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.

Peter Manseau is the founding director of the Center for Understanding Religion in American History at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and first curator of religion at the Smithsonian Institute, both in Washington, D.C. He can discuss religious art in America and American history.

David A. Hollinger is the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley’s Department of History. He is the author of Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez is an assistant professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She specializes in American religious history and women and religion. She is at work on The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, in which she argues that Mary appealed to both American Catholics and Protestants at a time when […]