter stays in Herrnhut and Bethlehem. In the thesis, I explore the valorization, use and negotiation of Moravian sites, traditions and objects, as both religious and cultural heritage. How do these Moravian congregations manage their treasured religious values, as something they have inher-ited and want to look after, while simultaneously sharing them with the world? I examine this question based on the daily religious life of the three congregations in their sites.
In doing so, I show how Moravians in Christiansfeld continuously interpret themselves as a “living congregation” and heirs to particular religious values they have been entrusted. Heirship constitutes a particular relationship with the site of Christiansfeld that the Moravian congregation seeks to keep, preserve and protect. Faced with the influence of external stakeholders who share Christiansfeld as UNESCO World Heritage, I show how Moravians negotiate their claims, responsibilities and practices in a continuous dilemma of keeping-while-sharing their religious heritage.

The thesis contributes to the existing research and studies of religious cultural heritage with its ethnographic perspectives on local forms of cultural heritage-making between religious and secular heritage stakeholders. Analytically, the thesis contributes, in particular, by its focus on local religious actors as heirs. The analytical concept of heirs, I argue, holds analytical potency in ethnographic studies of religious cultural heritage.