Belief

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.

The wildly popular books helped people understand farming and health through the movement of the planets, in a way compatible with Protestantism.

Why did the priest and the choir singer die, and what was the nature of their love?

On Rousas Rushdoony's political thought and lasting influence on the Christian right.

This post is a part of our “Faith in Revolution” series, which explores the ways that religious ideologies and communities shaped the revolutionary era.

A long heritage of black preachers who played an important role for enslaved people shaped Martin Luther King Jr.‘s moral and ethical vision.

Religious bigotry is only less pressing today than racial bigotry because of progress Jefferson helped bring about.

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

Why debunking mesmerism only made it stronger.

Although the British settlers imported Africans from the first as slaves, the earliest Virginians had yet to establish many basic rules regarding slavery.

The Oneida Community's Christian form of collectivism was transported to California in the 1880s, when the original Oneida Community fell apart.

A new book recovers the many ways Protestant Americans, especially women, communicated with the dead from the 17th century to the rise of séance Spiritualism.

Zoar's citizens left religious persecution in Germany and created a utopian community on the Erie Canal.

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction.