History of the Movement

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Notable Swedenborgians

Swedenborgian Church of North America: A Brief History

black and white picture of the New Jerusalem Temple

The Swedenborgian movement began in Sweden, France, and England in the 1780s. The first Swedenborgian church was registered in England in 1787, and the artist William Blake was one of the members of that first church.

Swedenborgian thought spread through the efforts of many people, including John Chapman (1774-1845) who was also known as Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed is most well known for all of the apple trees that he planted in the Midwest, as well as for spreading “good news, right fresh from heaven.” He would give away pieces of Swedenborg’s theological writings as he traveled.

Swedenborgians became known for believing in: the oneness of God, the afterlife, a deeper meaning to the Bible, and the importance of living a good life. Swedenborg’s writings were very popular at that time in the United States. Notable Swedenborgians include William Blake, Charles Bonney, John Chapman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Helen Keller, Dr. Kristine Mann, Howard Pyle, Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, and Eliza Tibbets.

Except in rare years of national emergencies, an annual summer convention has been held since the first one in 1817. In fact, prior to changing their name, the church was called the “General Convention of the New Jerusalem.” It is at this convention that ideas are shared, business meetings are held, policies are created, and elections of the officers of the church are voted upon. Each church/region sends a delegation of members to vote on denominational business.

The Swedenborgian Church of North America ordained their first female minister in 1975, and their first openly gay minister in 1997. The organization in North America consists of many different churches who follow Swedenborg’s theology. Its spiritually rich and inclusive ministries can be found throughout North America and online.

Swedenborgian Church of North America: A History by Rev. Dr. Jim Lawrence (2021)

The Swedenborgian movement had beginnings in Europe, which helped to grow interest in Swedenborg’s radical critique of the older Christian traditions. Created in Avignon in 1773 by the Marquis de Thorn and involving such well-known figures as Benedict Chastanier and Abbe Pernety, French Freemasonry provided the first organizational toe-hold with a Swedenborg Rite comprised of six Degrees (Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Neophyte, Illuminated Theosophite, Blue Brother, and Red Brother). Carl Bernhard Wadström converted as a young man to Swedenborg’s view of Christianity through his engagements with the first Swedish publishing efforts, started a society in 1779 in Norköpping, Sweden. Later as an emigrant to England he became a central figure in the British abolition movement and shaped an anti-slavery program influenced by his reading of Swedenborg. In the first ecclesiastical church movement through a meeting that included the artist William Blake, the Swedenborgian church launched, organized, and registered in England as a non-Conformist dissenting sect in 1787.

A New Church in the New World

Dozens of schisms in Protestant mainline traditions and new alternative Christian movements unfolded in the 19th century as part of a rapidly growing diversity of Christian expressions in the United States after the Revolutionary War. A visiting Scotsman, James Glen, gave the first American public lectures in 1794 on Swedenborg’s “New Church” Christianity in Philadelphia. His deposit of boxes of Swedenborg’s theology books led to numerous reading circles that became congregations. In 1817, this growing “New Church” organized into a denominational movement, and the Swedenborgian Church of North America was born. The focus on publications proclaiming the way toward a New Church spurred a joke that “Swedenborgians believe in salvation by publication,” so it may be significant that the first socially prominent American Swedenborgian in America was the renowned Revolutionary War printer, Francis Bailey, to whom the Founding Fathers turned to publish the Articles of Confederation (the first American Constitution). He proved useful by printing the first Swedenborgian tract literature in America and by becoming the first American printer for Swedenborg’s writings. His political radicalism had helped his printing business thrive, but he later lamented that his religious radicalism damaged his business over time.

Johnny Appleseed: Swedenborgian Missionary on the Frontier

As Swedenborgian outreach of thought sprouted vigorously, apple trees in the westward expansion were also sprouting—a double-sprouting through the labor of Swedenborg’s most colorful advocate, John Chapman (1774-1845), better known as Johnny Appleseed. American law required 50 apple trees per land grant. On his many plots of land especially in Ohio and Indiana, he raised thousands of small groves of saplings that could be transported and replanted for the incoming settlers. In addition to apple tree saplings, he also carried bundles of pages from Swedenborg’s books and engaged in open air preaching about New Church Christianity. He was known far and wide, and the Midwest became a stronghold of early Swedenborgianism. Instrumental in helping the first Swedenborgian college to spring up in Urbana, Ohio, there is still today a Johnny Appleseed museum especially devoted to school children in Urbana.

Herding Cats: A Centralized Convention

As the fledgling new religion expanded, desires for a stronger organizational approach slowly developed during the 19th century. Viewpoints on the evolution of denominational government led to many experiments in regional attempts for organization that often resulted in varying styles and approaches among the various regions. Thomas Worcester, founder and pastor for forty years of the well-known Beacon Hill church in Boston and also founding visionary and president of what became and remains the theological school for the movement, rallied the cause for greater central organization. In 1838 he tried to carry out an episcopal form of church government upon the diffuse movement through what infamously became known as “the squeezing rule.” At the 22^nd convention his resolution was passed that required all churches to formalize according to a new Rule of Order by the following year or be dropped from the rolls of the denomination. All heaven broke loose with new breakaway regional organizations called the Western Convention and the Central Convention to rival Worcester’s New England-centered home base increasingly referred to as the Eastern Convention. Interestingly, the Western Convention represented the least interest in centralized government, whereas the Central Convention represented even more commitment to centralized government than Worcester. It took decades for it all to settle down. When it did the spirit of the General Convention of the New Jerusalem (the formal name of the Swedenborgian Church of North America) insisted on a decentralized congregational polity over a centralized episcopal one, but the core of the Central Convention became the sprouting root that finally led to the eventual secession in 1890 that became the second American Swedenborgian denomination, the General Church of the New Jerusalem with an episcopal form of government.

