Founded by Roger Williams in 1636 after he had been exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of his faith, Rhode Island land has been forged by religious freedom, innovation, and dissent. AASLH and NCPH Joint Conference attendees and members of the Providence community gathered at the First Baptist Church in America for a public conversation on the ways religion has shaped America and how America has shaped religion for more than 250 years.

Led by four public historians first trained as scholars of religion, the conversation explored the remarkable diversity of America’s religious history and its role in the cultivation of democratic life, the perennial challenges of religious exclusion and Christian nationalism, and the public historian’s role in documenting todays’ shifting religious landscape. (Above, right) C. Morgan Grefe, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and Karin Wulf, Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, join the speakers as Church Minister Rev. Jamie P. Washam welcomes the audience.

(Above, left) Facilitator Christopher Cantwell is a scholar of religion and former museum professional who is interested in the ways that Christianity, capitalism, and collective memory form and shape each other. (Above, right) Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a writer seeking new ways to tell the big and small stories of religion in America.

(Above, left) Andrew Ali Aghapour  is a scholar and comedian based in Durham, North Carolina who helps develop public scholarship projects like Under Gods, Crash Course Religions, Religion for Breakfast and the Religion in America Initiative.   (Above, right) Peter Manseau is a novelist, historian, and museum curator. He is the founding director of the Center for Understanding of Religion in American History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.