"All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship... against his consent."
Sketch of William Penn, from life. From its start in 1647, when founder George Fox exhorted his neighbors to reject the empty formalism and rituals of the Church of England and seek a personal relationship with God, the Society of Friends threatened religious and political authorities. Believing that God existed in all people, Friends rejected the trained clergy and structured services of the Anglican Church. Instead they gathered in meetings where they sat in silence until a Friend was moved by God to speak.
Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, circa 1834.
The “Cave of Kelpius,” Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, PA, circa 2010. ... Penn was unable to provide much help for Fox in 1675, but when the Admiral died in 1680, the thirty-six-year-old Penn came into possession of a debt of £16,000 that the crown owed to his father for services rendered. In 1681 Penn requested that Charles II grant him the last large unclaimed territory on the North American seaboard as payment for the debt. When Charles agreed and awarded him a province of more than 40,000 square miles, Penn became the largest private landowner in the whole of Great Britain.
The Bakery, (on the left), Saal (center), and Saron (right) buildings at the... Penn's promise of religious toleration was particularly welcomed by religious dissenters in the German Lutheran states, where a religious revival had been flourishing for at least a decade. Rebelling against the formalism of the established Protestant churches, pietists, as these religious dissenters came to be known, insisted upon a more spiritual and living faith, emphasizing simplicity, emotion, and the necessity of a new birth.
Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784. The first religious communitarians to make the trip to Pennsylvania were a small group of German pietist hermits led by Johannes Kelpius who voyaged to Penn's colony to await the advent of Christ in the unspoiled wilderness of the New World. After Christ failed to arrive as expected in 1694, the celibate Brothers who belonged to a group known among the colonists as "The Woman in the Wilderness" lived ascetic lives in their Tabernacle on a ridge above the Wissahickon River, just north of Philadelphia.
Old Economy, Ambridge, PA, 2010. Believing that Christ would soon return to call them to his celestial kingdom, the Harmonists made no effort to win converts. Whereas the Moravians in fewer than twenty years abandoned their communal economic system, gave up residence in sex and age-segregated "choirs" to live in traditional family units, and eventually opened their settlements to outsiders and assimilated among their neighbors, the Harmonists held to their faith and communistic sharing of wealth throughout the nineteenth century.
WPA poster depicting and Amish family Page 2
Czech Priest John Huss, burned at the stake in 1415.
Zinzendorf als Lehrer der, by Johann Valentin Haidt, circa 1747. The Brethren emerged with renewed vigor in the 1720s when Moravian carpenter Christian David met Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf of Saxony, a rich, highly-educated, practical, and deeply religious aristocrat who as a child had been schooled in the teachings of the German pietists by the two noble women who had raised him. Zinzendorf granted David and other Moravian refugees land upon which they built a town they called Herrnut.
Map of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, PA, 1758. Outraged at the reappearance of Moravians in Bohemia, the Lutheran Church, now the established church of the region, pressured the King of Saxony to banish Zinzendorf, and the United Brethren were once again on the move. Exiled from Saxony, Zinzendorf founded congregations in Holland, England, Ireland, and elsewhere in Germany. Other Moravians became part of the "Sea Congregations" that emigrated to the West Indies, South America, South Africa, and North America. Within a decade the Moravians had put in place the most ambitious mission program ever developed by the Protestant world.
Bethlehem, PA, by Nicholas Garrison, 1784. Soon afterwards the Brethren purchased 5,000 acres ten miles to the northwest, founding the settlement they named Nazareth. Directed by the General Synod in Germany, the Moravians also founded settlements at Emmaus in the Lehigh Valley, Lititz in Lancaster County, Hope in northern New Jersey, and Dansbury near the New York border, which served as a base for missionary efforts among the Lenape people.
Moravian Gemein House, Bethlehem, PA, circa 1870. For Moravians music was an essential aid to worship, so it was part of every religious service and celebration. Moravian choruses won renown for their beautiful harmonies, and Bethlehem became a musical center, its musicians introducing much of the great classical music of Europe to North America. The playing of hymns required the construction of church organs. Between the 1760s and his death in 1804, David Tannenberg built and supervised the installation of nearly fifty instruments of his own design in churches throughout the Commonwealth For eighteen years, Nazareth and Bethlehem bore the full financial burden of the Brethren's missionary work in North America. Moravian missionaries worked tirelessly to carry the message of Christ to Europeans and Native Americans in eastern North America. Zinzendorf himself spent two years attempting unsuccessfully to create a grand "Congregation of God in the Spirit" among all the German settlers of Pennsylvania. During his sixty-year career, Moravian missionary David Zeisberger converted hundreds of Lenape and Iroquois.
