Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
States & Territories

Pennsylvania

Northeast

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William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a holy experiment in religious toleration for his fellow Quakers, and Philadelphia grew into colonial America's most religiously diverse city as a result, drawing German Lutheran, Reformed and Anabaptist settlers alongside the founding Quakers. Lancaster County's Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, descended from those German and Swiss Anabaptist settlers, remain the largest and most visible plain sect population in the country, still farming without electricity or automobiles within an hour of Philadelphia's suburbs.

Facts
Identity
Jurisdiction Status
U.S. state 1
Religion
Leading Religious Affiliation
Catholic 2
Pennsylvania: Catholic is 22% of adults, ahead of Nothing in particular at 20%. Margin of error plus or minus 3.6 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/pennsylvania/
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 1
Founded by William Penn as a refuge for Quakers and other dissenters, Pennsylvania's colonial and state constitutions guaranteed liberty of conscience and never established a state church.
Geography
Census Region
Northeast 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
Latin for Penn's woods, named by King Charles II in honor of Admiral Sir William Penn, father of the colony's founder. 1
Learn More
A Holy Experiment and the Plain Sects That Outlasted It

William Penn had been imprisoned in England for his Quaker preaching before he ever received the royal charter that let him found Pennsylvania in 1681, and the colony he built was a direct answer to that experience, a holy experiment guaranteeing liberty of conscience to any settler who believed in one God, a bar low enough to draw far more than his fellow Quakers. Philadelphia grew rapidly into colonial America's most religiously mixed city as German Lutheran, German Reformed and Anabaptist families arrived alongside the founding Quakers, three traditions that shared a historic peace church commitment to nonviolence even where they differed sharply in worship and theology.

The Anabaptist strand of that settlement proved the most durable. Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in Lancaster County descend directly from Swiss and German settlers fleeing persecution in the eighteenth century, and their continued rejection of automobiles, public electrical grid connection and other technology, what the community calls its Ordnung, is a deliberate theological choice about maintaining separation from the world rather than a failure to modernize, renegotiated generation by generation rather than fixed once and left unchanged. Scholarship on the community stresses the choice is selective rather than blanket, since many Amish households use battery power, hire motorized transportation from non Amish neighbors and adopt specific technologies once a congregation judges them compatible with staying separate. Lancaster County today holds the largest and most visible concentration of plain sect life in the country, still farming within an hour of Philadelphia's suburbs three centuries after Penn's charter made room for the first of them.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "incorporated in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, engaging in religious, charitable, social, philanthropic and relief work in the United States and other countries on behalf of participating yearly..."

Source American Friends Service Committee (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "incorporated in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, engaging in religious, charitable, social, philanthropic and relief work on behalf of participating yearly meetings and other bodies of the..."

Source American Friends Service Committee (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Weller and Baker LLP (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), covering the years ended 30 September 2024 and 2023."

Americas, Continents

This source names Americas directly: "William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a holy experiment in religious toleration for his fellow Quakers, and Philadelphia grew into colonial America's most religiously diverse city as a..."

Source The Riddle of Amish CultureDonald B. Kraybill
Amish, Denominations

This source names Amish directly: "Lancaster County's Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, descended from those German and Swiss Anabaptist settlers, remain the largest and most visible plain sect population in the country..."

Source The Riddle of Amish CultureDonald B. Kraybill

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Brooklyn, New York, the dedication of the Hicks Street and Columbia Heights properties on 31 January 1909, and the Reception Day the Society held there..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "guide on Roman Catholicism in western Pennsylvania records that a February 1967 student retreat organized by Ralph Keifer and William Storey at the Ark and the Dove retreat center, attended by..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "He died on February 18, 1836, on the Pennsylvania land grant that bore his name."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "historian Melvin Small, now based at Pennsylvania State University, that systematically compiles data on interstate and civil wars since 1816, including coded battle death totals for each combatant."

Source Correlates of War Project: Battle Deaths DataCorrelates of War Project

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, independently corroborating the date, location and the blended Moravian and Anglican liturgy."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, formally inaugurating full communion between the Episcopal Church and the Moravian Church's Northern and Southern Provinces, naming the..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "congregations across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland."

