Belief

But unlike today's white Christian nationalism, Black church leaders called for healing internal divisions through engagement.

Exploring the role mainline Protestants have played in promoting the idea of America as a Christian country.

Any attempt to understand the complexities of American economic thought without considering the significant role of religious beliefs is incomplete.

The surprising influence of premillennial eschatology on American culture.

It was no coincidence that public school secularization and desegregation were happening, and failing, simultaneously.

"Between the Temples" tackles the anxieties around cultural assimilation—and finds continuity among very different generations.

Less about morality than about rights, the Mormon War of 1858 hinged on the issue of polygamy, pitting a Utah community against federal authorities.

When religion became the veil for racial violence in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A new book argues that we misunderstand the forces that drove the notorious slave rebel.

Chronicling the emergence of a unique blend of counterculture and Christianity.

A new book blames institutional Protestantism for undermining a vibrant strain of Christian radicalism that swirled through the Gilded Age.

The evangelical psychologist gained influence with millions of families through decades of parenting advice focused on strict discipline.

In 1964, he toured Africa and the Middle East on a journey that would both transform his outlook and reveal the limits of transnational solidarity.

Christian and Jewish themes influenced the world of art around one of jazz’s greatest singers.

A controversial historical claim grounds MAGA evangelicalism's embrace of the "Appeal to Heaven" flag.

Most ministers were silent about Watergate. Why was one evangelical pastor different?

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.

How a Hollywood marketing campaign was responsible for the Ten Commandments being displayed in public all across the country.

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention.

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

Why did so many American Jewish women find Christian Science appealing?

In trying to freeze reality into a cudgel that can be used to assault political opponents, the New Atheists deny the observable evidence in front of them.

After the apocalypse that wasn’t.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

Florida’s new school chaplain law invites a constitutional crisis as DeSantis bars some religions, defying First Amendment protections on religious liberty.

I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.