Belief

Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before.

To understand America, you can start with Apollo 11 and all that is counterfactual that’s grown around it.

On the outsized role that Christians have played in the oil business.

A new take on the origins of our ideas about religious liberty.

Why some antebellum reformers thought convents were incompatible with "true womanhood."

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

How mapping Roman Catholic dioceses illustrates key concepts of religious ecologies at a continental scale.

Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten?

One emphasized the freedom to think; the other, in effect, the freedom to pray.

From prehistoric caves, through Aztecs, Mormons, Beat poets, Jean-Paul Sartre and a British MP.

A new book argues that, politically, messianic movements were often light-years ahead of their time. But at what cost?

A Q&A with author Katharine Gerbner about "Protestant Supremacy."

Islamophobes today ignore the long history and contributions of Muslim Americans.

On the many moments when white Christians could have interceded on behalf of racial justice, but did not.

Examining the life of Father Divine, the black preacher who called for the destruction of racial separation and claimed to be God.

Awakening from illness, the newly risen patient announced that Jemima had died and that her body had been requisitioned by God for the salvation of humankind.

Before the 1990s, evangelical Christians were busier resettling newly arrived refugees than trying to keep them out.

The fundamentalist movement took the war as an opportunity to rebrand.

While sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention has recently come to light, it's not new.

A dark chapter in the history of religious persecution.

How stories of abuse in minority religious communities have influenced American culture.

A review of Daniel T. Rodgers’ "As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon."

Smithsonian curator of religion Peter Manseau weighs in on a history that must be told.

For some Lebanese immigrants, religion was a comfort, providing a sense of home in an new world. For others, it was a constant reminder of what was left behind.

It was among the first social issues to split American Protestants into liberal and conservative camps.

A story of a philosopher, his sister, and belief.

"We are living in an age of historical reckoning," said Southern Baptist leader R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Remembering Howard Thurman and other forgotten activists.

Religious conservatives used the Bush presidency to launch their takeover of the GOP.

Our secular government is all tangled up with God. How did we get here?