A Widening Arc of Swedenborgian Contributions

Christian disputes around theology and doctrine dominated 19th-century America, and Swedenborgians were in the thick of it, becoming especially known for teachings about life after death, a “oneness” or one person approach to the Christian Trinity, a lived regeneration rather than a fixed salvation, and a key to unlocking the inner sense of the Bible. Social scientific studies of American religion show that by the end of the 19th century, Swedenborg and Swedenborgians had become widely recognized and household names, and it is commonly noted by religion historians that Swedenborgian reach into cultural thought far exceeded the church’s numerical size. As Yale church history professor Sydney Ahlstrom writes, “Of all the unconventional currents streaming through the many levels of American religion during [the 19th century], none proved attractive to more diverse types of dissenters from established denominations than those which stemmed from Emanuel Swedenborg. His influence was seen everywhere: in Transcendentalism and at Brook Farm, in spiritualism and the free love movement, in the craze for communitarian experiments, in faith healing, mesmerism, and a half-dozen medical cults; among great intellectuals, crude charlatans, and innumerable frontier quacks.”

Another factor explaining the cultural reach of Swedenborgian thought lies in the impressive roster major figures in cultural thought who have found enrichment through engaging Swedenborg’s visionary big cosmos: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Johann Goethe, Edgar Guest, Judith Nathaniel Hawthorne, Heinrich Heine, Johann Herder, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, George Inness, Henry James, Sr., Helen Keller, Sheridan Le Fanu, Vachel Lindsay, George MacDonald, Edwin Markham, Czeslaw Milosz, Raymond Moody, John Frederic Oberlin, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Coventry Patmore, Edgar Allan Poe, Hiram Powers, Howard Pyle, Kathleen Raine, Friedrich Schelling, Arnold Schoenberg, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sadhu Sundar Singh, August Strindberg, D. T. Suzuki, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats. The richness of Swedenborg’s ideas on a vast cosmos with many dimensions and the nature of authentic spiritual formation has consistently provided a springboard for creative thought.

A recent article by Fodor on the 16 most fascinating churches to visit in America includes two remarkable examples of Swedenborgian architecture: Wayfarers Chapel in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church. In both instances, a renowned group of architects, that include Lloyd Wright and Bernard Maybeck, followed Swedenborg’s discussion of the spiritual dimension of nature to shape contemplative expressions of sacred space that continue to draw many thousands of visitors a year.

Swedenborgians as Pioneers in Pluralism and Ecumenicity

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 made an immense impression on American consciousness, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in association with it attracted world-wide attention. It was the brainchild of prominent Chicago lawyer and Swedenborgian Charles Carroll Bonney, often on the short list for Supreme Court nominees and legendary for his work in fair labor practices for new immigrants. Bonney shaped an early powerful pluralist vision for the religious dimension of human culture worldwide, and he drew primarily from Swedenborgian theology for this early great step in religious pluralism. He later wrote, “During the organization and conduct of the World’s Congresses of 1893, I was led to feel that all my life had been a preparation for this work; and that in a thousand ways provision had been made for its extraordinary needs.”

Historian Richard Seager refers to Bonney’s inspiration and organizational work as “the dawn of religious pluralism.” Of the 250 congresses, the Parliament of the World’s Religions is the only one that is still going today. It was first revived at its centennial in 1993, and the planning committee expressly asked for Swedenborgian participation because, in the words of the request letter, “We owe Swedenborgians so much.” Several gatherings have occurred since then, such as the 2015 gathering in Salt Lake City that drew nearly 10,000 attendees from 73 countries, 30 Major Religions, and 548 Sub-Traditions.

The National Council of Churches formed in 1950 largely as a movement to address social concerns together as Christians in the country. Originally, 32 communions joined, though five more have been added since then, including the Swedenborgian Church of North America, which was accepted in 1967 despite having a membership total less than the usual threshold of 50,000 members. A recent book on the New York Times Bestseller List, The Secret History of the World, by Mark Booth remarks that the Swedenborgian Church is the only esoteric spiritual tradition that has been included in the NCC membership.

Radical Inclusivity in the New Age

The Swedenborgian Church of North America has been part of the progressive movement toward inclusivity in culture by ordaining its first woman in 1975 and its first openly gay ordinand in 1997. At the 1986 annual meeting of the Council of Ministers, the following Standing Resolution was adopted unanimously: “In light of the inclusiveness of the vision of the Holy City, New Jerusalem, from which our theological perspective is drawn, the Council of Ministers believes that the central consideration in evaluating requests for ordination is the quality of the ministry that it believes the individual is capable of providing.” In other words, the Swedenborgian Church of North America does not ordain women or men, straight people or gay people, people of a particular race, ethnicity, or class: it ordains individuals who are prepared and trained to provide skillful ministry in a world of complex spiritual needs.

The effort to find new expressions and uses has been persistent and has bloomed new forms of worship, spiritual articulations, and ministry in addition to long-serving traditional expressions. The multi-generational family camps have proven immensely popular, and new ministries have shaped new wineskins for a new abundance. The Swedenborgian Church of North America continues to be open to how it can be a part of and contribute to the unfolding New Church and New Age.