In my capacity as a volunteer Lay Chaplain at Gritman Hospital, in Moscow, Idaho, I’ve been doing some hall walking. Walking that leads me into the rooms of perfect strangers.
For the past 25 years, the number of Americans claiming no religion has steadily ballooned as more and more people quit church, synagogue or mosque and openly acknowledged being a "none."
Over the last decade, prominent people — household names and lesser-known leaders on social and moral issues — died after playing an outsized role in the realm of religion.
By Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, Jews, Mormons and Christian Scientists had joined the ranks of the chaplain corps. As I write in my book, “Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America,” this significant change inaugurated a century-long project to redefine what counted as American religion.