Belief

What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times?

"Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century" by Geoffrey R. Stone.

The story of a spiritual visionary who in 1884, set out to create a colony of orphans in the New Mexico desert.

Leigh Eric Schmidt profiles the nineteenth century's notable "village atheists."

In a new book, a historian explores the American fascination with conversion, and its costs. 

Today's Christian nationalists and liberal secularists both oversimplify the history of the nation's founding.

Edits that colonists made to prayer books during the American Revolution embodied the shift to independence.

The U.S. Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, but the fight for religious equality was only just beginning.

Historian Thomas S. Kidd examines the tension between Benjamin Franklin's deism and his frequent religious rhetoric

In the half-decade before Roe v. Wade, respected religious leaders participated in a nationwide struggle to make abortion more accessible.

It’s a match made in heaven.

Religious scholars argue that the Waco raid was not justified and that with more understanding of theology, the loss of life could have been avoided.

A variety of government programs helped white American Catholics get where they are today.

Despite what Steve King says, the U.S. was never a Christian nation.

In a novelized biography of Samuel Sewell, a greater mystery than what bedeviled the girls is what motivated a righteous man to condemn them for witchcraft.

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

Religious "freedom" and "liberty" have always had different connotations.

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.

Pinball hasn’t always been an all-American game of fun: for decades it was an object of widespread moral outrage.

The founding moment of the United States brought a society newly freed from religion. What went wrong?

Megachurches represent an enduring model of ecclesial organization in Protestantism.

How the April 8, 1966, cover of TIME set off a firestorm.

The Vermont senator isn’t religious, but a victory in Iowa or New Hampshire would be the first ever for a Jewish presidential candidate.

What does it mean to be Muslim in America? And how has the practice of Islam in the U.S. changed over time?

The terms meaning has shifted throughout Christianity’s long history, making it difficult to define.

Patrick Blanchfield tracks the long-standing entanglement of guns and religion in the United States. Part 1 of 2.

Richard Nixon, Billy Graham, and their White House church services.

From Stonehenge to Silicon Valley: how technology nurtured New Age ideas in a world supposedly stripped of its magic.

Popular early U.S. tales depicted Muslims as menacing figures in faraway lands or cardboard moral paragons.

The "Christian Amendment" and the push for Christianity to be established as the national religion of the United States.