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).

Ari Kelman is a professor at Stanford with a focus on forms of religious knowledge transmission. He holds a specific research interest in American Jewry, with insight into how Jewish communities adapt within broader U.S. society.

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 […]

Oluwafunke Adeoye, or Funke as everyone calls her, is a lawyer, human rights defender and founding executive director of Hope Behind Bars Africa, an organization that promotes human rights and criminal justice reforms in Nigeria.

Donna Auston is an anthropologist, writer, and public intellectual whose body of work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, protest and social movements, media representation and Islam in America. She is the Senior Program Officer at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York.

In this guide, we offer background, resources, expert sources and related content to help you better report on the religious life of Black Americans.