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Replica of small town

Exploring the Midwest’s Forgotten Utopian Communes

The American Midwest was once a site of radical experimentation for various communitarian groups. What has become of their legacy?
Elle Hardy and the cover of her book, Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World.

The Rise of Pentecostal Christianity

While the world’s fastest-growing religious faith offers material benefits and psychological uplift to many, it also pushes a reactionary political agenda.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, speaking from a pulpit.

Evangelical Groundhog Day

The NYT identifies the 'religious fervor in the American right' — around four decades late.
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers speaking before the appearance of former president Donald Trump at a Save America Rally on Jan 15th in Florence, Arizona.
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The Bond That Explains Why Some on the Christian Right Support Putin’s War

Russia has become an ally in a global movement.
Exhibit

Higher Callings

A survey of American religious movements, from the Puritans to today's Christian Right.

English Quakers on a Barbados plantation

How 18th-Century Quakers Led a Boycott of Sugar to Protest Against Slavery

These Quakers led some of the early campaigns against sugar being produced by enslaved people.
Pastoral landscape with classical architecture. Copy after Thomas Cole’s “Dream of Arcadia”, by Robert Seldon Duncanson, 1852.

An Ugly Preeminence

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.
Painting of a Dutch merchant with his wife and an enslaved servants, standing on the shore with Dutch ships sailing in the background

The Legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch Empire

In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures.
Thomas Paine

Reframing the Story of Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy

The time when Harvard made an atheist their head chaplain.
Jim Jones and family

In the Image of Jonestown

In our flattened historical imagination, pictures of atrocity and those of progress can coincide in unsettling ways.
Linda Kay Klein as a teenager
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Shamed Over Sex, a Generation Confronts the Past

Former followers of an evangelical “purity” movement that promoted a strict view of abstinence are grappling with aftershocks.
Rev. Timothy McDonald III in First Iconium Baptist Church
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Attacking Sunday Voting is Part of a Long Tradition of Controlling Black Americans

The centuries-long battle over Sunday activities is really about African Americans' freedom and agency.

What Tecumseh Fought For

Pursuing a Native alliance powerful enough to resist the American invaders, the Shawnee leader and his prophet brother envisioned a new and better Indian world.

QAnon Didn't Just Spring Forth From the Void

Calling QAnon a "cult" or "religion" hides how its practices are born of deeply American social and political traditions.
Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana.

The Invisible Landscape: Tracing the Spiritualist Utopianism of Nineteenth-Century America

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

The Unquiet Hymnbook in the Early United States

This post is a part of our “Faith in Revolution” series, which explores the ways that religious ideologies and communities shaped the revolutionary era.
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the Freedom March on Washington in 1963.

How a Heritage of Black Preaching Shaped MLK's Voice in Calling for Justice

A long heritage of black preachers who played an important role for enslaved people shaped Martin Luther King Jr.‘s moral and ethical vision.
Men and women of Zoar, Ohio, posing in a field with their hay harvest, horses, and equipment.

The Communal, Sometimes Celibate, 19th-Century Ohio Town That Thrived for Three Generations

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

The Last Shakers?

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction.
Colonial men holding a copy of the 1649 Maryland Toleration Act.

Five Ways We Misunderstand American Religious History

From religious liberty to religious violence, it helps to get our facts straight.
Lithograph of the Fox Sisters.
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The Fox Sisters

The story of Kate and Margaret Fox, the small-town girls who triggered the 19th century movement known as Spiritualism.
Modern building on a grassy lawn

This Small Indiana Town is a Hotbed of Utopianism

New Harmony has attracted eccentric spiritual groups, social reformers, intellectuals, and artists.

The Scandinavian Christian Music Industry and Transatlantic Pentecostalism

In the post-war era, a wave of American young evangelists flocked to Europe to claim the continent for Christ. And the exchanges went both ways.

Religious Cult, Force for Civil Rights, or Both?

Examining the life of Father Divine, the black preacher who called for the destruction of racial separation and claimed to be God.

Jonestown’s Victims Have a Lesson to Teach Us, So I Listened

In uncovering the blackness of Peoples Temple, I began to better understand my community and the need to belong.
Colorful illustration of Larry Norman, haloed by yellow.

The Unlikely Endurance of Christian Rock

The genre has been disdained by the church and mocked by secular culture. That just reassured practitioners that they were rebels on a righteous path.

Evangelical Fear Elected Trump

The history of evangelicalism in America is shot through with fear—but it also contains an alternative.
Elvis Presley performing to a crowd of fans reaching toward him

How Christianity Created Rock ’n’ Roll

Rock music owes much of its claim to coolness to the Christian faith.

The Complexities of Racial and Religious Identities

Judith Weisenfeld’s book, New World A-Coming, reinterprets the various religious movements among African Americans in the early twentieth century.
The Mount Carmel Center in Waco, Texas engulfed in flames

How Religious Literacy Might Have Changed the Waco Tragedy

Religious scholars argue that the Waco raid was not justified and that with more understanding of theology, the loss of life could have been avoided.
Oneida Community members outside their mansion house, ca. 1865-1875.
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When We Say “Share Everything,” We Mean Everything

On the Oneida Community, a radical religious organization practicing “Bible communism,” and eventually, manufacturing silverware.

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