Religion in the American Experience

Join Dr. Colleen Prior for a special episode of Religion in the American Experience where we explore the effect of the war in Gaza on Jews and Muslims in the United States. In this episode we look at the history of both groups in North America and examine both historic trends and current survey data to try and understand why violent actions against both groups are on the rise, and we discuss what...

Christian Nationalism: This is a term that many of our listeners have likely come across, as its use has become much more common in the news over the past couple of years, particularly as some politicians have begun to embrace the term as a core part of their personal and political identity. Christian Nationalism isn’t a new concept though, of course. To understand its history, we’re very fortunat...

A historian wrote once that “[w]e cannot understand American history unless we reckon with the ways religion and war have reinforced and challenged each other.” We are going to dip our toes into that water today, and while we are at it, will run into the idea of “Christian nationalism” – a topic currently bouncing around in our public square. This hour has the potential of helping our listeners be...

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States and served from 1977 to 1981, which term included the Iranian hostage crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Camp David Accords, finalization of the Panama Canal Treaties, and the 1979 energy crisis. His post-presidency work is considered the most influential and significant of any American pr...

Since the summer of 2021 when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the wake of America’s departure, some 70,000+ Afghan refugees have come to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome. This has taxed the country’s capacity to resettle these people  - men, women and children - who fled for their lives – all of whom have experienced severe trauma on their way to the United States. There are...

Since the summer of 2021 when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the wake of America’s departure, some 70,000+ Afghan refugees have come to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome. This has taxed the country’s capacity to resettle these people  - men, women and children - who fled for their lives – all of whom have experienced severe trauma on their way to the United States. There are...

The recent discoveries of unmarked graves at the sites of four former residential schools in western Canada have shocked and horrified Canadians and the world. This has spurred an interest here in the United States to understand the history of our Native American boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced a Federal Indian Boarding School I...

Sermons, the words of the country’s vast number of spiritual leaders, have played significant and even profound roles during times of national crisis. They have comforted those that mourn, given grief higher purposes, and plumbed the depths of evil, suffering, and loss; they have offered hope, courage, vision, and belief in the face of doubt and fear. They have also been key to how the nation defi...

Daniel Walker Howe was born January 10, 1937 in Ogden, Utah. Both of his parents were from Utah, though neither were religious. His mother had grown up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His father’s family had come to Utah to work on the railroads. Daniel’s father was a newspaper man who lost his job during the Depression, and who was hired by the Works Progress Admin...

The most recent addition to the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall is the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in September of 2016. This is a profound and exceptionally meaningful addition to the tapestry woven by the museums in D.C.   From the perspective of The National Museum of American Religion, we want to know more about the roles that religion played...

Food sustains physical life, and as such is of critical importance to each of us. Some in the country have an abundance; hunger or food insecurity gnaws at others: in which group we find ourselves determines much of our current existence. What we eat also touches on other aspects of our lives besides “need”: celebrations, emotional comfort, health, family traditions, and connections or “breaking b...

Reverend Kim Jackson is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Atlanta, vicar at the Church of the Common Ground, which gives services for the homeless and, as of her electoral victory in November 2020, the first out LGBTQ person ever elected to the Georgia state Senate.  Her father served families as a social worker for more than 30 years. Kim's mom, a retired nurse and Professor of Nursing, serve...

Capitalism – a massive influence in the American narrative; loved for driving innovations and raising the standard of living; plagued by the production of opulence and the economic inequality left in its wake. If we understand capitalism better, we understand America better. And, it turns out that religion has played and continues to play a significant role in economics, which is of great interest...

Americans have always thought hard about how to prevent crime and bring about justice, with the desire to create a flourishing society. The prison system is a critical part of the punishment and rehabilitation system in the United States, which has the largest prison population in the world and the highest per capita incarceration rate. Because of this and other reasons, there are often calls for...

Climate change is one of the dominant news stories of the 21st century. Rising sea levels, more fearsome and catastrophic hurricanes, drought, raging wildfires – there is so much here that seems to touch existential fears of humankind. The podcast series “Religion in the American Experience” wishes to understand how religion, one of the greatest forces in the nation’s history and that thing that m...

The "digital first" National Museum of American Religion addresses the critical gap in Americans' understanding of their own history - the story of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion, including the establishment of the revolutionary and indispensable idea of religious freedom as a governing principle, is perhaps the last great untold American story. Our middle...

There seems to be some sort of mental health crisis, especially among younger people, in the United States – with many experts blaming social media. Teen suicide is in the news, depression seems to be an ever-growing menace. Then COVID hit last year, which has exacerbated the problem. Mental health has a special place as seen through the lens of religion – the sicknesses one can’t see, the depress...

Listen to David Black, an attorney from Great Falls, Virginia, talk about  religion's influence on him during his early life in the 1970s and 1980s and then during college and beyond, and how that makes him who he is today as an actor on the American stage. Religion has profoundly influenced the sweeping American narrative, from the times of the Indigenous peoples to the present. The start-up digi...

We have all been part of the recent contentious U.S. presidential election, which finally ended in the transfer of power in January of this year.  At the Museum we observed that, as usual, a colossal amount of energy, money, time, emotion, concern, debate, argument, Tweets, posts, letter-writing, editorializing, and protest were invested in the election and its outcome. America was all in. That is...

Food sustains physical life, and as such is of critical importance to each of us. Some in the country have an abundance; hunger gnaws at others: in which group we find ourselves determines much of our current existence. What we eat also touches on other aspects of our lives besides “need”: celebrations, emotional comfort, health, family traditions, and connections or “breaking bread” with others....

America is a nation of immigrants, except for the Indigenous Peoples who were here before European colonization and the Africans brought here against their will and sold as enslaved people.   I just read this in the newspaper a few days ago “Administration short of shelter space amid ‘overwhelming’ [immigration] surge: record number of unaccompanied minors being held in adult cells far longer than...

Food sustains physical life, and as such is of critical importance to each of us. Some in the country have an abundance; hunger or food insecurity gnaws at others: in which group we find ourselves determines much of our current existence. What we eat also touches on other aspects of our lives besides “need”: celebrations, emotional comfort, health, family traditions, and connections or “breaking b...

It has been noted that religion was prominent at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, as it often is at presidential inaugurations, in traditional ways: the oath of office was taken with the president’s hand on the family bible; the invocation was offered by a Catholic priest, the benediction by an African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor; musical numbers with threads of religion in them, includin...

From Edwin Drake’s 1859 discovery of oil in Pennsylvania to our 21st century entanglements in the Middle East, oil’s influence on America is vast. Religion’s role in this American oil story is outsized, and relatively unknown, and understanding it will help us more fully comprehend what religion has done to America, and what America has done to religion—which is understanding America itself. We tr...

Sports is everywhere in America, as we all know: the Super Bowl, the Masters, the World Series, the Stanley Cup, the Olympics, the NBA, MLB, NFL, youth travel sports, and the list goes on and on. So if we understand sports, we may understand America. For us on the podcast series, the question is “does religion factor into sports”? It seems the answer is a loud “yes.”   In 1976 Sports Illustrated p...