A view of the Moravian town of Nazareth, PA, circa 1761. Other colonists often viewed with concern and suspicion the close relations that Moravian missionaries were able to establish with Native American tribes that others feared. After Indian warriors attacked frontier settlements during the bloody French and Indian War of the mid 1700s, a group of vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys in 1763 massacred twenty Conestoga Indian men, women, and children, even though they were pacifist Christians. During the American Revolution, Moravian Indian converts again became victims of war when a band of vigilantes murdered and scalped another ninety-six of them.
Young Ladies' Seminary and Church, at Bethlehem, PA, by Gustavus Grunewald,... In 1818 the General Synod rejected the Pennsylvania Moravians' petition to bear arms during times of war, but did permit ending the practice of determining marriages by the casting of lots - yes, no, or blank - which Moravians had long practiced as a way to determine God's will.
Painting of a Moravian "single sister," Lehigh Valley, PA, circa 1840. Page 3And the multitude of those that believed were of one heart and one soul; neither said any of them that any of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. When William Penn in the 1680s opened his lands in North America as a haven for his fellow Quakers, he also offered it as a refuge to other Europeans who suffered persecution for their religious beliefs. Pennsylvania quickly became a multinational and multi-religious colony unlike any other in North America. Rich with natural resources and economic opportunities, it attracted English Anglicans, French Huguenots, Scottish and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Sephardic Jews.
Johannes Kelpius, by Christopher Witt, 1705. Among the religious refugees who immigrated to Pennsylvania were small groups of radical German-speaking Protestants who were determined to live apart from others. These religious communitarians believed that they constituted a separate and consecrated body that must live apart from the sinfulness of the world. Many wanted to recreate the simple lives and pure faith of the early Christians and to create autonomous states as independent as possible from outside civil or religious authority. The desire to distance themselves from the corruption of the world also had motivated the Pilgrims in their migration to Plymouth in 1620 and the great Puritan exodus to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. The English separatists who settled in New England, however, were no friends of religious pluralism.
Bakery (on left), Saal (Meetinghouse) and Saron (Sisters’ House), Ephrata... The 1730s witnessed the appearance in Pennsylvania of two pietist groups that would become deeply identified with Pennsylvania: the "Solitaries" and "Householders" of the Ephrata Cloister, a non-utopian sect, and the Amish. Founded in 1732 by Conrad Beissel, a German pietist who more than a decade before came to Pennsylvania to join Kelpius's monks, Ephrata won international renown as an economically self-sufficient and deeply spiritual community of celibate and married Christians. The Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata soon became well known among the German immigrants in Lancaster for their rigorous ascetic life, the services they provided the larger community, and their belief in the imminent return of Christ to the world. Emphasizing spiritual rather than material goals, the Brothers and Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister made important contributions to colonial life and culture. They ran an important printing operation and produced exquisite, hand-illuminated books and documents in the style known as Fraktur. The choir performed its renowned hymnal music in a hauntingly beautiful style designed to move listeners and singers alike to a state of mystical exaltation. In the late 1700s, an "offspring" of Ephrata formed at the base of the South Mountains in Pennsylvania's Franklin County. Although it bore little physical resemblance to the Cloister of Ephrata, the Snow Hill community carried the spirit of Beissel's movement into the 1890s. In 1736, a small group of Swiss Brethren known as the Amish, or followers of Jakob Ammann, established their first significant New World settlement at Northkill on the Berks County frontier. Insistent upon strict separation from the world and the expulsion and shunning of sinners, the Amish would thrive in Pennsylvania and, unlike the other German religious communitarians, maintain their separate communities to the present day. The Amish, like the Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, and Beissel's followers at Ephrata, were pacifists. Following Christ's self-sacrificial model and his Sermon on the Mount, their churches taught them to be willing to die, but not to kill for their beliefs. Maintaining their "non-association" with the local militias and their detachment from political affairs, however, proved problematic, especially during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution when their refusal to bear arms and attempts to remain politically neutral drew the anger of their neighbors and Pennsylvania's political and military leaders.
Joseph Smith, by Adrian Lamb, copy after unidentified artist, circa 1840. In the early nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Americans were swept up in religious revivals so widespread they became known as the Second Great Awakening. From the "Burned Over District" of western New York to the canebrakes of Kentucky, Americans followed new prophets and embraced new faiths, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose founder Joseph Smith, first worked on his translation of the Book of Mormon while living on his father-in-law's farm near Great Bend, Pennsylvania. In the isolated valley that surrounded the Great Salt Lake, the Mormons created an independent, theocratic state with its own government and army.
Horace Greeley, 1869 In the 1830s and early 1840s, thousands embraced the vision of millennialist preacher William Miller, who prophesized the Second Coming of Christ would occur in March 1843. In 1850 former Millerite Peter Armstrong led a small group of followers to the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania to found the community of Celestia. For more than thirty years Armstrong and his followers eagerly anticipated the return of their Savior. Like the Harmonists of western Pennsylvania, the residents of Celestia pooled their property and labor into a communistic economic system deeded to "Almighty God and to his heirs in Jesus Messiah" to better prepare themselves for Christ's imminent return. Secular efforts to accelerate human progress in the world through communitarian principles also arose during the early 1800s. Among the most significant was that promoted by English industrialist Robert Owen, who in 1824 bought the Harmonists' abandoned community in Indiana and attempted to build a socialist utopia that would serve as a model for the world. Owen's "New Harmony" experiment quickly failed, but the dream lived on as social theorists and reformers on both sides of the Atlantic designed communitarian models for a more perfect human society.Alfred Brisbane initiated another communitarian movement in the 1840s, when he introduced Americans to the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier in his best-selling book, The Social Destiny of Man. In a wave of enthusiasm, American Fourierists launched more than forty rural "phalanxes" during that decade, modeled on Brisbane's Americanized version of Fourier's ideas. The first of these, financed by The Sylvania Society, took shape on thirty two thousand acres bordering the Delaware River in Pike County, Pennsylvania. Few American phalanxes lasted more than a year or two, but a handful, including Brooks Farm in Massachusetts, gripped the imaginations of people seeking peaceful and voluntary ways to perfect the human condition. The rapid failure of these antebellum utopias did not end the search for communitarian solutions to human problems. An exploding population, rapid industrialization, and the rising cost of land did, however, make it harder to buy land for large settlements. In the 1870s German Hutterites set up communities on the northern Great Plains, and splinter groups of United Order Mormons formed communities that for a short time rejected private property. Small cooperative associations of spiritualists, perfectionists, brotherhoods, sanctified Sisters, and others appeared and disappeared across the United States.
The Divine Lorraine Hotel, Philadelphia, PA., 2008. In the early 1930s, African-American evangelist Father Divine created an urban, multiracial, international religious community that sought to cultivate loving relations between the races, and encouraged its members to work hard, avoid debt, pay taxes, and resist Communism. During the Great Depression his Peace Mission Movement provided badly needed goods and services for people in need, regardless of their race. In the 1940s Father Divine relocated from New York to the Philadelphia suburb of Gladwyne. In Philadelphia, the Peace Mission opened the Divine Lorraine Hotel on North Broad Street, one of the first, high-quality integrated hotels in the City of Brotherly Love. In the second half of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania continued to be home to a growing diversity of what increasingly were referred to as "intentional" communities. In the 1960s and early 1970s people embracing the values of the anti-consumerist American "counter-culture" banded together in communes in the Pocono Mountains and along the banks of the Delaware River. Followers of Indian yogi Amrit Desai moved to his Hindu Ashram at Sumneytown in Berks County, where many embraced celibacy and donated their labor, wages, and assets to the community.
Amish farmer, Lancaster, PA, circa 2000. Page 4Religious splits among Christians during the Protestant Reformation caused violent upheavals and devastating wars that remade the map of Europe. For centuries afterwards, the Roman Catholic and established Protestant churches feared religious separatists, that is, individuals who invoked the principle of personal faith and refused to respect established religious authorities, for they threatened the stability of both church and state. Yet since the time of John Hus's heretical views in the early fifteenth century, the German states had remained hotbeds of religious fervor and dissent.
