In tiny Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, a handful of the bright green late-summer lawns are dotted with Oz for Senate campaign signs.
This idyllic, church community of fewer than 1,300 people includes families that go back generations to the town’s 1890s founding. Houses are passed down between family members, and many residents are related.
It’s not a place particularly used to — or excited by — media attention, but Mehmet Oz has roots in town through his wife’s family, and his move there in 2020 has put the Montgomery County town in the middle of the 2022 Senate race.
“It has caused a lot of attention to be put on Bryn Athyn,” said Mayor Kenneth Schauder, who is also a Bryn Athyn volunteer firefighter and its director of emergency management. “We’re private here, and I’d rather not be sitting here doing an interview right now, but I understand. It’s politics.”
Today, Bryn Athyn is politically split and going through its own cultural and political changes. In interviews with more than a dozen current and former residents, the topic of Oz’s candidacy provoked a range of emotions from gushing pride to indifference to embarrassment.
Mostly, though, people are protective of their community, known for its rolling hills, breathtaking cathedral and reputation as an ideal place to raise a family, even as conservative Christian values have clashed with more progressive ideas.
“We’re very small, we’re very friendly, so even if there were people that did not agree with Oz, they’re certainly not going to vocally oppose him,” said Nora Cooper, a longtime Bryn Athyn resident. “He’s a friend of the family.”
‘A typical Christian community’
Most of the 300 houses in Bryn Athyn borough don’t have mailboxes. Residents go to the post office on Fetters Mill Road near the old train tracks to snag their letters and packages while gabbing with friends and relatives they run into.
The college, the bakery, and the church are the other common gathering spaces. At a recent borough council meeting, the main agenda item was repaving the street outside the firehouse. The most striking incident in the police chief’s crime report was a tussle between an Uber driver and a rider who was angry about the route.
A lot of kids grow up with the same classmates from childhood through young adulthood. The General Church of the New Jerusalem, a denomination of Swedenborgianism, often referred to as the New Church, runs an elementary school, high school, and college.
“I think at points people were nervous about coming in,” said Andy Adams, who has lived in Bryn Athyn for the last 30 years. “They thought it was some type of religious cult, which it isn’t. It’s a typical Christian community.”
When Oz met and married Lisa Lemole in 1985, he married into a prominent family in that religious community, largely run by the church.
Lisa Oz’s mother is a minister, and her great-grandfather helped build the cathedral.
Her mother is a member of the Asplundh family, one of several highly successful families in town. The family’s tree business, Asplundh Tree Expert LLC, is one of the largest U.S. companies, with 34,000 employees and some $5 billion in revenues. The company is owned by about 200 Asplundh family members, who collectively are worth about $3 billion — and several have contributed generously to Oz’s campaign. The family is lauded across political parties by residents for their support of the town.
A spiritual connection
Bryn Athyn dates back to 1889, when Philadelphia industrialist John Pitcairn bought the land to establish a community for the New Church. The church bases its beliefs on the theological writings of 18th-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, a scientist by trade who asserted a spiritual awakening had allowed him to speak to angels and demons and glean details of God and the afterlife.
Although it is rooted in Christian beliefs and the Bible, Swedenborgianism arose along with other movements of the time that sought to reconcile spirituality and scientific rationality. From his visions, Swedenborg asserted that the Holy Trinity represented three elements of a singular “Divine person,” one all-powerful, loving God. Death is a transition to a spiritual plane similar to the living world, with heaven and hell regarded more as eternal states of being that are determined by the life one leads.
Oz was raised as a secular Muslim, but has said the faith influenced his approach to both spirituality and his medical practice.
“As a physician, I seek to connect with my patients on both the physical and spiritual levels, since true healing is never about curing just the body,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Although I rarely mention him by name, Swedenborg has made this easier for me.”
The branch in Bryn Athyn is just one of several within the larger church organization, and there are Swedenborgian communities in Pittsburgh, Maryland and Massachusetts. Although more than 90% of Bryn Athyn residents are church members, today these branches count their adherents in the low thousands.
In recent years, the Academy has started accepting students from outside of the religion, and some homes are going up for sale on the open market. The religious community prides itself on emphasizing service and charity and, though mostly upper middle class, also has lower-income residents.
“We are religious-based, and we are trying to open up,” Schauder said. “We understand that 5,000 people in our church is not sustainable forever, so we have to find out ways to open up our church to be more accepting and try to figure out how to bring people in.”
Does Oz live here?
Questions about Oz’s residency have dogged his campaign — the couple lived in New Jersey for decades — but in interviews with more than a dozen residents, the consensus was that Oz does have a presence in town. They see him jogging on the Pennypack trail, walking the college campus, and pulling in and out of the home where he’s staying. He attended a pig roast with neighbors in July.
“When he’s not out on the road in Pennsylvania, he’s home,” said Adams, a family friend who lives a two-minute walk from the home where Oz is staying. “I literally take a walk almost every night, and his cars are in his driveways.”
Several people interviewed were skeptical Oz spends a majority of evenings there, but he’s also maintaining a grueling campaign schedule — more than 100 events in the last few months alone.
His visits before he became a candidate were less frequent, residents said, and mostly around the holidays.
Asked in an interview what Bryn Athyn means to him, Oz said, “It’s home.”
It’s where he married his wife and where they spent many weekends when they were first living in West Philadelphia, he said.
