Belief

Kevin Dann on the spiritualists of New York City and beyond.

A brief history of the Yuletide in America.

Jefferson revised the Gospels to make Jesus more reasonable, and lost the power of his story.

It was less about their asceticism and more about rejecting the world they had fled.

Perpetual outsiders, Mormons spent 200 years assimilating to a certain national ideal—only to find their country in an identity crisis.

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."

Despite extensive historiography, most people are not aware that the Society of Jesus owned people.

Any effective soul-searching must take into account the history of white American Christian support for white supremacist power.

The fight between Biden and conservative Catholics will be about more than policy.

Power, plague and Christianity were closely intertwined in 17th-century New England.

In the 1960s, youth counterculture spawned Christian rock.

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

The president's "1776 Commission" marks a turning point in his rhetoric.

How the ancient, antisemitic nocturnal ritual fantasy expresses itself through the ages—and explains the right’s fascination with fringe conspiracy theories.

How an Illuminati conspiracy theory captured American imaginations in the nation’s earliest days.

No, Trump can’t rewrite school curriculums himself, but a thousand mini-Trumps on the nation’s school boards can.

Calling QAnon a "cult" or "religion" hides how its practices are born of deeply American social and political traditions.

Why the Exodus must remain central to the African American church.

The role of Black churches in the Reconstruction of the United States.

For most of American history, the light-skinned Jesus conjured up by white congregations demanded the preservation of inequality as part of the divine order.

Miles Harvey on the life and times of James J. Strang.

The murder that challenged Cotton Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity.

How the history of dispensationalism shapes U.S. foreign policy today.

Nearly a century later, both ‘Head of Christ’ and criticism of its role in enshrining Jesus as white endure.

What were the religious beliefs of the American founding generation? What do they mean for us today?

American photojournalism has always been entangled with race and religion.

The philosophy behind calls to lift stay-at-home orders.

For Freud, “chosenness” was a psychopathological fantasy in need of explanation.

The hidden history of Utopian Socialism and its close relationship with cultures of esoteric spirituality in the nineteenth-century United States. 

The 1800 election shows there is nothing new about conspiracy theories, and that they really take hold when we don’t trust each other.