​In partnership with Brigham Young University's history and political science departments and Wheatley Institute as well as America 250 Utah, we will be holding the Religion and the American Founding Conference on March 11-12, 2026. It will take place on the BYU campus and is FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Registration for in-person attendance required. For those unable to attend, all sessions will be livestreamed. See https://americanreligion250.org/conference-program/.

The conference will begin by exploring the religious landscape on the eve of the Revolution, including that of the Indigenous Peoples and those who are enslaved. Denominational archivists will discuss their participation in the revolutionary and founding eras through artifacts linking them to that time. The final panel will explore religion, memory, and the meaning of America at 250 years old.

A special keynote address will be given the evening of March 11th by Dr. Thomas Kidd, author of Benjamin Franklin: The Spiritual Life of a Founding Father and Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh.

Ian Wendt recently joined the NMAR team as associate executive director.

“I am very pleased to join NMAR in order to forward its mission of helping Americans better understand the profound roles of our diverse religions and religious freedom in our history and our contemporary society. I am also grateful for the opportunity to work with the many impressive people who support the museum’s many meaningful activities.”

​Ian C. Wendt is the owner of Collegiate Courses and the producer of a video series on communities and society called Being Humans Together. He taught and researched the history of South Asia, the Muslim world, and world religions for ten years at multiple colleges and universities. He produced national and international educational assessments for the College Board and the Educational Testing Service for eight years. For the last three years, he has travelled full-time with his family, connecting with extended family, friends, and their communities across the United States of America. They seek out community builders, leaders, and service groups who are bringing people together. Ian has a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.​

The museum was invited to participate in a summit that explored reimagining museums as engines of religious literacy, entitled "Sacred Ground: Why America's Museums Need a New Dialogue on Faith." It took place on November 13th at the Eldridge Street Museum (https://www.eldridgestreet.org/) in Manhattan's Lower East Side. 

Keynote address: Religious Fluency as Democracy's Lifeline with Stephen Prothero

​Sessions: 
​
Faith: Humanity's Oldest Operating System, moderated by Regina Stein, Scholar-in-Residence, Museum at Eldridge Street

Weaving Religious Awareness into Society's Fabric, moderated by Michael Glickman, Founder, jMUSE 

Sacred Space: Keepers of Collective Memory, moderated by Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock Curator Emerita, The Met Cloisters

Sacred Community: Rituals as Living History, moderated by Chris Stevenson, President and Co-Founder, The National Museum of American Religion

A Conversation on Religion and Civic Life, moderated by Alice Greenwald, former President and CEO, National September 11 Memorial and Museum

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, built in 1877, was the first synagogue in America purpose-built by immigrants from Eastern Europe. The synagogue began to decline following the introduction of the 1924 Immigrant Quota Laws. That new policy, combined with an increasing exodus to outer boroughs, caused a sharp and steady decline in the population of the Jewish Lower East Side. In the 1940s, the congregation relocated to the synagogue’s lower-level chapel and closed off the massive space above them. In 1986, one hundred years after the synagogue first opened, the hidden sanctuary was rediscovered. Immediately, new generations rallied to save the building. The Eldridge Street Project pursued the restoration of the priceless building for nearly 20 years. In December 2007, the restoration was finally complete, and the building was rededicated as the Museum at Eldridge Street.​

Acknowledging that religious history is often personal, local, community-based, and ubiquitous, we initiated a pilot project call ARHIMBY (American Religious History In My Backyard), best described as crowdsourced and proximate religious history in the United States.

The picture above is of our first post, documenting a stone marker in Lincoln, Virginia where in the 1700s a Quaker named Hannah Janney “worshiped twice weekly on a log in the unbroken forest.” Thus began a religious community that still exists today.

Check out any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

We invite people from every walk of life and in every part of the nation to take their own videos of some proximate religious history, which can include personal religious history, and send to us at contact@nmar.org. We will then archive and post it. The videos must be 40s or less and be accompanied by a short description and the location.

Pass this invitation to friends and family!

On September 11, 2025, the museum held three screenings of We Are Not Afraid: Religion’s Response to September 11th, the second film in our “Religious Thoughts During Times of National Crisis” series. Religions For Peace USA held a webinar that featured several clips of the film and a panel discussion with film director Danny Drysdale, scholar Dr. Melissa Matthes (author of When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter), and museum president Chris Stevenson. RFP USA’s talented executive director, Tarunjit Butalia, led the event. We are grateful to RFP USA for hosting this screening.
 
Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute and American Studies program hosted an in-person screening on its Provo campus. The old Varsity Theater was filled, mostly with students who had not been alive at the time of the terrorist attacks. (There was an added layer of mourning there as the day before, Charlie Kirk had been assassinated at Utah Valley University, a short drive from BYU.) The panel discussion, with the same people listed above, was fantastic, with the students sending in many questions to moderator Paul Lambert, the director of the Wheatley Institute’s religion initiative. We are grateful to the Wheatley Institute and the American Studies programs for hosting the screening.
 
There was also a screening in Washington, D.C., at the Foley & Lardner law offices, led by NMAR’s director of content, Dr. Colleen Prior.

As we continue design work on the traveling exhibit that will curate the history of religious freedom in America by exploring the religious architecture of minority religions, the team visited some of the religious structures that will be featured. 