His kids grew up visiting their grandparents’ Bryn Athyn horse farm. And the family would return for holidays and attend church services. Oz said part of moving back was to be closer to his wife’s parents as they got older. Oz’s mother now lives in Turkey.
“It’s just bucolic to go home and be with people, good souls trying to do the right thing raising families,” Oz said. “It’s just a fantastic place if you want to have a straight-up life where you know a lot of people around you and you can get anywhere you want.”
The Ozes purchased a 34-acre property in Lower Moreland, bordering Bryn Athyn, from the church that includes an eight-bedroom manor, and was once owned by members of the founding Pitcairn family. In the sale, Oz inked a buyback clause that stipulates the church has right of first refusal should he ever decide to sell. He also agreed not to develop the property, which already receives an open-space tax break in exchange for preserving acres of forestland.
Jeremy Finkeldey, who lives down the road from the home the Ozes bought, sees the relocation as a political move that might not be permanent.
“Oz has never lived in Bryn Athyn,” Finkledey said. “He married into a Bryn Athyn family and after he decided to run for our Senate seat vacated by Toomey, he bought Michael Pitcairn’s old place ... and put up two Oz signs at the end of the driveway.”
Oz does not currently live in the home, which he’s said still needs renovations. So far, no construction permits have been filed in Lower Moreland.
The politics of Bryn Athyn
In Bryn Athyn, church and town leadership are intricately connected and skew conservative.
“This is a Republican town. Everyone on Borough Council is a registered Republican, so I think we like him,” Schauder said of Oz’s overall reception in town.
“I think he’s a good choice. I think he cares about people and he’ll do a good job,” said Sue Odhner, who’s lived in Bryn Athyn for 45 years. “He believes in the values I believe in.”
However, the borough has become more Democratic in recent years, along with Montgomery County as a whole. Nearby town councils in Upper Moreland and Hatboro recently flipped from Republican. And while local politics leans more conservative, Bryn Athyn narrowly voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
In June, Bryn Athyn’s newly formed Gay Straight Alliance held a Pride demonstration targeting clergy members who had a history of anti-LGBTQ statements. The fight for LGBTQ inclusion along with a more active role for women in the church has led to some tension in the town.
“With a community like Bryn Athyn that has been so insular and conservative for so many years, when you do visibly start to see that change, it’s notable,” said Alaina Johns, whose grandfather, Highland Johns, was mayor of Bryn Athyn from 1984 to 2010. She attended two years of boarding school and college there.
To Johns, the movement reflects a thawing of the fear more progressive residents had of speaking out. And she sees a direct link between the group’s fight for LGBTQ rights and women’s rights, and the 2022 Senate election.
Being able to win back places like Bryn Athyn — wealthy Pennsylvania suburbs that have trended blue — is something political pundits saw as a potential strength early on for Oz, who was a familiar daytime TV face. But some members of the community who know and respect his family have struggled as the candidate adopted talking points that aimed to appeal to pro-Trump primary voters.
“At the beginning I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt,” said Lamar Goodenough, on Oz’s embrace of a more right-wing platform. “Honestly, my take was, he’s got to be smarter than Trump, right? But I see his gun ads and the whole Trump endorsement, and I just wonder, ‘What are you thinking?’”
Luke David, a 28-year-old who has lived in Bryn Athyn for a decade, worries about the perception the town gets from the outside as Oz claims it as his home.
“Our little town defines itself by its theology, scholarship, and community,” David said. “The only part of Bryn Athyn he might represent is the wealthy and out of touch, which, frankly, isn’t how I’d hope the town would be known.... As much as he might be my spiritual neighbor, he sure isn’t my physical neighbor.”
‘The real deal’
Political debates in Bryn Athyn are typically reserved for Facebook but on a recent afternoon at the post office, feelings about Oz were mixed. Blane Bostock, a local musician who had biked over to get his mail, scoffed at Oz’s candidacy.
“Please, a doctor with no political experience? Forget about it,” he said. “ ... We need people that have had some training, you know?”
A few minutes later, Oz supporter Peter Coy said people like Bostock have the wrong idea about his friend of nearly three decades.
“People think he’s some Hollywood doctor. He’s a real cardiothoracic surgeon, and he’s a brilliant mind,” said Coy, who had Oz at his birthday in April. “The thing with Mehmet is he’s like the real deal.”
Coy, who switched his party registration from Independent to vote for Oz in the primary, said he likes that Oz isn’t a lifelong politician, or a “swamp rat,” as he dubs them.
”I think he’d be a great senator,” he said.
Justin Rose, 39, whose roommate is a cousin of Oz’s, said he loves the Oz family, whose philanthropy he credits with his education, but he lowered his voice to say he’s voting for Fetterman in the fall.
“Bryn Athyn is really unique,” Rose said. “If you just assume, ’They’re rich, they’ll vote Republican,’ we’ll surprise you, because we’ve got middle-class people here, progressive people here.”
Rose, who works in social services, also thinks the town's residents “think deeper” than your average voters.
“In our town, we’re taught that life is eternal so the truth is, like — this stuff doesn’t matter,” Rose said. “It’s what you do while you’re here. I’m political, and I’ll vote but like, 10,000 years from now, you’re gonna ask me, ‘Who became the senator?’
“What’s a senator?”
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(Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Ryan Briggs contributed to this report.)
