This conference brings together many speakers, including the Batten School's Sally Hudson, to grapple with the past history, present challenges, and future prospects for religion and public life in the United States. The questions raised by this conference come in light of the struggle over the nation’s increasing pluralism, including debates about secularity, identity, systemic inequalities, and narrations of history in relation to the present. Following closely on the fifth year anniversary of the event, the aim of the conference is shaped by the infamous “Unite the Right” rally that occurred in Charlottesville in August 2017 – an event with tragic and lingering consequences. In hindsight, Charlottesville now appears as the beginning of an era in which much of what we took for granted as clear and fixed has become more and more unstable. In a way that cuts to the heart of our project’s basic concerns, we wish to ask: How did we get to Charlottesville? And how were more recent incidents of terror and national turmoil shaped by or rooted in the same forces as Charlottesville? Each panel is geared toward a specific concentration of topics that offers an opportunity for critical and creative engagement with the challenges facing religious and public actors in an increasingly complex socio-political landscape.