"Old Ship Church is a vibrant Unitarian Universalist congregation that dates back to its Puritan roots from 1635." It is the only surviving 17th-century Puritan meetinghouse in the United States. We attended a Sunday Service, and the congregation was extremely welcoming, even providing us with a tour of the building and recounting stories of their stewardship of the Church, the Bell Tower, and the cemetery grounds. Walking into the church felt like stepping back in time. Old Ship Church is, according to The New York Times, "the oldest continuously worshiped-in church in North America and the only surviving example in this country of the English Gothic style of the 17th century..." The interior of the church is a Gothic open-timber construction, resembling the shape and ribs of a ship's hull, and smelling of centuries-old wood. Colleen got to ring the bell at the beginning of service.

You can feel the community as soon as you approach the brick exterior of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia. We joined the congregation for a Sunday mass in July of this year. The Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic church and congregation located at 419 South 6th Street in Center City. The congregation, founded in 1794, is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the nation. "The church was proposed in 1791 by members of the Free African Society of Philadelphia, including Absalom Jones, out of a desire to create a space for autonomous African-American worship and community in the city. The desire to create the church was strengthened in 1792, after African-American members of St. George's Methodist Church walked out due to racial segregation in the worship services."  

Mother Bethel recently appointed its first female Pastor, Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness, in 2024, and she was nothing short of inspiring, enlightening, and incendiary. Music was a critical component of service, aligned with worship itself, and soon we were singing, clapping, exchanging handshakes, and rejoicing along with the congregants. We had a wonderful tour of their small museum, and got to see objects related to the founders, as well as original paintings, Bibles, deeds, stained glass, and artworks created to celebrate the historic church. 

​A high-level draft program is below.

I. Religious landscape at the brink of revolution

• religions of Indigenous peoples
• religions of European colonists
• religions of the enslaved and enslaver
  
  

II. Religions’ participation in the founding of the United States of America

• revolutionary religions  
• loyalist religions
• religious artifacts from revolutionary era
  
  

III. Religions’ theological views of the founding of the United States of America

• colonial-era religions’ views of the founding
• non-colonial-era religions’ views of founding
  ​
  

IV. Professional development for religious librarians and archivists

The museum’s Religion in the American Experience podcast began working with BYUradio to produce a limited series about religion and the founding of America that will be published during 2026 to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. The episodes are listed below with a brief description of each.

American Religion: 

• Expansion and European Religious Environment of 17th Century - Makeup of religious belief and practice in England and Europe and its role in North American colonization, with special emphasis on the competing visions of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
• Native American Belief Systems - Overview of Indigenous religious beliefs prior to colonization as well as changes in religious belief and practice, with an eye towards distinguishing both what unified native religion, as well as examining the nuances of religious difference between different region’s tribal communities.
• Colonial Religious Liberty and its Religions - Flashpoints in church, state, and freedom of conscience within and beyond the New England colonies, with special attention paid to the exiles of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, the hanging of Boston Quakers, and the treatment of Jews throughout the colonies.

Religion in 18th Century America:

• Great Awakening - Growth of evangelical religion in the early to mid-18th century, including Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the influence of church schisms on religious freedom.
• Enslaved Religion - Overview of African religions pre-enslavement including Islam and African religions, as well as the methods by which slavery shaped African American religious belief and practice; religion as both upholding and challenging slavery.

Religion and American Revolution:

• Religion and the Coming of Revolution – Examination of the religious traditions which contributed to independence, as well as the religious fears the colonies harbored against Great Britain such as the establishment of an Anglican episcopate and the promise to accord Catholics greater religious liberties through the enactment of the Quebec Act of 1774.
• Religious Minorities and the Revolution (cover 2-3 different traditions) – Examines the way in which the War for Independence both expanded and contracted religious rights for various minority religions based upon their perceived loyalty. Traces the expanding acceptance of Jews during the revolution as well as the suspicion that peace churches (Quakers, Mennonites) engendered amongst the populace.

Religion, Confederation Congress and Constitution

• Godless Constitution? - The text of the U.S. Constitution as relates to religion and the many and varied perspectives of the founders regarding the place of God, Jesus, and religion at the national level.
• First Amendment/Bill of Rights and the Framework of Religious Freedom - What the founders meant when they wrote that Congress was not to “establish” a religion while also providing for the “free exercise” thereof, with special emphasis paid to the continuing battle over disestablishment at the state level following the ratification of the Constitution.

Religion and Federal Government:

• Sunday Mail Controversy – An examination of debates over whether the federal government should close post offices and halt mail delivery on the Sabbath as a case study of how some Evangelical religious reformers sought to inject God into national political debates.
• Quakers and Slavery - The first national antislavery campaign carried out by the Society of Friends during the first Congress, and the divisions between North and South it sparked.
• Cherokee Removal – The role of Christian missions as “civilizing” programs to Cherokees, as well as religious dissent against Jackson’s policy of Cherokee removal, and religious repression, with special attention paid to the role religious women played in mobilizing against the U.S. government’s actions.

Religion and State Government:

• Oaths and Blasphemy - Probes the meaning of religion within the courts in the early American Republic, by attending to debates over whether Atheists and Universalists could be witnesses in court cases owing to their lack of belief in God or future punishment.
• Church, State, and Mormonism - The struggle between Mormons, the State of Missouri, and the federal government concerning protection of religious minorities, and how it cemented the notion that religious protections lay under the purview of the states.

​Religion and New Republic:

• Tocqueville and American Religion  -Overview of the religious environment of America at the close of the founding through the eyes of Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville with emphasis placed on the growth of voluntary, denominational, religion throughout the country, its expansion westward, and the growth in sectional tensions in the churches surrounding the place of slavery in Christian communities.