Belief

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?

How the utopian notion of the U.S. as a meritocracy became so ingrained in the American psyche.

The partnership between rabbis and labor that delivered the two-day weekend.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

How dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.

The story of Swami Vivekananda and his time in America.

The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.

History and controversy in the architecture of the Latter-day Saints.

It’s a political movement willing to align with anyone to win.

Baptists were never monolithic on the issue of slavery, but Southern Baptists were united in their opposition to Northern Baptists determining their beliefs.

Is Jefferson's Bible evidence that the Founding Fathers engaged with scripture to birth a Christian nation? Or that they sought to foster a new secular order?

That status has been taken as obvious, then questioned, then reasserted over the decades.

The Christian, the athlete, and the activist.

Luther is part myth, mascot, and mantle, symbolizing the hopes and sanctifying the heroes of American evangelicalism.

The outlines of “salvation antiquarianism”—with the emphasis on “saving”—appears particularly clearly in the AAS’s inaugural 1813 address.

The famous historian makes the claim that the demigods of American historical mythology can help us carve paths through our forbidding 21st-century wilderness.

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

Evangelicalism and the more liberal “mainline” Protestantism must be understood in a dialectical relationship to one another, rather than in isolation.

In the 1990s, liberal intellectuals complained that evangelicals were moralistic on political questions. Now the complaint is reversed.

A new history of spiritualism during the Civil War era suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

Fifty years ago, zealots preaching misogyny and homophobia—led by an accused sexual predator—took over America’s largest Protestant denomination.

How British protestantism connected colonies and empire until the rupture of the American Revolution.

We will never truly achieve racial justice until we, collectively, learn how to treat and heal the wound of white supremacy.

Liberal Protestants built a global elite in the 20th century. Its fracturing holds a caution for evangelicals today.

Missionaries spread the idea that Christianity accounts for American success throughout the world.

To understand why evangelicals vote Republican, we shouldn’t focus just on Falwell; we need to look at a century or more of evangelical political culture.

Two preachers who shaped American Christianity diverged sharply on whether to protest or exploit slavery, with consequences that persist today.

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

The disturbing conclusion might just be that evangelicalism does not exist.

Breaking down the myths of originalism and America's founding.