​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/.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

This past month, the NMAR team welcomed Li Zhi Rieken as an intern focusing on social media and the monthly podcast. Li Zhi is currently a senior at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is a religion and political science double major and focusing mainly on Christianity and Judaism in contemporary society. Previously, Li Zhi has been a research assistant for the Russia-Ukraine Program at the Eurasia Center. He continues to cover African elections and political polls as the South African correspondent and social media lead for Africa Elects.