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
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Famous quotes containing the word religious:
“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“... the generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)