Skip to main content

A Moral Minority

March 2023
1min read

Perhaps for the first time in our history, two members of the President’s cabinet attend the same small country church. Contributor John Maass of Philadelphia points out that Secretary of Health and Human Services Richard S. Schweiker and Secretary of Transportation Andrew L. Lewis are both active members of the Central Schwenkfelder Church in Worcester, Pennsylvania. “The Schwenkfelders are one of the smallest denominations in the United States,” he writes.“They have only five churches in southeastern Pennsylvania and 2,748 members.

“Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1490–1561) was a worldly German nobleman of Silesia who gave up his career as a courtier to become a dedicated preacher and reformer. In a time of cruel bigotry Schwenckfeld pleaded for peace, tolerance, and ecumenism: ‘A true Christian life is not bound to place, time, vestment, person, meats, and similarly purely formal matter. Quite the contrary,’ he said, ‘it consists in the individual trust in God.’ His followers were persecuted by both Catholics and Lutherans and finally fled their homes to seek refuge in the Quakers’ Pennsylvania, where all creeds were welcomed. The Schwenkfelders’ Mayflower was the St. Andrew , which brought 164 Germans to Philadelphia on September 22, 1734. Two days later they held a Thanksgiving service. Their descendants still celebrate that day with a traditional meal of bread, apple butter, and cider. Schwenckfeld’s followers in Europe died out long ago, but the American Schwenkfelder Church prospers. American scholars worked for sixty-three years to collect and publish Schwenckfeld’s writings in nineteen thick volumes. The Schwenkfelders have always stood for the separation of church and state, and they send their children to the public schools. What makes an American join such a minute community? The very smallness may be an asset: to be a Schwenkfelder is like belonging to one big family.

“The recent history of the First Schwenkfelder Church of Philadelphia also tells something of these people’s spirit. Founded in 1898, the church stood in what is now called ‘a changing neighborhood.’ After old Pastor Kriebel died, the membership dwindled to fifteen, but the Schwenkfelders refused to give up their church. In 1974 they recruited a minister who was working with juvenile gangs. Now the Reverend T. Arnold Brooker ministers to a congregation of 250 black Schwenkfelders.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "August/september 1981"

Authored by: Martha C. Brown

America’s First Native Cookbook

Authored by: The Editors

A preview of a magnificent private collection of nineteenth-century art

Authored by: Richard Reinhardt

This puckish, nearly forgotten California architect built his own distinctive style on the simple principle that beauty alone endures

Authored by: Joseph J. Corn

The Rise and Fall of a Most American Dream

Authored by: Nat Brandt

In the Meuse-Argonne, this backwoods pacifist did what Marshal Foch saw as “the greatest thing accomplished by any private’ soldier of all the armies of Europe.”

Authored by: Peter Andrews

How a Courtly Game Became Big Business

Authored by: The Editors

The Forgotten Photographs of Nancy Ford Cones

Authored by: T. H. Watkins

A HERITAGE PRESERVED

Authored by: Walter Karp

How the happy combination of a millionaire and, a parson gave us Colonial Williamsburg, a place of surpassing loveliness—and a continuing reminder of what a truly bold enterprise our Revolution was

Authored by: John H. White, Jr.

The John Bull Steams Again

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.