Religion in the American Experience

Lodged firmly in the American psyche and a bedrock part of American history, is the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash in October of 1929 - the market lost 50% of its value in weeks - and lasting a decade, it was the worst calamity to hit the United States since the Civil War. Unemployment soared, farms went under, long bread lines formed, people up and left their homes for a better place, and poverty skyrocket...

Who is Thomas Jefferson? He is the author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, founder of the University of Virginia, slaveholder, has a monument in Washington DC and his face on our five-cent coin, and is one of the four presidents carved in stone at Mt. Rushmore – along with George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. He has also been called the American Sphinx, because a complete...

Iowa is lodged firmly in the American psyche as a place of traditional American values – hard work, family, and religion. Iowa is an important player in the United States’ vaunted agricultural industry, having been ranked first in the country in soybean production, corn production, and pork production. America has also slowly learned over the past decade, with ICE raids and COVID, is that a significant number of immigrants and refu...

Martin Luther King is a larger-than-life character in the American narrative, playing a pivotal role in the nation’s mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC in August of 1963 as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is an integral part of Americans’ understanding of him and the Civil Rights Movement. However, talking about receiving the Nobel ...

We are at that time of year when the Charlie Brown Christmas Special arrives in the public square and perhaps more pervasively in the psyche of millions of Americans. In this unique and quite secular television program, first aired at 7:30pm on December 9, 1965, viewers hear Linus recite from the Bible - Luke chapter two verses eight through fourteen – the Christmas story. As this story might suggest, it turns out that religion pla...

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 can be done to combat anti-Semitic ...

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 fortunate today to have with us two outstan...

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 more effective in their efforts to...

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 president, channeled through the Cart...

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 nine non-governmental agencies the...

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 nine non-governmental agencies the...

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 Initiative, a comprehensive review o...

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 defines itself as it reacts to these cr...

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 W...

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 ab...

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 bread” with others. For the purposes...

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, served as a community nurse for economic...

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 to this podcast series, “Religion ...

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 "prison reform", as is the case tod...