In this guide, we provide background, tips and suggestions, newswriting for context and experts and sources for you to turn to as you ramp up your coverage of religion and the 2026 midterms.

The Keston Center for Religion, Politics, and Society is based at Baylor University in Waco, Tx. The center seeks to promote research, teaching, and understanding of religion and politics in communist, post-communist and totalitarian societies. Director is Kathy Hilllman. Contact is Keston Center Archivist Larisa Seago.

This guide is designed to help reporters uncover fresh, compelling and nuanced religion stories in advance of the United States Semiquincentennial celebrations in July 2026.

The National Museum of American Religion (NMAR) is a private, non-profit, digital-first museum dedicated to highlighting the role religion has played in shaping the social, political, economic and cultural fabric of American life.

David Mislin is a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, and his work focuses on the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. He is the author of Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of the Secular Age (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Lisa Dellinger (Chickasaw Nation) is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Constructive Theologies and Louisville Postdoctoral Fellow at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Tinker Visitin Professor at Iliff School of Theology. She writes and teaches at the intersection of Christianity and Indigenous experience, bringing attention to Native identity, colonial history and the complexities […]

Sohrab Amari is an Iranian-born American journalist, author and editor, best known as a co-founder of the online magazine Compact and U.S. editor of UnHerd and the author of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It (2023). He is a source on politics from a Catholic perspective […]

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America, forthcoming in June 2026 and Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden. Media inquiries should be directed to Deb Seager, Director of Publicity, Grove Atlantic.

Philip P. Arnold is president of the Indigenous Values Initiative of the leadership of the Onondaga Nation, the Central Fire (or Capital) of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (made up of the Seneca, Tuscarora, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk nations). He also leads the The Doctrine of Discovery educational resource, is lovingly maintained by Indigenous Values Initiative […]