George Rapp, founder of the Harmony Society. In the days that followed, Rapp and his followers baptized their children within their own fellowship and refused to send them to the local schools, refused to swear oaths, worked on the customary Sabbath, and insisted that God had forbidden them to attend Lutheran church services. Rapp declared that he no longer considered the local pastor a servant of God and that Lutheran ministers could no longer forgive sins.
Old Economy, Ambridge, PA, 2010. By 1803, Rapp had boldly declared himself the bishop of a separatist evangelical movement that was spreading through neighboring towns. Fearing the crackdown that was sure to follow, in that year Rapp sailed to Pennsylvania to find a new home for his flock, where they could prepare in peace for the Second Coming of Christ and "end of days" that Rapp believed was imminent. After an initial scouting trip, Rapp wrote back to Germany that he was sure "God has prepared a little place for us" in a land where "they want you to think and believe what you wish."
Economy, Rapp's Colony on the Ohio, watercolor on paper, by Johann Karl Bodmer,... Responding to his call, more than 500 followers sold all their possessions and booked passage to the New World. On a sunny July morning in 1804, three hundred Lutheran separatists from Wurttemberg, Germany, disembarked at the port of Baltimore after a long, arduous journey. Soon joined by another 260 who had arrived at the port of Philadelphia, the immigrants made their way to western Pennsylvania, where they proceeded to clear the wilderness and build a "community of equality" where members held all goods and property in common. They called their new home Harmony. Here they lived and worshipped for ten years while waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. Rapp held that Jesus taught and commanded a community of goods. In 1805 the Harmonists signed Articles of Association by which they granted all property to Rapp and his associates, who in turn agreed to provide them with "all the necessities of life." Two years later the faithful of Harmony embraced celibacy so that they might be better prepared for the end of days. They buried those who died in the Harmony Society Cemetery without headstones, or even mounds to distinguish graves, so that none could take precedence over another.
The Harmonist Church, Economy, PA, circa 1880.
Swiss View of New Harmony, Indiana, by Johann karl Bodmer, 1832. Oversight of the community was divided between Rapp, who attended to members' spiritual lives, and his adopted son, Frederick Reichart Rapp, who ran the Association's business and temporal affairs until his death in 1834, when he was succeeded first by Jacob Henrici and then by Jonathan Lenz. Agriculture always lay at the center of the Rappites' world, but to insure their self-sufficiency, the community embraced the latest labor-saving machinery for the manufacture of their clothing, food, drink -even the repair of watches and clocks.
Hired field workers cutting hay, Economy, PA, circa 1880. The Rappites began to attract visitors in the early 1820s. Indeed, by that time their reputation was so widespread that George Gordon Lord Byron satirized them in his epic poem, Don Juan. In the decades that followed, visitors from around the world made the trip to Economy to understand the communitarian principles that had created such economic success and social harmony. For in the rough and tumble world of nineteenth-century America, the town of Economy appeared an oasis of peace, stability, and order. As the scholar Charles Nordhoff observed in the 1870s, "Neatness and a Sunday quiet are the prevailing characteristics in Economy."
Elderly Harmonist woman–“An Economite”– in German dress, Economy, PA,... Upon Frederick Rapp's death in 1834, "Father" Rapp also took over the temporal affairs of Economy and was widely regarded as a practical, good-natured, active, and deeply spiritual leader. Each Sunday, sitting at a table on a platform in the sturdy brick Harmony Society Church, he preached a gospel of humility, simplicity, industriousness, self-sacrifice, prayer, and self-examination. Rapp held onto his belief in Christ's Second Coming to the end. On his death bed the ninety-year-old patriarch was reported to have said, "If I did not know that the dear Lord meant I should present you all to him, I should think my last moments come."
Harmonists Barbara Bosch and Franz Gillman, Economy, PA, circa 1902.
John Duss, circa 1900. When it was over, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court divided what remained of the Harmony Society estate between the Dusses and the Commonwealth, which used its share to purchase six acres of Economy and set up the Old Economy Memorial, an historic district of seventeen original Harmonist buildings now operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. |