The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and coiner of the phrase “speak truth to power,” was founded in Philadelphia by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Spring 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6. Over the following century, AFSC embodied ...
The Anglican Church came to Philadelphia under the terms of the 1681 Pennsylvania charter, which welcomed all who “acknowledge one almighty God.” In 1695, thirty-nine Anglicans formed Philadelphia’s Christ Church, the first Anglican congregation in Pennsylvania, and requested a minister from the bishop of London, who oversaw the Church of England in the colonies. Members of Christ Church, ...
Established in 1846, the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at Eighteenth and Race Streets became the principal church and center of Catholic life for the clergy and faithful of the Philadelphia archdiocese. During a turbulent era of immigration and anti-Catholic nativism, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick (1796-1863) desired a “common church of the whole ...
Convents—communities of women devoted to religious life—in the Greater Philadelphia area played a significant role in the education of youth and in social services for communities from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. Although some regional Catholic convents moved or closed during this time, the Philadelphia area remained strong in Catholic identity because of ...
The Protestant Episcopal Church, established in 1789, was the heir of the Church of England in the newly formed United States. The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, which encompassed the church in the Philadelphia region, became known as the “mother diocese” of the denomination because of its founding role. The name of the denomination—the Protestant Episcopal ...
In the Philadelphia region, burial and funeral rituals have served to honor the dead and comfort the living. These practices have reflected shifting gender roles, new material and technological developments, and changing demographics. Until the mid-nineteenth century, women were the primary caretakers of the dead prior to burial, while male sextons interred bodies. By the ...
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the German Reformed Church played a role in developing the religious landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania. Along with other Reformed churches, the German Reformed Church provided a spiritual home for German immigrants and their children that, over time, also served as a medium for adapting to American culture even ...
Long an important center of African American musical life, Philadelphia played a key role in the development of Black gospel music. One of the seminal figures in developing the gospel style, Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933), moved to Philadelphia during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century and became a well-known gospel songwriter. As the ...
With the exception of Greater Boston, the Philadelphia region has more independent colleges and universities than any other metro area of the United States. These numbers stem from the religious variety of the region, whose various religions wanted to enjoy the prestige of having an institution of higher learning. Catholic-affiliated schools continue to embrace their religious banner, less so ...
The International Peace Mission Movement, an American communitarian religion founded in the early decades of the twentieth century, established a significant presence in Philadelphia under the leadership of its African American minister, the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, better known as Father Divine (1879?-1965). As an American sectarian religious innovator, Father Divine reached the height of ...
Islam, a religion founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula, has had a presence in the greater Philadelphia region since the colonial era, but the number of Muslims locally did not grow significantly until after the 1960s. By the 2010s, when Muslims in the United States numbered more ...
From the colonial era to the twenty-first century, Jews in the greater Philadelphia area participated in, and contributed to, many aspects of the region’s life. They founded a myriad of synagogues and Jewish organizations, ranging from those with a religious or educational purpose to those encouraging civic engagement and historical awareness. Members of the Philadelphia Jewish community ...
Lutherans came early to the Philadelphia region as economic opportunities provided them with possibilities that their homelands could not offer. Once settled, they worked to transplant their spirituality in their new homeland. To that end, they established congregations, a synod, social ministry organizations, and a seminary that ministered to them and their descendants. The presence ...
Philadelphia offered seventeenth-century Mennonite immigrants a gateway to the New World and their first permanent settlement in what would become the United States. Despite decades of migration to other parts of the country, Mennonites not only persisted in the city but also grew and diversified. By the early years of the twenty-first century, Mennonites in ...
The Philadelphia region historically produced fewer missionaries than other areas of North America. Through at least the early twentieth century New Englanders and southerners dominated the organized efforts of Christian churches to send out evangelists to convert others to the ...
In the eighteenth century, the Moravian church grew from a small group of Protestant dissenters in Germany to a global church with its most important American center at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The Moravians were best known for their experiments in communal living and their global missions, including a number of missions to Native Americans. In 1762, ...
Despite eras of suspicion and the relocation of many its members to the West during the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church) not only persisted in the Philadelphia region but also grew and spread, especially in the early twenty-first century. Strong evidence of such growth was the rise of a new temple in Center City ...
Established in the crucible of the American revolutionary era, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is recognized as the genesis of black religious organizing ...
Popes use their visits to encourage faith, emphasize their priorities, and fulfill their role as pastors. The places visited use these trips to highlight their successes, history, and culture on an international stage. Prior to the visit of Pope Francis (b. 1936) to Philadelphia on September 26 and 27, 2015, only one other pope had made an official visit to the city. Pope John Paul ...
Pietism was the source for much of the early religious vitality and diversity in Philadelphia. Between 1683 and 1800 thousands of Pietists crossed the Atlantic Ocean looking for a place where they could follow their conscience in religious matters. Pennsylvania became an attractive destination thanks to the goodwill fostered by William Penn’s missionary journey to ...
Much as New England was shaped by its Puritan heritage, the history of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley intertwined heavily with the Religious Society of Friends. Philadelphia gained one of its nicknames, “The Quaker City,” from its founding and settlement by the Friends, colloquially known as Quakers, a historically Christian religious sect that emerged during ...
Philadelphia’s first Catholic Mass was heard in 1708. Despite English law prohibiting Catholic worship, broad religious tolerance had been laid out that year in the Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges by William Penn (1644-1718). The resulting legal tension came to a head in 1733 when a complaint about the “Romish chappell,” Saint Joseph’s in Willing’s Alley, ...
Parochial schools in the Philadelphia region share a common Catholic mission and similar patterns of growth and development. For more than three centuries they have responded to the changing characteristics of the region’s Catholic ...
Parishes stand at the center of Roman Catholic religious life. Since the arrival of Catholicism in the Philadelphia region in the early eighteenth century, parishes have shaped Catholics’ sense of communal identity by functioning as both the administrative unit of a diocese and the primary site of Catholic worship. Developing into expansive complexes that often ...
Seventh-day Adventism, one among several uniquely American-born Christian traditions, resulted from the religious fervor and innovations of the Second Great Awakening (c. 1800-30), which generated schisms in established churches and plantings of new religious associations across the United States, including Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley ...
People of faith have long revered significant religious sites, making pilgrimages for special devotion to locations that often developed into formal shrines–places regarded as holy because of their associations with sacred persons, relics, or events. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Roman Catholic churches and other faiths in the Philadelphia area established a number of shrines, ...
The Philadelphia area became a center of Spiritualist activity in the mid-nineteenth century, appealing to radical Quakers reformers, who supported progressive ideals of racial and gender equality, individualism, progress, and scientific approaches, and to grieving families anxious to communicate with the spirits of departed loved ones. The First Association of Spiritualists of Philadelphia met ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy