religious movements

Southern Baptists were seeking a religion of the heart, and in Edwards they discovered a trove of treatises, biographies, and sermons on Christian spirituality.

Why three religious groups traded monogamy for celibacy, polygamy, and complex marriage.

An excerpt from the new anthology, “American Cult.”

The story of Jemima Wilkinson, otherwise known as the Public Universal Friend.

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

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.

Divisions in society and religion that still exist today resulted from the "Great Awakenings" of the 18th Century.

How the spectacle of the 1806 solar eclipse impacted the national consciousness.

As evangelicals worked to gain public legitimacy during the Cold War, historians of evangelicalism search for a usable past for their fellow believers.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Jewish Catalog."

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.

How the Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.

Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?

A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.

The rise of the right-wing paranoid fantasy, egged on by Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, reflects deep currents in American politics.

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.

Conservative Judaism’s origins lie in a donor plan to neutralize and refine the radical Jewish immigrant masses.

The religious origins of American liberalism.

The US Supreme Court's most recent decisions undermine centuries of established secularism within American government.