Source Presbytery Of Philadelphia (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Harrisburg, Cities

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "cotton quilt made by an unidentified Pennsylvania maker between 1890 and 1910, held in the permanent collection of the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont under accession number 2006-13.10, a..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Headquartered in Akron, Pennsylvania, and jointly operated today by Mennonite Central Committee U.S."

Source Mennonite Central Committee (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "MCC incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1937 and is headquartered in Akron, Pennsylvania, jointly operated today with Mennonite Central Committee Canada."

Source Mennonite Central Committee (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "audited by Brown Plus (Lancaster, Pennsylvania), covering the years ended 31 March 2025 and 2024."

Source Mennonite Central Committee U.S. and Subsidiaries: Consolidated Financial Statements, Years Ended March 31, 2025 and 2024Mennonite Central Committee U.S. and Subsidiaries; audited by Brown Plus

This source names Mennonites directly: "William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681 as a holy experiment in religious toleration for his fellow Quakers, and Philadelphia grew into colonial America's most religiously diverse city as a..."

Source The Riddle of Amish CultureDonald B. Kraybill

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Ten years after Pennsylvania militia massacred ninety six Christian Lenape at the Moravian mission of Gnadenhutten in 1782, and roughly a century before Moravian missionaries founded the Bethel..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "a statewide grand jury convened by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, examining six Catholic dioceses (Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton) over roughly..."

Source Report 1 of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury (Pennsylvania)40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "On 8 March 1782, a Pennsylvania militia under Colonel David Williamson, seeking revenge for raids the Gnadenhutten Lenape had played no part in, disarmed the community under a pretense of friendship..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Henry Muhlenberg organized in Pennsylvania in 1742, and marks the continent's first Lutheran congregation rather than its first durable denominational structure, a distinction historians of American..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "a statewide grand jury convened by the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, examining six Catholic dioceses (Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton, together..."

Source Report 1 of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury (Pennsylvania)40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004, including a direct scholarly assessment of the claimed continuity between Grimassi's Stregheria and documented Italian folk magical practice."

Source Sabina Magliocco, Witching CultureSabina Magliocco

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "later official inquiry (John Jay, the Pennsylvania grand jury, Ryan, Murphy, the Royal Commission) went on to document independently."

Source The Boston Globe Spotlight Team's Investigation of Clergy Sexual AbuseThe Boston Globe Spotlight Team (Walter V. Robinson, Michael Rezendes, Sacha Pfeiffer, Matt Carroll)

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "retreat center in nearby Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, held from 17 to 19 February 1967 for about twenty five students from Duquesne and La Roche College."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "six Christian Lenape converts by Pennsylvania militia on 8 March 1782 and the annual Day of Remembrance the Gnadenhutten Historical Park and Museum now holds with the Delaware Nation each March."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "in America's own archive in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, publishes this account of the Bible of Kralice in its newsletter This Month in Moravian History, documenting Jan Blahoslav's 1564 New Testament..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to formally inaugurate a full communion relationship between the two denominations."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "denominational press, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania."

Source A. W. Tozer (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Collier of the Court of Common Pleas for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, granted a charter to Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society on 13 December 1884, recorded two days later on 15 December 1884..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Brooklyn, New York, judging the larger city a stronger base for expanding the international preaching work."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "congregation towns, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, United States, founded in 1741; Herrnhut in Saxony, Germany, founded in 1722; and Gracehill in Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, founded in 1759, to..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania documents the 1909 move to Brooklyn in institutional detail, including the incorporation of the People's Pulpit Association as a separate New York..."

This source names Pennsylvania directly: "the hundredth anniversary of its 1884 Pennsylvania charter, documents the Society's incorporation and its charter's stated purpose, the dissemination of Bible truths through tracts, pamphlets..."

Principal Tradition Of

Roman Catholicism, Denominations

Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey.

Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
The Riddle of Amish Culture
Donald B. Kraybill, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001View the Source
Amish Society
John A. Hostetler, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
A Religious History of the American People
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University Press, 1972View the Source
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