The Patent of Toleration of the year 1781 cleared the way for activities of two Protestant churches in the Habsburg Monarchy. In the two borderland regions chosen for analysis - the regions of Děčín and Šluknov - the Protestant inhabitants were affected by the religious influences from Saxony that acquired various forms. From the period before the year 1620 there was, exceptionally, preserved the Lutheran religion, whose followers visited churches on the Saxon side of the border. Also, the regions were continuously settled by Saxon immigrants who were not organized within the structures of the Augsburg confession. Only after the commencement of industrialization and the subsequent wave of Saxon immigration was made possible the establishment of independent Protestant choirs. Absolutely exceptional was the Lutheran choir of Saxon officials in Podmokly that was founded after railroad had been finished in 1851. Already before the year 1850 the mission of the renewed Unity of Brethren from Herrnhut instigated the popular religious movement. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, religious propaganda of the movement „Away from Rome“ (Los von Rom), in many cases supported from Saxony, found response in these regions. The typology of religious influences from Saxony and their manifestations on the Bohemian side of the border, established on the basis of the examples of Děčín and Šluknov regions, could be used for the nineteenth century also for other borderland regions inhabited predominantly by German-speaking population.
Typology of religious influences from Saxony and their manifestations among the Protestant inhabitants of North Bohemian borderlands in the nineteenth century.