Religious
- Conrad Beissel – religious leader who in 1732 founded the Ephrata Community in Pennsylvania
- August Ernst – former president of Northwestern University and ordained minister
- Raymond Philip Etteldorf – Roman Catholic Archbishop and author
- George J. Geis — Baptist missionary in Kachin State, Burma.
- Barbara Heck – 1768 – founder of the first Methodist church in New York
- Samuel Hirsch – philosopher and rabbi
- Adolf Hoenecke – served as the head of Wisconsin Synod congregations from 1878 – 1908
- Arthur W. Hummel, Sr. – Christian missionary to China and Sinologist
- Johannes Kelpius – Pietist, mystic, musician, and writer, interested in the occult, botany, and astronomy, came to believe with his followers in the "Society of the Woman in the Wilderness"
- Kathryn Kuhlman – 20th Century faith healer and Pentecostal arm of Protestant Christianity
- Barbara Heinemann Landmann – spiritual leader of the Amana Colonies
- Alexander Mack – Germantown, Pennsylvania New World religious leader
- Christian Metz – inspirationalist
- Henry Moeller – Roman Catholic archbishop of Cincinnati
- Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg – Lutheran clergyman
- Richard John Neuhaus – clergyman (first a Lutheran pastor and then a Roman Catholic priest), theologian, and ethicist
- St. John Neumann – Bishop of Philadelphia (1852–60) and the first American bishop to be canonized
- Reinhold Niebuhr – Protestant theologian best known for his work relating the Christian faith to the realities of modern politics and diplomacy.
- George Rapp – founder of the religious sect called Harmonists, Harmonites, Rappites, or the Harmony Society
- George Erik Rupp – educator and theologian, the former President of Rice University and later of Columbia University, and president of the International Rescue Committee
- Theodore Schneider – was the second bishop of the Metropolitan Washington, D.C. Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
- Francis Xavier Seelos – Roman Catholic martyred priest
- Joseph Stephan – Roman Catholic priest, Union Army chaplain, Indian agent and director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions from 1885 to 1901
- Joseph Strub – founder of what is today Duquesne University, which was called the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost until 1911
- Paul Tillich – Protestant theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher
- C. F. W. Walther – Lutheran clergyman, professor, seminary president, editor, and first president of The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod
- Donald Wuerl – prelate of the Roman Catholic Church
- Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf – founded the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his daughter Benigna organized the school which would become Moravian College
Read more about this topic: List Of German Americans
Famous quotes containing the word religious:
“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Each religious sect has its own physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This philosophy of hate, of religious and racial intolerance, with its passionate urge toward war, is loose in the world. It is the enemy of democracy; it is the enemy of all the fruitful and spiritual sides of life. It is our responsibility, as individuals and organizations, to resist this.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)