bruce-church (https://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Rehabilitating Paul McCain, MDiv":
It would seem that this is a sign of a cult or sect that their leader could get away with such behavior for a long time. I suspect that any member who publicly mentioned his suspicions was expelled from the pietistic group. Packing up everything to follow this leader to come to America is another sign of it being a sect, along with giving Stephan singular control of the purse and of most decisions.
I was told that the story of the women confessing to Walther in the confessional is just a cover-up for the more embarrassing story full of medical details. A number of women and Stephan came down with syphilis which was quite common in the New World. Recall that one of the two, Lewis or Clark, I forget which, came down with it and later committed suicide. Stephan later died from it, or its complications, at his Illinois home. He was accompanied till the end of his days by one of the women he had a fling with. There may have never been a confessional involved at all. Probably a doctor told Walther everything, and that Stephan's behavior was no longer ignorable, and he was a public health hazard. The confessional part of the story seems to me just a way to redeem the young women in the minds of the community, and also cement Walther's role as leader in that all these women would confide with him. Also, everyone knew that if Walther knew that, what else did he know from the confessional?
Stephan's congregation was mostly professional folk--lawyers and such, which explains why they weren't so great a farming! They blamed it on Stephan choosing a bad area to farm, but how could farming right next to the Mississippi ever be bad? Anyway, the true medical facts would have come out if Stephan had been cavorting with commoners.
The Mississippi shifted course and swallowed up two of the original four Saxon settlements at some point, along with an entire riverside bluff, but that detail is not too well known either, perhaps because it's seen as divine judgment on the LCMS.
